Email Marketing

The everyday occurrence of sending and checking emails has made email a rife media for marketing and advertising.

Email has become part of everyday life in this technology driven society; and like any mass media, it is increasingly being used as a marketing and advertising tool. Effective use of email marketing is an efficient, and cost-effective way to better connect with the customers, build public relationship, reach the correct demographic group, and last but not least be more environmental friendly since email marketing is paper-free. Many companies choose to use email as a tool to connect with existing customers via voluntary mailing list; while no new customers are recruited in the process, it provides the customers with a more personal experience and builds customer loyalty. Others send out bulk emails that are aimed to generate new customers.

Generally speaking, email marketing is a low cost, efficient way of transmitting information to existing or potential customers. It also have the advantage of being an active form of marketing, since the messages are delivered directly to the users, as opposed to a website that has to wait for users to come to it. The results generated by email marketing are easily traced, and the kind of messages sent via email can be highly specialized to suit the individual needs of the customer. The multimedia nature of the Internet also makes email a highly versatile means to deliver the message. All of these factors make email marketing a very effective way of online advertising and marketing, and it is reported as second only to marketing via search engine management.

While email marketing has many advantages and continues to be a great way of marketing on the Internet, it is a tool that requires caution. Many legitimate email marketing materials are increasingly mistaken for spam, and are either manually deleted or blocked by spam filter software. This can be hard to avoid because of the sheer volume of spam, and the many different methods used by spam filters to distinguish between spam and legitimate messages. Therefore, companies increasingly utilize voluntary mailing lists instead of sending out bulk emails, since the latter can be considered as spam.