Businesses use email marketing as a way to get in touch with their customers and provide them with information. Unlike direct mail, email places the company’s marketing message directly in front of their customer—or so they hope.
Email marketing is not perfect, and while it does have a few benefits, it also has its fair share of disadvantages. Before you opt to use email as your next marketing campaign, read on about five of the biggest drawbacks to email.
1. Your customers may not see your message.
Spam filters keep customers from receiving emails all the time. If you’re not careful with the words you choose for a subject line, your customers may never see the email. If you notice that a large number of your customers are not opening your emails, it could be a sign that something you’re doing is not sitting right with spam filters, so you may want to take the time to look into it.
You also need to pay attention to the days and times that you send your emails. If it’s in the middle of a workday, it’s possible that your customers will overlook your email to focus on job-related tasks, but by the time they get home, they’ll have forgotten about your email altogether.
2. It’s not cheap.
In order to send campaigns to a large number of consumers, you will need to have someone on staff who can design something eye catching and someone who can write something intriguing. Both of these people will cost you money.
You will also need to invest in email campaign software, such as Constant Contact. This tool will store all of your contacts’ information as well as provide you with templates to create basic email campaigns. But again, this will cost money.
3. You need to work hard.
If you have mastered getting by the spam filters, your next challenge is to actually get your email opened by your customers. This requires you to create catchy subject lines and also provide good meaty content on the inside that will interest them. Your customers are not going to waste their time reading your email if they’re not enticed to do so, so your email marketing campaigns need to be thoroughly planned and launched to be successful.
4. There will always be glitches.
Though we live in a world run by technology, we can’t seem to make all the technology work together. Chances are that not all of your customers are using the same type of computer or web browser. The problem is that what looks great on one computer and on one web browser may look like garbage on another. For example, if you created your email marketing campaign on a Mac computer and you tested it out through Outlook on Safari and it looked great, that doesn’t’ t mean that it will look great on a PC opened in Gmail through Internet Explorer. For those customers who are getting the distorted version of your email campaigns, you can be sure they won’t benefit from your emails.
5. It’s becoming an old tactic.
Back in the day, email replaced direct mail. Today, social media is replacing email. Many companies are turning to social media as a way to engage with their customers and provide them with information. Some companies are even doing away with internal emails and relying on corporate social media sites like Yammer for all of their internal communications. Thanks to social media, email marketing does not have the same effect it once did.
There are a few drawbacks to email marketing, and if it’s a tactic that you’re using or thinking about using, it’s important you understand these disadvantages to better assess which marketing tactics are right for your business.
This valuable marketing article was written for you by Joshua Reyolds for SEOMAP – a group specializing in SEO keyword research.
