Email+Advertising

=**E-mail Advertising**=

Contents: 1. Overview 2. Reasons for using alternative/emerging media 3. Limitations of the media 4. Costs of using the media 5. Reach and Frequency of the media 6. Scheduling of the media 7. Impact of the media 8. Audience qualities of the media 9. Responsiveness of the media 10. Other interesting qualities of the media for advertising purposes 11. Advertisers who are successfully using the media

Overview
Email advertising is a form of direct marketing that a lot of companies use. It has begun to emerge more in recent years due to a significant increase in the population’s access to the internet and personal email accounts. Email advertising has numerous benefits that outweigh its drawbacks.

Reasons for usage
Email advertising can help a company do a lot of things. First it can simply increase sales by letting the consumer know about a new product or a current sale. Second, email advertising can acquire more information from a consumer to add to a company’s database. Third, email advertising can and should offer a direct link to a website where the consumer can purchase the service or product immediately. Finally, maybe the most common reason company’s use email advertising, it is more inexpensive than many other forms of direct marketing. Also email advertising reaches its target in seconds, not days or weeks like other forms of advertising do.



Limitations
Some limitations with email advertising are that some consumers do not check their email often. Also if the writing of the email is flat or boring some consumers may not be tempted to respond or even read the entire email. The main reason email advertising is sometimes looked down upon is because email advertising is so frequently and often spam mail. Spam is an abuse of email marketing, spam is so detrimental because it is unsolicited and unwanted advertising.

Cost
The costs of email advertising are relatively much less expensive than other forms of advertising. Email advertising unlike other forms of advertising such as print ads or television/radio spots doesn’t require money to publish. The only major cost of email advertising is the labor involved in creating the email and sending it to the list of consumers you want to target.

Reach and frequency are completely controlled by the company compared to the consumer or media outlet in other forms of advertising. The company would decide who, depending on the list of email addresses, to send it to and how often it would send another email. If the company has a special offer coming up in a few weeks it could email the consumer a few times reminding them of the great deals. This falls right in line with scheduling, the company can schedule emails whenever it believes the frequency has the best chance of motivating the consumer into buying.



The impact of email marketing can be great depending on the email and if the consumer benefits from the product or service. The impact is more constant with this kind of advertising because it is direct to the consumer. Email impact mostly depends on the content of the email; a large factor with email advertising is the subject line. If the subject line is weak or poor the consumer generally ignores the email, and the message is lost entirely. If the subject line “pops” and the consumers are intrigued by the message, it can be accepted and services will be sold.

There is a large difference in audience quality between email advertising and spam. Opt in email advertising is when the consumer gives permission for the company to email them. These emails contain information and specials pertaining to specific products or services the consumer has shown interest in. Spam is unwanted, unsolicited emails that give email advertising a bad name. Specific qualities of audiences will be determined by databases that use the information they have gathered about certain consumers. For example, Viagra would not send emails to a 20 year old college student about its products. The databases that have this information decide, depending on the product, who to solicit.



Responsiveness
Consumers are very receptive to email advertising. Compared to regular direct mail, email marketing performs better. Also targeted email results in a sale 5 to 15 percent of the time compared to 0.5 to 0.2 percent of the time of banner ads.

The most interesting quality of email advertising compared to other new emerging forms of advertising is how much cheaper it is to advertise this way. It could cost pennies per prospect compared to thousands you can spend on print or television advertisements. Also the way the world is becoming more connected to the internet, soon everyone will have an email account. Email advertising could replace many other forms of direct mail. For example instead of getting your Sunday paper full of coupons, they could one day be emailed to you. Another interesting quality for e-mail advertising is the opt-in feature that many companies have made available. It allows consumers to receive e-mails about offers and new products available that the consumer is already interest in.

[|Pepsi-Co] [|ESPN] [|New York Times] [|Wal-Mart] [|Expedia] [|Travelocity] [|American Airlines] [|Southwest]