Email Marketing : Define

Email Marketing History

In 1978, Gary Thuerk of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) conveyed the principal mass email to roughly 400 potential customers through the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). He asserts that this came about in $13 million worth of deals in DEC products, and featured the capability of promoting through mass messages.

The email was sent from one computer to another, traveling through a network of machines, not unlike the internet we know today. Tomlinson also introduced the "@" symbol in email addresses to the world.

What is Email Marketing?

Email Marketing is a way to reach consumers directly via electronic email. To have a direct connection with your customer and subscriber.

Email Marketing is a type of direct digital marketing that uses electronic mail(also called email or e-mail) as the marketing communication delivery method.

Promoting the products and services of an organization by sending emails to a targeted audience. To increase product awareness and encourage trail.

Email marketing can be carried out through different types of emails

1. Promotional Email
2. Newsletter
3. Transitional Email

Promotional email:- To promote a new product, sales, and special offers. Provide direct information about products.

Newsletter:- These are regular emails that are sent to a list of the subscriber who has chosen to receive updates from a company. Contain news and information that will be of interest to the customer. The goal is to keep a customer connected to a company even when they are not buying anything.

Transitional Email:- Mandatory communication. Triggered based, based on action, shoot as per the customer behavior.

Usage of Email Marketing

Email marketing is, quite simply, using the tools of email to deliver advertising messages.

1. Email consumption rates are rising.
2. Customer connection with brands.
3. Flexible time-saving.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Email Marketing

Advantages of Email Marketing

• Cost-effective - the costs of email marketing can be much lower than many other forms of marketing. There are no advertising fees, printing, or media space costs.
• Flexible design - you can send plain text, graphics, or attach files - whichever suits your message best. A choice of design options gives you the scope to convey your business branding.
• Shareable - it's easy for people to forward and share your email content, building your reputation by word-of-mouth or viral marketing. This may help influence new customers to become followers of your brand. 
• Time-saving - through automation you can trigger emails to be sent to customers based on an action they have performed on your website - eg. send a welcome email when a user signs up to your website, or issue an email offering a discount incentive if the user abandons an online shopping cart. Once you have developed a template you can reuse it for numerous email campaigns.   
• Real-time marketing - through email marketing you can connect with customers in real-time. Using automated triggers, such as website activity, recent purchases, or shopping cart abandonment, you can reach the right audience, at the right time, in the right place, and with the right offer.

Disadvantages of Email Marketing

• Difficult to gain attention: A large number of marketers and businesses are using this method to reach new customers. If you want a strong online advertising campaign you have to spend money. The cost of web site design, software, hardware, maintenance of your business site, online distribution costs, and invested time, all must be factored into the cost of providing your service or product online
• spam: With email, spam is the greatest risk of all. Unsolicited emails can be a gamble, as some recipients will dislike commercial emails, especially if they’re not well-targeted. You must also ensure that your emails are up to date with privacy and data protection rules so that customers can open and read them with trust. Even when comes to opt-in emails, you must be careful to avoid sending too many.
• Deliverability issues: Over time, some of the email addresses in your list may get inactive. You may be sending emails to no one. Unmaintained inboxes get filled up, and it will reject any new mail sent to it. And for those who use spam filters, your email subject may appear to be spammy and get caught, never to be seen by the recipient.
• Design problems: You should be careful to design your email such that it will appear readable no matter what device or screen size is being used. Emails with images can cause inconsistency with smaller screens. They may also be bigger in size, and therefore slower to download. On the other hand, some may find text-only emails as monotonous and dull.

How can you grow your Email subscriber List? (Growing Your Email List)

• Build a healthy email so can customer attract to your products
• Provide free stuff.
• Offer an exclusive opportunity or deal.
• Deliver value-add content (it is any unique, original, or exclusive content or information that your audience cannot get anywhere else.)
  

What email metrics should I track?

The top 3 metrics to track for email marketing are:

1. Email Deliverability:- rate(or acceptance rate) can be understood as the success rate of getting an email delivered to the email address of your target audience.
2. Open Rate:- Number of opens email. 20-30 percent or more open rate is considered as good.
3. Click-through Rate:- If anyone clicks on any of the links in your email then that would be counted as a click but the click-through rate shows the percentage of subscribers who clicked a link in your email. 

Conclusion

Nowadays, Email marketing is growing, the word of email constantly changes, so be up to date. There are so many benefits of email marketing, the main being a big boost to the business if done effectively.

If you implement these new changes into your email marketing strategy your customers will be more responsive, your campaign performance will improve and your business will continue to grow.