Email marketing is one of the most successful areas of marketing. One of the reasons for this success is its reputation of being a cheap and easy to implement medium.
But is this reputation really justified?
Arguments for ! No need to be a genius to get started
So, this Excel with a lot of email addresses (customers, prospects or others) that is lying around, why shouldn't I send my ad to these people?
This is often the basis for thinking about starting an email marketing program. You don't need to be a computer engineer to get started, there are many tools on the web (some of which are free) that allow you to send mass emails.
As far as hardware is concerned, a bit of graphical know-how and some html knowledge may be enough. Even your cousin Kevin (sorry for the Kevin's) will be able to help you out to start.
In this way, many companies start their email marketing strategy with the means at hand. But is it really a strategy... that's the crux of the matter.
This ... Email Marketing strategy is often improved over time (but sometimes also completely abandoned). Sometimes with the intervention of an agency for the graphic material or a copywriter for the text. The databases grow and the number of campaigns increases. For better or for worse.
Arguments against! Lots of subtleties that require the intervention of specialists
One may ask ... what is the point of investing more money?
To measure you have to think...
... and know how to take a step back! Analyzing the results of an email marketing program, measuring the ROI, setting up KPIs, etc. is a complex matter that can take a lot of time ... but also significantly improve the effectiveness of the email marketing strategy.
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It is not only necessary to measure, it is also necessary to test, to imagine the most effective scenarios of campaign, to make tests AB, to develop landing pages, to set up tracking to measure the sales... phew!
Deliverability, the headache of a specialist!
Unless it is simply not measured, deliverability is one of the first challenges on which the budding email marketer will break his teeth. Reputation, spam filters, spam traps, smtp, spf, dkim, so many words that quickly become a nightmare.
And it's not something that can be fixed once and for all, it's an everyday attention that deliverability requires.
We don't send 600,000 emails a week like we send 250 every month
If you want to send 250 emails to your customers ... there's still a way to do it in Outlook the first time ... but when there are 10,000 or 120,000 or more ... and you have to deal with 1258 bounces, 349 unsubscribes, 76 insulting emails, 92 spam complaints ... and only 0.0045% of your audience responds, it's immediately a lot less fun.
Design and integration in email marketing ... a very special art
My email is displayed correctly in Firefox, so I copy/paste the html code and ZOU ! I throw the campaign ... uh, damn ! No background in Outlook, so the text is white on a white background. We do not understand anything when the images are not displayed, filtered as spam because there is no text version Arghhhh. And that's not all, there are still plenty of surprises waiting for the novice in the field!
Database, CRM, ...
From my point of view, this is one of the most sensitive points... managing your contacts in an intelligent way. This is far from simple. Still too many email marketing programs are based on an "Excel file" management, which can cause huge damages!
So, is email marketing chic and cheap?
P.s. Obviously, this is an easy article ... since I'm preaching to the choir!
