email marketing essay

email marketing essay

The Power and Potential of Email Marketing: A Comprehensive Analysis

1. Introduction to Email Marketing

Electronic communication in the form of emails is a predominant tool that facilitates the day-to-day contact between buyers and sellers, in addition to its function as a basic communication mechanism. The use of emails to contact and support customers is a common practice in various industries such as the public sector, insurance, finance, and the energy sector. Though emails are a significant tool to communicate with customers and clients, and have been leveraged as a medium by organizations and companies, the use and management of emails is an under-researched and poorly understood topic.

Email marketing occupies a significant position in the marketing literature. Significant scholarly effort has gone into studying factors that influence the outcomes or the effectiveness of email marketing. In this context, an exhaustive meta-analysis would provide a holistic view of the factors that influence email marketing. Each included review contributes a particular facet of empirical evidence that researchers need to consider when attempting to understand email marketing. Therefore, the need for filing the existing literature review by offering a more comprehensive view of email marketing. In this study, we aim to bring together the common issues identified in contemporary research in email marketing and provide information crucial to advertising and marketing practitioners by identifying the most frequently researched factors influencing email marketing and offer a comprehensive overview.

The paper proceeds. In section 2, we discuss electronic marketing (email marketing) and the features of email marketing with multiple examples throughout the paper. Section 3 is the method of the multiple regression analysis. Section 4 is the result of the study. Section 5 provides a comprehensive overview and the implications of the study, and the last section is the conclusion of our study.

2. Key Strategies for Effective Email Campaigns

The research indicated that individual views are wide and varied based upon numerous experiences as consumers and as email marketers. Marketers and consumers were quite polarized on these problems. Some people and traditional marketers feel that “e” in CRM is shorthand for electronic. Many in marketing and communications of the traditional type are placing all their bets on just new delivery vehicles, such as the “e.” It’s all about the e, not the C (which really stands for customer relationships) in CRM.

Challenging issues in email marketing cited by focus groups are unsolicited emails, undelivered emails, whether Opt-In is truly Opt-In, privacy issues, relevance and respect for the customer’s time, segmentation and targeting, databases and lists, and frequency of relevant and effective campaigns. Effective email marketing is all about giving each customer good reasons to stay connected and to learn how the customer wants to connect without giving the impression that you are forcing email marketing on them.

The focus groups recognized effective email as valuable and useful and well-organized as well as well-constructed. “Effective email” has these attributes in common—email that is relevant to an individual customer (or what a customer perceives as valuable), interesting, not too long, and directed to a market or audience of customers who already have some interest in the content.

Focus Group Findings

The report is organized into easy-to-understand sections on how to segment email lists and closely track results. It discusses the types of campaigns that are considered the most effective, frequency issues, as well as demographic issues. Subscription Management and Email Creation and Deployment are also covered. Additionally, there are real-world case studies from the retail industry, and other marketers as examples. We have spoken with an array of new generation companies and others about the driving forces behind the most exciting business phenomena in the world today. Businesses are discovering that it is possible to harness the power of databases to manage and measure all marketing campaigns. More than faster time to market, the Internet is about business transformation. There are those who relish in thought that the digital age brought “e” to commerce and continuous improvement.

According to an eMarketer report, “Email Marketing Best Practices: Avoid Emails That Fail,” almost 40% of consumers reported finding email marketing messages that they had agreed to receive not useful. What steps can email marketers take in order to propel the right messages to loyal as well as potential buyers and, in some cases, lost contacts in order to refashion them into buyers? This is the overarching question for email marketing professionals. This study examines the practices of a variety of marketers. Recommendations are made on the basis of this review of best practices. These recommendations are founded in part on interviews and case studies, more than a dozen books, and more than 200 articles, as well as the collective experience of the authors.

3. Measuring Success: Metrics and Analytics in Email Marketing

3.2. Measuring Open and Read Rates Email service providers do not have the ability to track each and every email message sent to its final destination. There are two methods available to track opens and reads of email messages. An invisible image or pixel is loaded with the email message. When the image is loaded, it sends a ‘request’ to the web server on which the image is stored, which can be tracked. The most commonly used method to track open rate is the use of unique ‘landing’ URLs. When the email message displays an image for the recipient to act upon, the URL is loaded, transmitted to the server and tracked. Some email clients do not have the capability to display HTML and graphics in their messages. These email software applications are configured to block all HTML interactions, and as such, no unique reach-back URL or instances of image requests will be transmitted. There is a concern in the industry that open rates are often over-exaggerated and not a true reflection of the success of the sent message. The ‘tracking pixel’ or unique URL must be enabled in the email client for it to be tracked. How long it remains in the email message is often determined by the recipient’s settings, e.g., to pull or delete upon opening, previewing or permanently storing.

3.1. Introduction Email marketing is both an art and a science. It is an art because its effectiveness is based on the creative interaction of the sender with their audience. It is a science because it relies on the collection and interpretation of data. Email marketing has been likened to ‘digital print’: both have techniques that are tried and tested, and both have ‘creatives’ who work to apply design and style that has impact. For both, there are educated ‘rules’ that are more or less flexible, and both have publishers and subscribers. But there is one significant difference. The metrics that can be recorded from each campaign have not been available to print marketers.

4. Challenges and Best Practices in Email Marketing

The US has started the march to eradicate email spam first with the highly publicized law known as ‘CAN-SPAM’, being that of HR3650 and signed into law by President George W. Bush on December 20, 2003. The law became effective on January 1st, 2004 and has caused a world uproar. Such an uproar that many states within the United States have brought forward in the region of some 17 other bills. This action from the US shows that they have understood that it is not ‘Technology’ that is the first step in defeating spam, but that it is definitely ‘People’. The people being affected by these spam emails are the people who own the machines that worldwide forward 5% of all the electronic traffic, daily. It is the people who have demanded their representatives do something about it, and the people to whom the US government has reacted. And this, the first time that they have not allowed the majority of the world’s opinions when making what is effectively their own internal laws. With any fortune, it will mean that the rest of the world is going to see the sense in the legislation or at least how long it takes for the politicians in taking extra votes to be swayed into making a worldwide law.

In 2002, Ferris Research released data that identified that 10% of all corporate email in the US is spam and the proportion is growing daily. According to other recent studies at that time, over $1.1 billion was spent annually on installing and maintaining anti-spam infrastructure in companies in the US. It is thought that if nothing were done, then 50% of all email being sent worldwide would come from spammers through the potency of hack attacks and the use of open proxies. It is not illegal to send bulk email worldwide, only if the content and message have been miss-sold or if there are no unsubscribe facilities. However, it is the very fact that there is little respect for the end recipients that has many of us and the majority of our politicians disgruntled.

5. The Future of Email Marketing: Trends and Innovations

In fact, email marketing has the potential to give the current generation of marketers the measure of widely accepted, credible, and ultimately manageable 1:1 marketing driven by clean, accurate self-maintained customer databases. Much of the current literature on email marketing makes the same assumption that it will rapidly develop into a dominant, desirable, undisputed, and self-evident channel of customer communication. Some predictions for the future are frankly scary, with email becoming such a dominant channel that other direct media disappear and billions of messages are sent per year. Email marketing will develop beyond the humble one-page brochure message of today to become an all-singing, all-dancing virtual direct mail system not recognized or acknowledged today. All customers will be reached somehow through email, which will thus magically become the absolutely right response device for virtually all marketing media. Business relationships of all kinds will become email-centric, with companies big and small totally reliant on email communication. The forecast missing of individualistic variety by the authors is a dull, gray, unimaginative, and ultimately self-defeating conception of so powerful a channel.

Given the professional maturity of email marketing, the failure of so many email marketers to deliver a consistently interesting, relevant, and respectful email experience has to be seen as one of the marketing profession’s most notable and avoidable failures. It is the breaking of this second golden rule in particular, the creative tyranny of the Sunday evening deadline, that has been so harmful to the potential of email marketing. This is not just traditional interruptive advertising carried to the email channel. These highly pressured cowboys riding roughshod over their email lists may or may not make their own sales targets in the short term. But from the hostile consumer perspective, they are undermining a communication channel that could do such wonders if it maintained a consistent standard of execution.