Low Cost: Accumulating email addresses and maintaining a mailing list is relatively inexpensive, as well as sending out a newsletter. The cost of sending thousands of pieces of direct mail would be much more expensive to reach the same number of customers.
Tracability: Clickthroughs and positive or negative responses to newsletters by customers emails can be easily tracked by many numerous tracking metrics. This allows for a measurement of return on investment as well as the effective of a marketing campaign.
Instant Delivery Time: Email is near instant and so provides the benefit of deploying a marketing campaign faster than traditional media. The ‘quickness’ of the internet also encourages immediate responses from potential customers.
Personalisation and Campaign Testing. It is easier and cheaper to personalize emails, or a group of emails, than for physical print media and also than for the company’s website. This allows a relatively easy and cost effective way to test different email creatives and messaging.
Integration. Another level of market targeting allows email marketing combined with other direct media more of a chance to reinforce the marketing campaign message with an audience.
Pushing the Message: Website based advertising relies on an individual to visit the website. Direct email communication allows an advertiser to ‘push’ it’s message to the target audience.
Numbers: It is far easier to collect email addresses of interested parties who can then opt-in to companies marketing emails and newsletters than it would be to collect physical addresses and send direct mail to the same interested parties.
Green: E-mail marketing is paper-free.
Disadvantages of Email Marketing
Undelivered Email: It may be difficult to get email through a spam filter as many companies use e-mail marketing to communicate with existing customers, but many other companies send unsolicited bulk e-mail.
Email Overload: Even when an email gets through to the consumer, there is so much email that needs to be looked at sometimes it is difficult for the individual to distinguish between solicited and unsolicited email, as well as have time to read through the email.
Renderability:. Difficulty of displaying the creative as intended within the in-box of different email reading systems.
Email response decay: Email recipients are most responsive when they first subscribe to an email. It is difficult to keep them engaged. Soon, the opted in for newsletter may be seen as an irritant.
Communications preferences: Recipients will have different preferences for email offers, content and frequency which affect engagement and response. These have to be managed through communications preferences.
Resources: Additional people and technology resources are required to deliver a sophisticated email newsletter that engages the consumer.
Advantages of Email Marketing