Is Email Marketing a Dead Advertising Medium?
Email marketing is a type of promotion that takes the form of electronic mail; it is classified as direct marketing. The term usually refers to the process of sending customers promotions and commercials, whether they are non-profit or profit businesses, directly to their inbox. Currently, the US alone spends an estimated $400 million on email marketing, each year.
With that in mind, exactly how effective is email marketing?
In short, it is very effective. Roughly 72% of respondents of an email marketing survey rated the process as being an extremely effective mode of marketing – the only one beating it being SEO, which is a search engine ranking process.
To add to this, the Direct Marketing Association discovered that the average rate of investment (ROI) on each dollar spent was $42 – an astounding statistic.
That said it is worth mentioning that email marketing needs to be done correctly. If email marketing is done poorly, the results can do more harm than good, costing the company money and flagging legal issues.
Companies should always be sure to follow the strict email marketing guidelines and laws that have been put in place, as this will fundamentally prevent any legal repercussions.
Avoiding legal complications is the first thing a company should think of, but understand whether the electronic advertisement will be effective is equally important. This is because even if the emails sent follow the law of the land (electronic land that is), an advertisement that doesn’t do anything is not worth anything.
Therefore, to determine whether email advertising really is effective, we have to understand how companies are using it. The best email marketing campaigns are those that target double opt-in email addresses, which display high quality and well-designed email advertisements.
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