Marketing a business has today come out to become one of the most imperative areas of attention for any business owner or promoter. Thanks to the keen interest of business owners in this, a host of new means of marketing have sprung up, and have tactfully replaced some of the most traditional means of propaganda and advertising. There were times when newspapers and radio broadcasts were the only means of getting updated about the world. While these marketing instruments and platforms had an expansive reach, the appeal was very universal, and not targeted or personal. The coming up of the world wide web and most recently, the mobile phones has brought this much needed personal touch to advertising and marketing. One of the marketing techniques which have implemented this today is email marketing.
As is very clear from the very name, this is just advertising or promoting a company and its service or product offerings through email. While being a very easy and fundamental concept, the reason why it has flourished so much is because of its impact on the audience. The promotional content, banners, fliers, read-outs or even images can now be directly sent to the inbox of a person, which gives its designer or disperser the assurance that it is at least being read by the targeted individual.
An important edge which email marketing has over many other contemporary and traditional means of web propaganda is that it has a higher conversion rate potential. This is because the text or the images embedded in the email can be smartly rigged to hyperlink back to the website and the order page for the business. This is how customers or the viewers are not left with a lot of time to think otherwise or about options and are encouraged to directly purchase the product or service.
While an ingenious idea in terms of its approach and effect, email marketing has also had its share of problems and controversies. With email marketing becoming a popularly used tool for web promotions, a lot of email marketers went quite overboard with it and led to flooding viewer mailboxes with their emails. This led the scrutinising agencies to introduce a ‘do not disturb’ clause for the web users, whereby each email marketer is now mandated to allow viewers to chose if they want to receive the email promotions or not. This clause also has an annexure, which limits the number of emails which can be sent out to the viewer base by any web marketer, on a given day. This is where it becomes crucial to hire an email marketing expert who has knowledge about these restrictions and can devise an email marketing campaign while being in the jurisdiction. A host of software tools, both licensed and open source are today available, which can be used by email marketers not just to devise marketing campaigns, but also to implement it in such a way that performance and impact analysis can be easily performed, and feedback to the campaign.