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Email Marketing: Advantages And Dark Sides

By: Julia Gulevich
Submitted: 2007-03-26 13:41:59
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The Advantages of Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the premier and highly liked forms of marketing among e-business marketers. There are various reasons for this. Email marketing has advantages as well as dark sides.

It is much less expensive than other marketing options like direct mail or newsletters. For a fraction of the cost email marketers can send their marketing message to a number of prospects.

Email marketing provides a high return on investment when done in the right manner. In fact it rates second only to search engine marketing among the marketing activities done on the internet.

Email marketing is instant. Email arrives at your inbox instantly as opposed to mail that can take days to be delivered.

Websites operate on the pull principle. On the other hand, email marketing is done as pushing the product to the consumer and operates on the push side of marketing.

The advantages of email marketing include the ability to track email messages and the user responses to them. This is done through web bugs, bounce messages, click-throughs, unsubscribes, read receipts etc. Through these open rates, positive and negative responses can be measured and sales can be correlated with marketing.

More than half of internet users check email on any given day. This is a big advantage of email marketing.

Email Marketing – The Dark Side

Often email marketing messages are sent without considering what the reaction of the recipient might be. Unsolicited mail that is sent in bulk is considered spam.

Illicit email marketing came after legitimate email marketing. In the early days of the internet, commercial operations were not allowed to use email. Now days, legitimate email marketers have a hard task establishing themselves as such with all the illegitimate email marketers trying to establish themselves as legitimate.

Often it is difficult to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate email operations.  Spammers try to represent themselves as legitimate marketers. The Direct Marketers association pressurizes legislators to allow activities which many would consider spam. These include sending of opt-out unsolicited promotional emails. Sometimes, due to the sheer volume of spam email legitimate commercial email to which the consumer has subscribed gets mistaken as spam. This is especially common when the two emails have a similar appearance e.g. flashy HTML and graphics.

Spam filters have become essential to most users. Often legitimate commercial email gets caught up in these spam filters. It is rare that email users complain about this.

Companies considering launching a commercial email promotional program must make sure that this does not violate the CAN-SPAM act as well as other laws of the land.

Email marketing has both advantages and dark sides to it. To profit the most from it, make sure you stay on the right side of the law and commercial regulations. Happy Marketing! Author is a technical expert associated with development of email marketing program: Bulk Email Software. Did you find those tips useful? You can learn a lot more here HTML Email Guide.

Article source: Expert Articles