Marketing through E-mail and Issues Surrounding it

Marketing through E-mail and Issues SurroundingitEmail marketing is one of the forms of directmarketing, which is done via Internet. Emails aresent to potential customers to boost the business,and gain the trust of the customer by disclosingrelevant information and help them to make goodshopping decisions. It also enhances therelationship with a current customer, byrepeating business with them. In simple words theprocedure of sending emails to customers is knownas email marketing.The major advantage of email marketing is that itdoesn 抰 consume a lot of time, is minimalresource consuming and is also cost-efficient.

Within a short period, a large audience can betargeted. Features such as Subscriptions,bounced messages, web bugs, and click throughhelp enables businesses to track potentialcustomers. Since the customers can be directlyreached, feedbacks can be collected with ease. Interms of cost also it is not as expensive asnewsletters. Reports have proven that this is thenext best marketing technique after searchmarketing. It is effective in tracking thereturns on investments.Email marketing is a modernized version of mailmarketing. The advantage over direct mailmarketing is that it takes less time to reach acustomer than mailing. Like people check theirmailboxes daily, inbox is also checked bymajority of the Internet users on a daily basis.Over the period of time, lots of helpful tools andweb services have been developed. List host is webservice that provides lots of options to themarketers like managing huge emails and email

address database. If the budget is more, listmanagers can be hired who can be given charge ofopt-in-email newsletters and managing databases.Software is also available in the market that doesthis job too.When the customer fills the form for the firsttime, there are check boxes to be ticked whichreflects their interests. Depending on thesechoices, an advertiser sends information to them,this is known as opt-in-email advertising,because the customer has opted to receive emailsand marketing like this isn 抰 illegal. Thecontent of the email can be elaborate, but itshouldn 抰 be too long as people are really busyfor that. The call to action, also known aseffective words, in the email should be chosenwith care. It 抯 not necessary that the contentshould revolve around only one item; relatedproduct 抯 information can also be included. Thisis known as cross selling. By using email blastingor sending an email to multiple customers at a

time can save a lots of time and will also increasethe efficiency.The dark side of email marketing is spamming oralso known as bulking. Some companies collectemail addresses of people illegally and sendirrelevant mails to them, which can be veryannoying. Some hackers design an email like anadvertisement, but when clicked on downloadsadware and viruses that can destroy a computer,which makes it even more dangerous. To makematters worse, the Direct Marketing Associationof America has petitioned to make spamming legal.Some prohibitions are also placed on providerswho help out business organizations to managetheir email marketing by giving them alreadyprepared email templates.Most of the mailing websites have added thefacility of separating spam from genuine email bycreating separate folders for both and this isknown as spam filtering. But in case of large

number of spam mails, a useful mail can go intothat folder and can go unnoticed and gets deletedwith the rest of the spam mails. This kind of mailis known as false positives. But the chances ofthis happening are rare. There are many lawsagainst spamming like United States?Can-Spam act,Europe 抯 privacy and electronic communicationsregulations. According to these laws, thecompanies should get their return addressauthenticated, false physical addresses shouldnot be included and a one click unsubscribe linkshould be place in the email. The lesser penaltyinvolves companies sending spam to be blacklistedand on a larger scale, they can be heavily fined.PPPPPWord Count 678