Email marketing: Advantages and disadvantages

Have you ever been part of an email marketing campaign? Whether you were the company trying to nurture leads or if you were part of the target audience, you probably have an opinion if it was successful or not. In this article, I have summarised the most common pros and cons of email marketing. 

Email marketing is a widely used tactic among B2B marketers, and it has been around for a long time. When used correctly, it can be a very effective marketing activity. Yet when used poorly, the result can be devasting and damage the recipients' trust in your company.

By listing the pros and cons of email marketing, you can get an idea of what to do more and what to do less. 

The pros of email marketing:

Direct connection
Email marketing is a very effective channel to communicate with your audience. Compared to social media and search engine optimization, you don't need to figure out any secret algorithms when you do email marketing. It's a valuable content distribution channel.

Large target audience
In all probability, I can say that majority of your target audience has an email account that they check regularly. I can not tell with the same confidence which social media they use or the search terms they look for online. That's why email is the best channel for reaching all your target audiences.

Build long-term relationship
As you communicate directly to your lead and analyse what type of content they might be interested in, you get a unique insight that you can use to nurture your lead. By creating and sending relevant content, you can create a long-term customer relationship and increase your sales. 

Cost-effective
With a small budget, you can perform well and get great results from email marketing. You need relevant content, an email marketing provider, and the skillset to manage an email marketing provider. Compared to many other communication channels, you don't need to pay anything extra as you own your email marketing channel. 

Measurable
It's very easy to measure the outcome of an email marketing activity. What are the delivery rates? How many opened the email? What was the click-through rate? What was the revenue per sent email? All this information is available from an email marketing provider.

The cons of email marketing:

It can potentially be marked as spam
Even though you only send emails to people who have opted in to your list, there is a chance that the recipient will mark the email as spam. You may have received emails that you forgot that you signed up for, or the content is not what the company said it would be about. Too many spam reports can have an affect on your emails' deliverability, so it's vital to make sure that all the people on your email list actually want to receive your emails.

Required skillset 
Even though the barriers to getting started with email marketing are relatively low, to do it successfully, you need proper knowledge. The right type of content must be created, you need to set objectives, and you need to be able to analyze and identify improvements during the process. Starting an email marketing campaign without any plan or goals is a recipe for failure.

Deliverability issues
As some email clients might mark your email as spam, you can't always be sure that the email reaches your intended audience. 

Information overload
You have probably received emails from companies that you have never opened. I think we all can relate to this. In times when we have a full email inbox, we need to prioritize. If an email from a company is irrelevant to you, it will probably soon end up in your trash folder. Email may give you a direct line to your contacts, but just like on social media or search, you're still competing with a large number of other companies for attention.

Making sure you get the biggest share of this attention is the challenge that every marketer struggles with - to make it easier to figure out how to to it, we've gathered our advice and knowledge about email marketing in this in-depth guide. Make sure to take a look if you've got a problem to solve.

Do you want to improve your email marketing?

The good thing is that with the right tactics, you can avoid these cons of email marketing. In this presentation, we've gathered a few tips to improve your segmentation, your automation, and the emails themselves. Click the button below to download it, and start putting our tips into practice.

How do your email marketing efforts perform compared to other businesses in the same industry? Read our article Email marketing statistics and trends in 2021 and find out.