It doesn’t matter what industry you are involved with as email marketing campaigns will always be an effective way of promoting your products and services. As the recession and poor economic climate shows no sign of letting up they are especially important as a cost effective marketing solution. There are of course other means of promoting your business and the advantages and disadvantages of this advertising method must be weighed up against other marketing methods. If used well you will find that it can enhance your reputation as well as your sales. On the other hand if used inappropriately you may find that it can compromise the relationship with your clients and customers entirely.

Email marketing is an effective marketing technique as they are relatively simple and hassle free to organise and deploy. The primary objective is to design and write an email which will grab the attention of your customer and then initiate some sort of call to action. When you compare this method of advertising with other forms it is easy to see how cost effective it can be to get a message sent out on a fixed budget. You will also be able to immediately gauge the success of your email marketing campaign from the number of email responses or sales that it generates. Another benefit of email marketing is of course that it is not limited by geographical location and that you can target customers from around the world. Targeted emails will help your customers understand what to expect of your products and services, enabling them to appreciate the benefits that much more. Another advantage is that alterations can be made to the design of your email at any time, which is of course a huge contrast to any form of print advertising.

With all the advantages of email marketing it can be easy to overlook some of the disadvantages. In some cases it can take time to build up a significant email list and you will not be able to properly gauge the effectiveness of your advertising until you have a reasonable volume of addresses. This may be especially noticeable for people starting up new websites who aren’t able to leverage the benefits of some sort of brand awareness. Another downside to these sorts of campaigns is that it may be difficult for the recipient to distinguish your email from the spam emails which clutter their inbox. If your customer has opted in to your mailing list then this shouldn’t be too much of a problem, however you should make sure that your email newsletter is well designed and written so that it will stand out as being something worth reading. On this note it can often be difficult to come up with unique, engaging copy for each email so it could be worth employing the services of a copywriter.

You can only decide whether email marketing will be beneficial to your company once you have properly weighed up the pros and cons. Of course it is also important that the cost is within your marketing budget but this shouldn’t be much of an issue. If you decide it is a method you wish to use then you will have the choice of using email marketing software of a specialist email marketing company to assist your efforts.

Author Bio: Trevor Richards is writing on behalf of email marketing software providers, Extravision.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: email marketing, marketing, advertising, business, promotion, sales, internet, ecommerce