Email marketing is one of those specialized methods of marketing and advertising over the internet that is cheap, relatively effective, and personalized. This means a lot to a small business when you consider that most small businesses don't have the revenue margins to support heavy advertising. Offline advertising is one of the most difficult things to endeavor to do from a cost and creativity perspective. The medium still scores heavily over the online medium but this is something that has started to change over the years. Let us take a look at some of the ways that email advertising can be of use to a small business.
Cost. This is the single, most important consideration. The costs of marketing through email consists of email creation costs, some infrastructure costs, and bandwidth costs. These may appear to be significant but with some sensible moves like using free templates, paying for an online campaign service can make this cost quite negligible. Imagine that with this setup, you are able to mail at least five hundred customers, with a conversion rate that you should expect of 1 percent, you are looking at a medium that has not only already paid for itself but has already earned you money.
Speed. A marketing offer is only as good as how fast it is prepared and reaches the customer. To this effect, email marketing is so fast that you can prepare an offer in an hour at the most and it should not take more than a few minutes for each mail to start reaching your customers. Of course, what happens after that is totally out of your control. If your mailer gets trapped by a spam filter then there is no chance that the customers will see it.
Tracking. One of the biggest problems in releasing offline advertisements and promotional material is that you have no idea if the offer has even been seen by the customer. This is one advantage that you can have in online marketing through email. This is because most email campaign software comes equipped with tracking devices and statistics that will tell you if an email has been opened, whether the email was acted upon, and where the recipient went after clicking a link in the email.
Reach. The wonderful thing about this method of marketing is the reach. Email marketing allows you to reach the widest possible audience in one inexpensive go. Whether the client is sitting in Michigan or Mongolia, the offer will reach the client at the same time and this means that everyone in the world is a possible customer of your products.
Captive audience. Traditional advertising is not immune from the viewers being distracted by another ad or something else. Even TV has a channel changer. However, emails being the medium that it is, people tend to take the trouble to read mails and absorb information with the least amount of distractions. People actually finish one task before the next when on the internet.
