Advantages and Disadvantages of Email Marketing

By Danni White - Last Updated on May 5, 2020
Ultimate pros & cons of email marketing to grow your business

Regardless of how big the business is, the budget allocated for email marketing is always the largest and there are many reasons why. Not only email marketing campaigns are important for small businesses but large enterprises as well.

Small enterprises need to be sure that every dollar spent on email marketing is worth it and gaining them a high return on investment.

Email marketing is a cost-effective way to ensure that you are reaching out to a wide base of customers, building your brand’s reputation and enhancing brand awareness day by day.

Email marketing campaigns are very easy to handle, unlike many other brand marketing strategies. That is why its benefits outdo its disadvantages. Are you looking for email marketing benefits? If yes, then this is the right page for you to discover the overpowering benefits of email marketing.

What Are the Benefits of Email Marketing?

Here are some advantages of email marketing for large enterprises as well as small businesses:

  • Customers Check Their Emails Everyday

    Count the number of times that you open your email account on your phone and desktop? Cannot count right? 90% of consumers(1) tend to open their emails uncountable times throughout the day. Whether the reason to check mail is personal or entirely, work-related, customers do get across your emails almost every day. To be more specific, an average person checks his inbox almost 20 times in a day.

    This means that almost 68.9% of your consumers open all the marketing-related emails 3 days a week by their mobile phones.

    This provides a great opportunity for the small or newly opened businesses to get in the front row and be in eyes of a large base of audience.

  • Increased Conversion Rate by Email Marketing

    In comparison with the other marketing tactics, email marketing provides the highest conversion rate. To be more specific, the value order through email is 3 times higher than an order value at a conventional store. If you have a developed and efficient email marketing strategy, you can increase the conversion rate by a high percentage.

    Promotional emails always come with a call to action point at the end. This encourages email readers to buy a particular product. Hence, increasing the conversion rate.

  • It Is Cost-Effective Than Traditional Marketing Methods

    One of the main email marketing pros is that it is mainly cost-effective as compared to other traditional marketing methods. Switching to email marketing from sending direct mails can save you a lot of dollars. In a similar manner, printing pamphlets and distributing them can also exceed your budget.

    Instead of investing your money on print media, you can invest them in finding valuable content sources so that you can attract potential customers through email marketing. According to research, for every dollar spent on email marketing, a marketer gets $38 in return.

  • It Automates the Sales Cycle

    The biggest benefits of email marketing is that you can automate it according to your niche. Your marketer can use automation marketing tools to develop drip campaigns. This would help you to send automatic messages to your mailing list. Consequently, keeping you in touch with the customers.

    Moreover, you can also automate the triggered actions. For instance, if a customer has responded to your website, you can get a triggered notification, allowing you to respond quickly to his query.

  • It Drives Traffic to Your Website

    Marketing messages sent through emails can help you to drive traffic to your website. You can add links to your emails directing to your website or product pages. Moreover, you can also craft compelling content, persuading your customers to take buying action on your website. There are many strategies that you can imply to get you more and more potential customers.

  • It Is Manageable and Easily Trackable

    As technology is progressing, automated tools software lets you measure your campaigns and marketing strategies. For instance, email marketing tools allow you to analyze overall performance by letting you the number of people who received your email, who read your email or who purchased items through emails.

    These tools allow you to track and measure performance so that you can know if the campaigns are going successfully or not. If your campaigns are not progressing as you expected them to be, you can always make adjustments to your content, to your subject line and offer types easily. After that, you can easily measure your performance after every move.

  • It Increases Brand Awareness

    One of the advantages of email marketing is increased brand awareness. Through your long mailing list, you are able to slide into millions of inboxes of people that might be interested in your products or services. Email marketing builds a consistent communication path between you and your mail subscribers. So, the more you will engage and interact with them, the more they would get to know about your business.

  • More Than Half of The People Prefer Reading Mails

    Many people expect brands to market or communicate through emails as it’s the most professional way. According to a survey, more than 72% of adults in the United States prefer brands prefer to receive and read business messages through mails. This is far more than 17% of teenagers who prefer to receive a business message through social media channels.

  • You Can Target Email Marketing Campaigns to Specific Audience

    Another benefit of email marketing is list segmentation. Advanced email marketing tools allow you to segment your mailing list into various groups on the virtue of each individual’s interests and characteristics. Once you have adopted this way, you can create and curate content for the targeted audience. This does not only increase your brand’s value but your campaign’s relevance as well. This would help you to drive more sales through email marketing.

  • It Helps You to Build Brand Credibility

    Consumers like to approach businesses that are trustworthy and credible. Email marketing helps you to build a truthful relationship with your consumers. Also, it allows you to build business credit so that you can deliver more meaningful and creative content for your email subscribers.

    For instance, many businesses try to curate content for the email newsletter so that they can interact regularly with their consumers. By delivering relevant information to your consumers without a promotional tone can benefit you to build a long-term relationship with them. Not only can you be credible in the market, but you can also establish your brand as number one in the relevant industry.

  • It Strengthens Relationships with Your Consumers and Readers

    Even though you have a large base of customers to entertain, you need to strengthen your relationship with them so that they can be loyal to you and bring in new customers. Email marketing gives you the opportunity to generate new leads and provide more to your existing customers.

    Valuable email communication is a great way for customers as well as brands to stay updated on every brand-related information. Moreover, you can educate new customers about your products and stay on top of their demands. You can appreciate them and let them know about any on-going offers and promotions easily.

  • Email Marketing Allows Your Customers and You to Share Your Content

    By including social media or website share buttons on your email account, you can easily upload the content to all of your social media accounts. This allows you to share content with your social media family. Moreover, if the readers find your content interesting, they can easily share content with their friends, family, and colleagues. This could massively increase your sales and help you to gain new leads.

  • You Can Reach Out to People Easily

    In today’s world, most of the websites are mobile-friendly, primarily because people now check websites and emails on their mobile phones. In fact, almost 41.9% of people use their smartphones to read emails every day.

    You can reach out to people through email marketing on a broader spectrum. No matter what device they use, you can improve the brand’s visibility and decrease the reach over time through marketing emails. However, you need to ensure that your emails are readable and mobile-friendly.

  • It Generates Calls

    if done right, email marketing helps businesses to reach or target the right type of audience. with the right offer at the right time, businesses can reach out to a targeted audience. A well-timed email from a business can results in a call flood if they are sent out at the right time.

    for some businesses, it is the best mode of communication. When businesses do not have phone numbers, all that marketers can do is communicate through emails.

  • Increase Donations

    You must be well aware by now that fundraising efforts are gradually moving online. That is why many non-profit organizations are adapting to this change for outreach efforts. For instance, if you run an animal shelter, you can send out emergency emails for donations to gather a large amount of money for animal help.

    However, you need to provide the receivers with all the details along with proof so that they can come forward and respond to your emails.

  • It Improves the Mode of Communication

    If your business requires frequent communication channels with your customers and prospects, you need to have one reliable channel through which you can engage with them. Email marketing is the most reliable way of informing customers about on-going offers, discounts, deals and newly launched or etc.

    Most people on your mailing list or those who have subscribed to you appreciate the email efforts and often read out your emails.

  • It Develops Your Brand’s Reputation

    With email marketing, not only can you enhance brand recognition with new clients but new businesses as well. Moreover, you can extend your reach to the farthest so that new people can know you whenever your existing client shares a message or offer to his friends or family.

    Emails are a business’s reinforcement. Sometimes, you would get a call or a message from someone you have never dealt with all because your existing client had shared a newsletter or a blog post from you earlier. This helps to build brand credibility upfront.

  • It Boosts Sales

    When you have people from the mailing list, who are genuinely interested to reach your offers and newsletters on emails, you’d see how your sales would boost throughout the year. Boosting sales is very substantial when it comes to running a local or small business. Gaining prospects from a local neighborhood and all across the globe is not possible without email marketing.

    For instance, if you are going down on sales, an email to your prospects would immediately boost up your sales and give a positive response in return.

  • You Can Learn What Is Working Out for You and What Is Not

    By using email marketing and analytics tools, you can easily find out the metrics to see how your email marketing campaigns are going. The meaningful insights help you to work even smarter.

    Moreover, it also gives you important data that you need to find out customers’ interest and demand.

    By the click-through rates, marketers can easily find out the services or products that the people are interested in.

  • You Can Get into Email Marketing Quickly

    Regardless of your expertise or experience in email marketing, you can get it all started quickly by email marketing software. Even though you need a lot of training to get your email marketing game right, help from a professional team will do you no harm.

  • Reach Out to People Regardless of The Device They Use

    Email marketing is one of the best strategies to reach out to people who use mobile phones or are captivated by mobile technology. No matter where they are if you send mobile-friendly emails, the readers would definitely read them or at least, open them.

  • Access to Custom Designed Email Templates

    One of the major advantages of email marketing is that you have the accessibility to professionally built email templates. The main purpose of introducing email templates is to make your communication professional so that the engagement with your audience can look quick and concerning.

  • It Makes You Look Professional

    Email formats are not easy to use. They are to make you look professional when you slide in your customers’ inbox. That is why email templates are there to make you look professional when sending out business offers; bumper offers or any news.

    You can personalize your email template to add a unique format and colors to make sure that it really complements your brand.

  • It Helps You to Market with A Personal Touch

    As opposed to other marketing channels that limit you to add a personal touch to your messages for the audience, email marketing provides you with the ability to sort out your customers and segment them according to their purchases and interests.

  • It Helps You to Get Immediate Results

    If you are running a small business, email marketing tools can provide you with accurate results so that you can easily track your campaigns.

  • Generates New Prospects and Leads

    Not everyone that’s in your mailing list would be ready to sign up or purchase something from you. However,benefits of email marketing helps you to nurture new leads by providing informative content.

  • Builds A Sense of Excitement

    People get really excited to see something they have been longing for. As you can track the most opens and clicks, you can easily detect the messages your clients get excited about.

  • It Helps to Start Engaging Conversations

    Email marketing is not one-sided. It is always a two-sided communication channel that benefits the sender as well as the receiver.

    However, you do not have to push your email subscribers to start a conversation or share their feedback. You can always ask for a review and encourage them to it as much as possible so that you can provide more knowledgeable newsletters for them in the future.

  • It Helps to Promote the Services You Offer

    If you are a service business, it might be very hard for you to keep clients. Email marketing provides you with an opportunity to reach out to your customers without nudging them.

  • It Helps You to Save Time

    If you know email marketing basics, you can easily know to send out emails to a long list of subscribers in less time span. In short, you would increase the efficacy of your campaign.

Disadvantages of Email Marketing

Here are some potential cons of email marketing. Pay close attention to them so that you can build a strategic email marketing campaign:

  • Spam

    Sometimes, too many promotional and spam email messages irritate readers. If you are not targeting the right audience, there’s a potential risk of people unsubscribing you. So, you need to comply with your marketing campaigns with the privacy standards and target people interested in your mails.

  • Undelivered Messages

    There are high chances that some people from your mailing list are not getting your mails. The reason behind this is that many internet service providers filter out the mails with specific spammy keywords.

  • Design Problems

    Your email and its content must be properly designed so that people can read your emails on every device.

  • Size Issues

    Your mail might not open if it contains large-sized photos. This could frustrate the audience and you might end up losing them.

  • Resources and Skills

    For a successful email marketing campaign, you need the right mailing list, the right design, and the right tools. If any area is lacking, you may not be able to achieve your goals as quickly as you like.

Pros and Cons of Email Marketing for Modern Marketers

If you are a marketer of today’s world, you need to see potential benefits and cons of email marketing to run your email marketing campaign smoothly:

Advantages:

  • It allows you to customize your marketing campaign.
  • You can persuade your customers through promotions.
  • It helps you to announce about your newly launched product.
  • Email marketing helps you to increase the abandoned cart conversion rate.
  • It is a gateway for real-time communication with your readers.
  • You do not have to worry about your content’s size as email has no character limit.

Disadvantages:

  • It might sometimes be time-consuming.
  • You need to provide your consumers with new curated content on a regular basis.
  • People might only be interested in emails related to bumper offers or promotional offers.

Conclusion

There are countless benefits of email marketing. However, it all comes down to how you use your budget, tools and your mailing list to increase sales or to drive traffic to your website. You can easily grow your business and set a reputable marketplace position for your brand but for that, you need to reach out to the audience from all across the globe. This is only possible if you concentrate to deliver useful content to the targeted audience.

Danni White | Danni White is the CEO of DW Creative Consulting Agency, a digital marketing firm specializing in elevating the visibility of small-to-midsize businesses and nonprofits. She is the author of 17 books and hosts the #Hashtags and Habits Podcast, which merges digital marketing, entrepreneurship, and personal growth.

Danni White | Danni White is the CEO of DW Creative Consulting Agency, a digital marketing firm specializing in elevating the visibility of small-to-midsize busi...

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