The Advantages and disadvantages of Email marketing

Advantages of Email marketing

In my experience, the main advantages of Email marketing are:

1. Relatively low cost of fulfilment. The physical costs of email are substantially less than direct mail.
2. Direct response medium encourages immediate action. Email marketing encourages clickthrough to a website where the offer can be redeemed immediately this increases the likelihood of an immediate, impulsive response.
3. Faster campaign deployment. Lead times for producing creative and the whole campaign lifecycle tends to be shorter than traditional media.
4. Ease of personalisation. It is easier and cheaper to personalise email than for physical media and also than for a website.
5. Options for testing. It is relatively easy and cost effective to test different email creative and messaging.
6. Integration. Through combining email marketing with other direct media which can be personalised such as direct mail, mobile messaging or web personalisation, campaign response can be increased as the message is reinforced by different media.

Disadvantages of Email Marketing

In my experience, the main disadvantages of Email marketing evident are:

1. Deliverability. Difficulty of getting messages delivered through different internet service providers (ISPs), corporate firewalls and webmail systems.
2. Renderability. Difficulty of displaying the creative as intended within the in-box of different email reading systems.
3. Email response decay. Email recipients are most responsive when they first subscribe to an email. It is difficult to keep them engaged.
4. Communications preferences. Recipients will have different preferences for email offers, content and frequency which affect engagement and response. These have to be managed through communications preferences.
5. Resource intensive. Although email offers great opportunities for targeting, personalisation and more frequent communications, additional people and technology resources are required to deliver these.