The Pros and Cons of Email Marketing For Your Business

When you are looking at the different marketing strategies that are available for your business, you have a lot to consider. Do you go for email marketing, social media marketing, SEO marketing or a mixture of all three? Email marketing is one of the most effective strategies and its also cost-effective. Many business owners haven’t yet tried email marketing and this is a big mistake when you consider the benefits.

To help you make the decision, we are going to discuss some of the pros and cons of email marketing in this article. Read on to find out more about this.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is actually quite simple to understand as it is exactly what it sounds like – marketing via email. Email marketing campaigns are usually sent out by businesses to their customers in order to drive traffic back to their site and encourage repeat purchases. Some people send out marketing emails one by one while others use software that makes it much easier. When considering email marketing as a tool, it is also worth noting that there are some data protection laws that you must be aware of such as GDPR.

Let’s start with the pros of email marketing.

Easy To Reach Many People At Once

One of the main advantages of using email marketing is that it can allow you to reach lots of people at once. Other marketing strategies could take longer to reach customers whereas, with an email, you can press send and have thousands of people receive it at the same time. For many businesses, reaching a large audience is a priority and so this can be extremely beneficial. As long as you have a large mailing list full of contacts who have agreed to receive marketing emails from you, this should be very effective.

It Is Affordable

Some forms of marketing such as TV advertising or link building can be very expensive. In comparison, email marketing is a much more affordable option, especially for small business owners who are struggling to cover the costs. In fact, there are even some free marketing tools that you can get to help you get started. The best free email marketing tools will allow you to send out emails to anyone on your mailing list, using templates that are very attractive. If you are looking for an affordable option, this is something to consider. 

You Can Track Results

Another great thing about email marketing is that many of the best services that you will find online offer analytics. This means that you can check how many people opened your emails, how many clicked on to your website and much more. This information can be extremely valuable when it comes to creating further campaigns in the future and ensuring that your website doesn’t have any issues. Tracking results is something that you should be doing across any kind of marketing campaign and with email marketing services, this is much easier to achieve. For this reason, many big brands spend a lot of time analysing their campaigns and improving upon them every single time.

So, what are the cons of email marketing?

Emails Aren’t Always Opened

One of the main issues with email marketing as a strategy for businesses is that emails aren’t always opened. In fact, many emails can go straight to the spam folder and might not ever even be seen by the person who received it. This can be incredibly disappointing if you have spent a lot of time working on an email campaign, only to find out that some of your most valued customers never opened it up to see what was inside. When you check your analytics, you will see the open rate and other important details. If no-one is opening your emails, it is time to try something different.

Sizing Can Be Tricky

When you send an email, you need to make sure that it fits perfectly on the screen that the recipient is using to view it. Of course, this isn’t always easy, especially if you are not using an email marketing service to send it out. This can be seen as a con of email marketing because it can be hard to ensure that everyone can see an optimised version of your email. This can result in them closing or even deleting the email and never seeing the true version of it. The best way to combat this is to make sure that you are testing out any emails on various devices. This way, you can be sure that everything will go smoothly.

You Need Good Writing Skills

Finally, something to be aware of when you are trying out email marketing as a strategy for your business is the fact that you need to be able to write good copy to go along with it. You don’t need to be a journalist or a professional writer to create an email campaign but if the text doesn’t flow and make sense, you could have a problem on your hands. The email should be written to match the target audience and it should promote the brand and use the right tone of voice. If this isn’t something within your skillset, the email marketing campaign might not be as successful as you hoped.

Final Verdict

As you can see, there are both pros and cons to using email marketing as a strategy to promote your business. However, it is clear that the pros outweigh the cons and this shows that this is one of the most effective strategies that you can use for your business. When creating an email marketing campaign, you should ensure you are using the right kind of software and that you are analysing any results that you get.

Over time, you’ll learn what works for your customers and what doesn’t. Use this information to build your campaigns and grow your business over time.