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Why email marketing fails?

By Binu Paul, SiliconIndia | Monday, 28 March 2011, 18:36 Hrs | 3 Comments

Bangalore: Being an effective, low-cost way for entrepreneurs to inform, reach out to, and retain current customers, email-marketing still maintains its relevance despite fears of extinction. Many marketers believe this is the result of their never-ending appetite for better reach to serve their clients. According to a recent Forrester Research report, email marketing will reach $2 billion by 2014.

Email marketing is all about sending customers promotions and commercials, whether they are non-profit or profit businesses, to their inbox.

Email marketing carries a lot of benefits with the major ones are being higher response rates, faster cycle time, simplified campaign testing, and improved lead management. It?s very effective as customers can be reached with targeted messages from companies they care about with e-marketing. E-mail marketing is also about customer retention which is a great tool to build stronger relationships with customers. The researchers found that about 84 percent of recipients like receiving emails from companies with whom they?ve subscribed to their newsletter.

It is still the most-preferred choice of direct marketing for SMEs for its effectiveness and low cost. Thousands of email can be sent at one click saving a great deal of communication time and very less turnaround time. It also brings back quick responses and feedbacks.

Email marketing fails mainly when companies ignore the expectations of their customers. Mailing frequency also matters a lot as too frequent mailers might annoy the customers and too little would take the brand out of their mind. Ignoring the customer feedbacks also is noted as one of the major reasons behind the failure of email marketing.

The real challenge lies in targeting the customers. According to the study, nearly $144 million will be wasted on emails that get lost in inbox clutter due to a lack of relevancy. To prevent this, you should read your customers mind by thinking like your customers. Secondly, your brand should get the highlight for which you need to select a good template. The content of the email should be properly segmented based on your customers? actions and behaviors. You should also pick the right day to send it depending on the open and click through dates. You can attract the readers attention by good subject lines and you should make sure that your emails comply with CAN-SPAM regulations.

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Reader's comments(3)

1: There's no doubt that email marketing works. In addition to the traditional email marketing (mass email) one should look at another marketing opportunity and that is the emails we all send from our corporate email addresses every day. I represent a company that has developed a solution for just those emails and thus this post.
The basic idea behind wrapmail is to utilize the facts that all businesses have websites and employees that send emails every day. These emails can become complete marketing tools and help promote, brand, sell and cross-sell in addition to drive traffic to the website and conduct research. Wrapmail is available for free at www.wrapmail.com

Posted by:REH - 29 Mar, 2011

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Amazing concept!

Herman Replied to: REH - 31 Mar, 2011

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3: because the big SEARCH companies want marketers to advertise with them and not reach customers directly

That is why Email marketing is unfairly targeted..even CAN-SPAM act is made for google adwords...

Posted by:Arulprakash Ravindran - 28 Mar, 2011

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