Email Marketing

Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It usually involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Marketing emails can be sent to a purchased lead list or a current customer database. The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant's relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.

How it started?

Email marketing has evolved rapidly alongside the technological growth of the 21st century. Prior to this growth, when emails were novelties to the majority of customers, email marketing was not as effective. In 1978, Gary Thuerk of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) sent out the first mass email to approximately 400 potential clients via the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). This email resulted in $13 million worth of sales in DEC products and highlighted the potential of marketing through mass emails. However, as email marketing developed as an effective means of direct communication, users began blocking out content from emails with filters and blocking programs. In order to effectively communicate a message through email, marketers had to develop a way of pushing content through to the end user, without being cut out by automatic filters and spam removing software. This resulted in the birth of triggered marketing emails, which are sent to specific users based on their tracked online browsing patterns.

Email marketing allows marketers to see feedback from users in real time, and to monitor how effective their campaign is in achieving market penetration, revealing a communication channel's scope. At the same time, however, it also means that the more personal nature of certain advertising methods, such as television advertisements, cannot be captured.

Types of Email Marketing:

1. Transactional Emails

Transactional emails are usually triggered based on a customer's action with a company. To be qualified as transactional or relationship messages, these communications' primary purpose must be "to facilitate, complete, or confirm a commercial transaction that the recipient has previously agreed to enter into with the sender" along with a few other narrow definitions of transactional messaging. Triggered transactional messages include dropped basket messages, password reset emails, purchase or order confirmation emails, order status emails, reorder emails, and email receipts.

The primary purpose of a transactional email is to convey information regarding the action that triggered it. But, due to their high open rates (51.3% compared to 36.6% for email newsletters), transactional emails are an opportunity to introduce or extend the email relationship with customers or subscribers; to anticipate and answer questions, or to cross-sell or up-sell products or services.

2. Direct emails

Direct email involves sending an email solely to communicate a promotional message (for example, a special offer or a product catalog). Companies usually collect a list of customer or prospect email addresses to send direct promotional messages to, or they rent a list of email addresses from service companies. Safe-mail marketing is also used.



3. Mobile email marketing

Email marketing develops large amounts[vague] of traffic through smartphones and tablets. Marketers are researching ways to advertise to more users and to make them view advertising for longer. However, the rate of delivery is still relatively low due to better filtering-out of advertising and users having multiple email accounts for different purposes. Because emails are generated according to the tracked behavior of consumers, it is possible to send advertising which is based on the recipient's behavior. Because of this, modern email marketing is perceived more often as a pull strategy rather than a push strategy

Advantages of Email Marketing

• Email marketing is popular with companies for several reasons:
• An exact return on investment can be tracked ("track to basket") and has proven to be high when done properly. Email marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.
• Email marketing is significantly cheaper and faster than traditional mail, mainly because of the high cost and time required in a traditional mail campaign for producing the artwork, printing, addressing, and mailing.
• Businesses and organizations who send a high volume of emails can use an ESP (email service provider) to gather information about the behavior of the recipients. The insights provided by consumer response to email marketing help businesses and organizations understand and make use of consumer behavior.
• Email provides a cost-effective method to test different marketing content, including visual, creative, marketing copy, and multimedia assets. The data gathered by testing in the email channel can then be used across all channels of marketing campaigns, both print and digital.
• Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of email subscribers who have opted in (i.e., consented) to receive the email.
• Almost half of American Internet users check or send email on a typical day, with emails delivered between 1 am and 5 am local time outperforming those sent at other times in open and click rates.
• Email is popular with digital marketers, rising an estimated 15% in 2009 to £292 million in the UK.
• If compared to standard email, direct email marketing produces higher response rate and higher average order value for e-commerce businesses.

Disadvantages of Email Marketing

• As of mid-2016, email deliverability is still an issue for legitimate marketers. According to the report, legitimate email servers averaged a delivery rate of 73% in the U.S.; six percent were filtered as spam, and 22% were missing. This lags behind other countries: Australia delivers at 90%, Canada at 89%, Britain at 88%, France at 84%, Germany at 80% and Brazil at 79%.
• Additionally, consumers receive on average circa 90 emails per day.
• Companies considering the use of an email marketing program must make sure that their program does not violate spam laws such as the United States' Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM), the European Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, or their Internet service provider's