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What are the pros and cons of advertising via email newsletters?

One of the great things about advertising is that there are now multiple ways of reaching your target audience. Traditional marketing methods now sit side by side with online forms of advertising, with the latter proving to be very popular with small businesses, mostly due to the lower costs associated with running an online campaign. One strategy that has been around as long as the internet is email marketing. Many businesses are now working hard to build a mailing list that they contact on a regular basis via an email campaign or newsletter. Let us take a quick look at the pros and cons of advertising this way:

Potential Savings

Generally speaking, the biggest investment you will have to make in email advertising is time. It costs very little to send an email. But it takes time to put a good newsletter together so that your recipients get something of value to them. Just because they have opted to get something for free does not mean they should be provided something of low quality. If your recipients find no value in the email or newsletter, they will surely decide to unsubscribe.

Tracking

If you want to run a successful email marketing campaign, you need to be aware of what people are doing with the emails and newsletters that you send out. The good news is that there is tracking software available that can help you quickly see who is opening the emails, clicking on the links or ads within them, and taking some sort of action when they do. If you do not use these types of metrics you will be unaware of what is working and what is not and will hence not know what changes you should make to improve your sales. Using an email ad server, you can track these data and maximize your revenue from email advertising.

Speed

Yes, it takes time to put together a newsletter that looks great, and which has a ton of information that will entertain, inform, and entice your target audience to buy whatever it is that you are selling. The beauty here, though, is that once you have done that hard work, the fruits of your labor can be delivered to your audience in a matter of seconds. There really is no quicker way to contact your customers than via email.

Reliability and Deliverability

While email marketing is fast and affordable, it is not always as reliable as you had hoped. Web-based email clients like Gmail and Yahoo will often send items to the spam or bulk folder that they consider to be unsolicited or mass marketing. Unless your audience has set their spam filters accordingly, all of your great emails could end up being unseen. Using a double opt-in setup can help avoid this particular issue.

Your Business Reputation

If you limit your emails to one or two per week, you can build your brand and your reputation rather quickly, especially if your newsletters are full of great information. On the other hand, blasting out emails two to three times per day will lead to your customer feeling as though you are cluttering their inbox and will surely lead them to filter your email or unsubscribe to your mailing list. This is a situation where “less is more” is very applicable.

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