Pitfalls of Email Marketing

You must have heard of email marketing repeatedly on the Internet, at conferences and during marketing strategy meetings. They say email marketing enriches business communications; targets specific key markets, and is both cost-effective and environmentally friendly. Businesses use email marketing as an affordable and often effective marketing tool.

However, before employing this technique you should make yourself aware of the disadvantages that exist.

Several factors can hinder your Email Marketing effectiveness, and, in some cases, email marketing can even work against your business.

• Spam Filters

“Spam” is a common term for bulk distributed emails. People often consider their e-mail inboxes to be a private space, which can make them averse to receiving unsolicited advertisements there. To cut down on the amount of unwanted emails, many servers have filters in place to lessen the number of spam emails a person receives.  People can further adjust their email filters to their own tastes. Your email marketing could well land in a spam folder and never get viewed. In some cases, you could find yourself or your business in serious legal trouble.

• Engagement

Email marketing requires constant tweaking to keep your subscribers engaged. A person will often sign up to receive email solely as part of a promotion. A user might also unintentionally sign up, such as if subscribing was the default choice on a web page. In such cases, your email marketing may be perceived as a nuisance. Even in the case that someone deliberately signed up to receive your marketing emails, like an industry newsletter, you still must work to maintain a level of engagement to keep your readers from unsubscribing.

• Appearance

You may have worked to create your email marketing to look exactly the way you envisioned. Unfortunately, your design may not come through the way you hoped, which can diminish the impact of your message. The email setting on another person’s computer may only allow text, blocking images from coming through. If the main focus of your marketing was a logo, it could be lost. If you want to avoid possibly messy appearance, you will need to make sure the codes used translate to the most basic processing systems.

• Costs

Sending a quick email to someone may not cost you much more than Internet access, but the costs of launching an email marketing campaign add up. Hiring a company to design and manage an email marketing campaign includes templates and consultations and can get pricey.

•  Emails Often Lack a Personal Touch. 

Email marketing will always be a form letter unless you are willing to write a personal message to thousands of potential subscribers.  But who has time for that? People aren’t stupid. They know you’ve written a form letter. If the content is valuable, however, this negative will often be overlooked.

• Getting Read.

There’s really no way to ensure that customers are actually reading the emails. It is not unusual for customers to have throw away email addresses that they use just for signing up with sites, plus they don’t even have to sign up for the emails to begin with. Even when a website makes this a requirement to use certain features on it, there’s no guarantee the customers won’t just mark the emails as spam.

• Responsive Design.

More than half of all internet traffic today comes from a mobile or hybrid device. The days of HTML emails on desktops or laptops are over. You really don’t know where someone might choose to read your email. This means your emails must have a responsive design in order to look professional on every device and every browser.

So, nowadays, The Internet has opened up whole new worlds of marketing opportunities, including the possibility of e-mail outreach campaigns but, at the same time, E-mail has quite a few downsides, some of which may be serious enough to make you think twice about proceeding.

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