Bo Z.

email marketing is probably the cheapest way to reach our customers, and it has many benifits such as providing detailed information, promotion, newsletters and creating great relationship with customers. But, there are also some negative impact, such as spam, unsure effectiveness and measurement.

Spam is worst thing could happen to either companies or customers. There are 80% of emails are considered as spam, which means they will be automatically deleted by email service providers or filtered into the spam box. In this situation, no matter how hard a company try its best to reach target market, and it will fail eventually, because their letters and promotion that is enclosed  with emails will bever be read by consumers. Moreover, let’s our emails go through all the spam filters and customers sign up for the newsletters voluntarily. But the question is: do they really spend time to read it?  and if they do, how long they are willing to spend their time? That’s why I said measurement, because it is almost impossible to measure the effectiveness of email marketing, and we will never know if customers are willing to read each email we send to them.

In order to make good email marketing, we need third party’s help. We need to choose a right company to plan for the email marketing campaign, here is a useful site that reviews most major email marketing companies. (link) It could help us to avoid spend unnecessary time on something we are not good at.

In my opinion, we should develop some kind of software integrated into a server, and it can monitor and generate report about how do customers behave when they get emails. For example, if customers read emails we send to them, it could report back to our server, then this software could monitor the time they spend on this email, and did them click on those links in the email. Such software could be really helpful to measure and adjust our email marketing campaign.

In addition, I think email marketing  start going after individuals rather than the same email to everyone. This could help us to build relationship with customers and focus on prospect. Here is another link about why we should do this. (link)