What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a process of sending or distributing emails containing marketing messages. It is a type of direct marketing that uses electronic mails for communicating money making messages to a targeted audience. In the wisest sense, every email sent to the desired customer for a preferred purpose is considered as Email Marketing.

Term Email Marketing can be well defined as:

- Sending emails with the objective of promoting products and services of the company.

- Delivering emails with the intention of attracting new customers or persuading the existing ones to buy something straight away.

- Attaching advertisements to emails that are sent by other companies to attract their customers.

- Distributing emails to promote repeat business, enhance customer reliability and for improving merchant-customer relationship.

An email marketing campaign requires email addresses of potential customers which can be obtained by various methods like using subscription services, relying on referrals from current customers and paying a fixed fee to email brokers. In order to carry out a profitable email marketing campaign, make sure that it always contains relevant information to make the customers endear to that email marketing campaign. Besides this, one should keep the campaign short and simple and it should intrigue the audience, generating a curiosity in them to know more. The subject line should be interesting enough to draw the attention of readers.

Email marketing offers many advantages due to which it has become very popular with companies.

Some of the benefits of Email Marketing are:

- It is very cost effective and saves a lot of time and resources as compared to conventional marketing methods like printed newsletters or direct mail.

- An email is a faster communication method than mailed advertisements as it takes few seconds or minutes to get delivered as compared to several days taken by traditional mails.

- The facility of mailing list enables one to send information to a broad range of potential customers who might be interested in his offerings excluding those who might not be interested.

- One can send interactive emails containing games, graphics, music, videos, quizzes, etc. to the targeted audience to grab their attention.

- Emails offer 24X7 marketing which means that the customers can understand one’s products and services even when he is not in his office.

- Emails facilitate in establishing a special bond with customers as emails are extremely personalized.

- It is quite easy to track the sent emails, obtaining details on how many of them were opened, what was the conversion rate and click through rate, etc. This helps one to assess the success rate of the campaign and increases the scope of improvement.

- While websites use ‘pull’ strategy to divert the web traffic to their site, emails use ‘push’ strategies as the advertisers push the email messages to the targeted audience.

- Emails effectively help in generating the repeat business in an automatic and affordable way.

- Emails are very popular amongst digital marketers and above all email marketing is ‘green’ as it is paper free.

Email marketing has become a very opportunistic and responsive medium today for communicating with prospective customers. It can bring vast benefits to one’s business if the email marketing campaign is executed in a correct way.