Email marketing is electronic mail marketing. It is about communicating with your target audience about valuable services or products through email. Email marketing is targeted at new prospects or previous customers alike. Basically, it involves sending written messages, images, or video or audio information to recipient email addresses. The keyword here is “email”.
Email marketing has come to replace or complement traditional marketing where somebody walks door to door selling a product like vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, or kitchen knives. Email marketing has become a tool for companies to reach large prospects for their business. Email marketing has also become useful for reaching people, whether new or existing customers all over a particular country or the whole world.
Email marketing is still alive and kicking even in this age when several technological advancements, tools, or services abound. Email marketing surpasses phone calling or phone marketing because it is permissionless (to some extent) and is always sitting in the customers’ inboxes to be viewed at any time they choose.
Email marketing is not dead as some may think, because people still subscribe to newsletters or RSS feeds (we will write more on these terms in another blog post). As long as people still own and use email addresses there will be a need to reach them through email. You can be assured this is a BIG! business for those who have the skills to pull it off, those companies who invest in it, and the audience that receives these deals or offers through email. It is a win-win for all involved.
The dynamics of email marketing have changed a bit than what it used to be in the past. Email marketing has evolved as much as the technology driving emails has evolved. Some of these changes include email blockers that route unsolicited emails directly to trash or spam and others that label the email as potentially dangerous to the recipient, or another that checks the validity of the sender’s email or IP address, etcetera.
Email marketing companies have also not given up, as they have created solutions to address these issues that make it a hurdle for them to reach their audience which include joint venture partnerships, having users subscribe to their newsletter, buying emails from other companies, and including an option to their recipients to unsubscribe from the email list.
We can say that email marketing is still one of the oldest (in internet-age terms) forms of marketing that has not seen any slow progress. As more users join the internet with their email addresses, it creates a large audience pool for marketing departments to get their target audience. There has not been any better, cheaper, or more effective marketing platform like email marketing since its inception.
Email marketing has changed the fortunes of both individuals and startups or established firms all over the world. In fact, that is why it is still being done by many companies worldwide. Ask any email user, and they will tell you how much email marketing campaign messages they receive from all over the world.
Political parties are using it. Pharmaceutical companies are using it, Football teams are using it, Non-Governmental Organisations are using it, financial institutions are using it, and even Spammers are using it. Why won’t you use Email Marketing too? If it is working for them, it will definitely work for you as well.
We will share lots of information on email marketing on this blog. Keep coming back to read and learn how to take advantage of email marketing.