Email Marketing Pros and Cons: What You Need to Know

Email marketing is a powerful tool that businesses can use to connect with customers and promote their products or services.

However, there are also some cons to using email marketing, which business owners should be aware of before they start Email marketing campaigns.

In this blog post, we will discuss email marketing pros and cons so that you can make an informed decision about whether or not it is right for your business.

This blog will also explain why you should go all in on an email marketing campaign as an effective marketing strategy, and how it can sometimes be challenging.

What is email marketing?

I know you know the shallow definition of email marketing as merely sending and receiving emails, but we need to expound on that.

According to The Balance Small Business, email marketing is essentially the art of using emails to promote your business. Yes, it is not just sending and receiving emails, as we all know. There should be a monetary transaction.  

To do that, one has to develop value-based relationships with the target audience. Email strategies are all about value addition and developing trust. The trust you build with your audience can increase their customer lifetime value (CLV).

Email Marketing Pros and Cons

Email marking has its fair share of advantages and disadvantages like all other marketing strategies. Before getting into it, we will need to look into each of these.   

Let’s start with the benefits of a successful email marketing campaign.

What are the benefits of email marketing?

Email marketing as a digital marketing strategy comes with a ton of benefits. I can say email marketing has more advantages than disadvantages because it can be simple and cost-effective while giving awesome results. In fact, almost any other email marketer can attest to that.  

Here are some of the email marketing benefits.

Increase web traffic

You will always have inbound traffic to your site as long as you have an email list. There are different types of emails you can send to your subscribers. You can send product promotion emails, discounted offers, and product release emails.

All these are meant to bring subscribers back to your site. And as such, you can always have traffic to your site if you have an email list. With about 10,000 subscribers, 1000 can’t fail to open and click through to your website as potential customers.

Understand your audience better

Email marketing lets you engage with your audience and understand what they are genuinely interested in. You can understand their purchase behavior, interests, and other characteristics. To do that, you will need to study your email analytics and the open and click-through rate.

Alternatively, you can undertake surveys and get personal reviews from your subscribers. People want to give an opinion about something that will help them improve. As a result, you can leverage that to improve the effectiveness of your product and services and develop meaningful relationships with your audience.

Automation capabilities

You can automate all your email marketing processes, from lead acquisition to fulfillment, using an effective email service provider, such as ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, and others. Automation saves your overall marketing resources and reduces the chances of human error.

In addition, it can boost your click-through rates and hence sales. You don’t need to send drip email campaigns as that will waste your time and may not allow effective targeting. With automation, you can achieve much more.

Low-cost effectiveness of email campaigns

You don’t need a lot of resources to market your products and services via an email marketing channel. In fact, you can send and receive emails for as low as $15 per month using an email marketing tool like GetResponse. It even comes with a free-forever plan. That means you can collect emails and send them for free. However, the free plan might have limitations.

Unlike other forms of marketing, such as PPC ads and SEO, email marketing requires little to no resources to launch and run. Creating, running, and managing cost-effective email marketing campaigns is easy.

You can set marketing strategies and measure KPIs

As a business, you should set marketing goals. Without them, it can be difficult to progress fast since goals can help you formulate a winning marketing strategy. And with each goal, you will need metrics to measure key performance indicators.

For example, in the case of email marketing, you will need to measure the number of subscribers. The more the number, the best position you can be in achieving your goal. The key performance indicator, in that case, will be the number of subscribers.

Email marketing helps you track and measure emails open rates to ascertain the success of your subject lines and click-through-rate to measure the success of your email copy. With these, it can become easier to optimize your emails for even better results.

High return on investment

Email marketing is the best form of marketing. In fact, research shows that email marketers expect $41 for a dollar spent on email marketing. That means it is the best type of digital marketing for businesses that want to profit from their marketing efforts.

This is because you can segment your subscribers and personalize each email to boost conversion rates. When an email is personalized, it can tackle specific issues facing a particular segment of users. Most email marketing tools have automated the art of segmentation and personalization.  

It is an essential sales funnel stage

If you understand the stages of the sales funnel, then you know that engagement is essential to the overall conversion rate. Ideally, there are four stages in a sales cycle. These are steps taken by a lead before it converts to a sale.

A compelling lead magnet will always attract and spur interest. However, marketing emails are essential in creating an intense desire and eventually driving action. You can do that by segmenting and personalizing each email copy to target the target audience’s emotions.

Personalization

This is one of the reasons why it has a high return on investment than any other form of marketing. Personalization allows you to create a compelling copy that targets the emotions of that particular segment of subscribers. It will be like conversing with someone face to face.

To do that, emailing allows you to include the name (s) of the subscriber and target their unique persona. Rather than sending a general message, as is the case with blog posts, emails allow you to send compelling messages, which, in turn, increase sales.  

Scalability

If you can’t scale your marketing campaign, then you can’t increase the number of sales and hence slower business growth. Scalability is an essential aspect of a business.

With email marketing, you can easily scale your marketing campaigns by investing in a few aspects. You can, for instance, increase your email list to a thousand if you were at 500 and hence a much bigger audience.

You can also invest in more effective email marketing and automation tools; these can help you send more emails and increase sales.

Easy to generate leads

With email marketing, you can easily convert traffic into leads. Using compelling forms and landing pages with call-to-action buttons placed strategically, you should be able to collect and convert leads to sales easily. Your copywriting skills need to be top-notch, as well.

And with thousands of subscribers, you can place call-to-action links in your emails and further boost the number of leads coming in. Though you can easily generate the same amount of leads from other forms of marketing such as paid ads, email marketing is quite affordable and effective in the long run.

Your subscribers can share your emails

Email marketing can reach a much larger audience by having your subscribers share your emails. It is easy to share an email since most of them have that option. Businesses can further enhance this by ensuring their emails are easily shareable.

With the share button, you can easily reach a wider audience with little to no advertising budget. As a result, that increases the profit margin of your email marketing campaigns. Sharing is almost similar to word of mouth; hence highly effective in generating sales.

It is real-time

Different from other forms of marketing that take time, such as search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing is real-time. That means you will send and receive emails instantly.

You can also access real-time data on the number of emails opened, and the links clicked within your email marketing dashboard. This real-time data makes adjusting your email marketing campaigns on time easier.   

Easy to build relationships and trust

Trust is a key element in sales and business growth. You already know that customers buy from people they trust. That means brand recognition and trust are essential before entering their billing information. The faster they trust you, the easier it is to generate sales.

Emails help to instill trust in people. They form an essential aspect of the overall sales funnel process. Emails are in the engagement stage. That means they help to spur interest and trigger desire before converting subscribers into leads and sales.

It is also easy to have two-way communication with your audience. You can ask them for feedback on your offers and such. The engagement builds trust and ultimately translates to sales.

Build an audience

Email marketing is among the easiest ways to build an audience – and not just a general audience but a targeted one that easily converts to sales. With existing customers who don’t require much effort to access and put your offers in front of them, it becomes easy to make sales.

To do that, you can use forms and squeeze pages to capture emails and web visitors’ names before storing them in a database. Awesome WordPress plugins such as OptinMonster help you create compelling squeeze pages. The tool also offers analytics on how your audience interacts with your forms and how you can improve the opt-in rate.

With that data, you can easily build a more targeted audience with ease. And with an audience, you can grow your business fast.

Disadvantages of email marketing

Despite all the benefits above, email marketing has some disadvantages, too. That means we need to look at the cons, as well.

Here are some cons of email marketing:

Ease of unsubscribe button

Most email marketing tools now have this feature in handy. When someone unsubscribes from your emails, they are no longer interested in the information you are sharing. You don’t want them to do that, do you?

Well, that calls for value-packed content. You will have to feed your subscribers the content that they want. If you do a little research and undertake adequate segmentation, you should have this information.

The ease of unsubscribing undermines the work you are putting in to acquire the leads and reduces your marketing base.

Design issues

Your subscribers will be coming from all walks of life. They will also use different computing devices to access and read your emails. It could be android devices, iPhones, Mac, or regular desktop computers.

In that case, you will need to offer a flexible email design to enhance end-user readability. That can sometimes be challenging if you don’t have responsive templates. And with a poor design, the click-through rates will reduce.

Emailing regulations

Just like in any other business, email marketing has a different set of regulations in different counties. That means if you are marketing to a global audience, these limitations could hinder your scalability and growth.

Some of the regulations include consent and cookies. If you send emails without the user’s consent, they will most likely mark it as spam or sometimes take legal action against you if the issue is critical.

Unopened emails

The average email open rate in all niches is close to 20%. That means it is not as high as we expect it to be; hence a significant issue with email marketing. The reasons for this always range from poor and less compelling subject lines, wrong timing and sending emails when your subscribers are busy, and other issues.

The end result is that unopened emails reduce your returns on investment. If subscribers can’t open your emails, they can’t read them. And if they can’t read the emails, they can’t click on your call-to-action buttons and purchase your offers.

Requires skills and resources (copywriting)

To create compelling emails that your subscribers will open and read, you will need to understand a few copywriting rules. Yes, there are skills in creating subject lines that your subscribers will click to open and read.

And if you can’t write the emails yourself, you will be required to hire a freelancer from Fiverr or Upwork to do the job. You will also need other resources, such as email marketing tools, which can be costly if you have a huge email list.

Undelivered emails

These are emails not delivered to the subscriber owing to a server or other technicalities. It can even be that the person is no longer using that email or didn’t key in properly. That can reduce your customer base and hence fewer sales.

Your return on investment will also be reduced since you will be paying money to send a certain amount of emails while only a few are delivered to the subscribers. In that case, they will not open nor click on your links to view the offers you have for them.

Spam folder

When subscribers aren’t interested in your content anymore, they can decide to mark them as spam and hence send them to the spam folder. Yes, they can either unsubscribe or mark the emails as spam. In that case, you will be losing potential leads.

Emailing tools such as Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail have this feature in place to reduce the number of emails delivered to their users since there are a ton of spammers online with malicious intentions. So, whenever your email has several links or is not designed properly, it will be sent to the spam folder.

You can reduce this by asking subscribers to safelist your emails or add them to their contacts. In that case, their emailing tool will never send them to the spam folder.

It is competitive

Think about it – almost any other business is building an email list to promote its offers to a defined audience. Yes, even big brands link Amazon and E-bay have huge email lists they collected over time.

It, therefore, becomes competitive, seeking the attention of subscribers. Businesses and firms send up to 300 billion emails to customers globally in a day. That’s a huge number. That means placing your emails in front of that customer is challenging.

The role of CRM in email marketing

Most marketers couple their email marketing efforts with an effective customer relationship management tool. It is not necessary to do this, but it is essential for the effectiveness of your email campaign.

A CRM can help you avoid spam and target a specific audience of users. It allows you to have customer data at hand and develop a defined persona. You can also use the data to develop a stronger relationship with your subscribers.   

FAQs

Conclusion

Email marketing is a powerful way to promote your business and generate revenue. It offers many advantages, such as the ability to understand your audience better, automate campaigns, and measure results.

With email marketing, you can also build relationships with customers and trust over time. The disadvantages of email marketing are easy to overcome and should not dissuade you from using this essential sales funnel stage.

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