10 Important Pros and Cons Of Email Marketing

Email marketing has its pros and cons, just like everything in life. People talk about the pros of email marketing, and they usually ignore the cons.

Fortunately, there are more pros than cons. However, to enjoy the benefits of emaill marketing, you need a good email marketing software that will allow you sending personalized automated messages.

When it comes to benefits, most digital marketing experts talk about ROI. 

Since email marketing ROI is obvious, I want to explain other pros and cons.

For example, did you know that 1.4% of Americans never check their email inbox? Therefore, you should consider other marketing channels as well. Let’s see.

#1 Measurability

This one is obvious. Without measurability, you don't know how many subscribers click the most on your newsletter. It depends on various factors:

• Subject line length
• Magnet words
• Authority of sender
• Segments
• Number of campaigns

Sending too many campaigns per month may impact on email open rates, both for B2B and B2C.

Sending between 6 and 15 monthly email campaigns show the highest open rate in B2C, but for B2B, it should be between 16 and 30. 

Usually, sending more than two emails per week is too much, but you should test since email marketing is very measurable.

According to Millward Brown, the email channel has the highest ability to measure Return on Investment (ROI).

The data comes from a survey of more than 300 senior executives across advertisers, agencies, and media companies. 

After the email, search and online ads are marketing channels with the highest ability to track.

On the other hand, webinars and event conferences are the worst marketing channels for measuring.

#2 Personalization

The fact that you can send 100,000 (e.g.) personalized emails is unquestionably promising.

Email personalization will surely increase the amount of money you got in your bank account. Personalized emails affect click rates of consumer products and services.

To send personalized emails, you have to collect as much information as you can about your customers.

Another research claims that personalized emails are 26% more likely to be opened.

However, if you don’t know a name of a subscriber, you’ll need to write something like “Hello there!”.

Sending personalized emails will deliver 6x transaction rates, but 70% of brands fail to use them, says Marketing Land.

Also, personalized emails have 41% higher unique click rates than non-personalized mailings. I don’t know for you, but I will always try to send personalized emails.

It is also possible with machine learning.

Here’s the ML definition published on sas.com:

“Machine learning is a method of data analysis that automates analytical model building. Using algorithms that iteratively learn from data, machine learning allows computers to find hidden insights without being explicitly programmed where to look.”

What do I mean when I say that you should send personalized emails by using machine learning?

Well, you can predict customers that might buy, or predict related products to the specific customer, which is GREAT for online stores to increase the CLV.

#3 Segmentation

Do you know which customers spent more than average but haven’t bought anything for a while? When you segment customers you can approach specific groups better.

Again, you need to collect information about your customers, like:

• Name
• Gender
• Birthday date
• Total orders
• Average value per order

Furthermore, segmenting emails will also increase the open rates you see, but not only that. It makes your emails more relevant and lowers unsubscribe rates.

Keep in mind that you need to be very when collecting information about your customer because every additional field decreases subscribe rates.

According to VWO, Norway’s leading online beauty shop increased customer registration by 10.84%.

They did it by removing 3 form fields. There are many techniques for segmentation that you can leverage. For example, you can segment subscribers by:

• Interests
• Demographics
• Recent open or link click activity
• Purchase history
• Subscription date
• Others/none

It appears that email marketers mostly like interest-based and demographics techniques.

As for me, it seems obvious, but I’d add purchase history. For example, why not segment those customers who haven’t bought anything for a while, and approach them separately?

#4 Low Costs

Email marketing apps are affordable. Here’s how they usually charge:

• By the number of subscribers
• By the number of sent emails
• Mix between the number of subscribers and the number of sent emails

Sometimes you can get a chance to get a lifetime deal and avoid recurring costs for email marketing apps. 

Which model will you choose doesn’t matter if you won’t send more than two emails a week. If you got 15,000 subscribers, who care if you’re able to send an unlimited number of newsletters?

Also, sending too many emails will get you to spam. With 15,000 subscribers you probably won’t send more than 123,000 newsletters per month.

SparkPost, lets you send 100k emails for free. If you need more, for example, 150,000 emails will cost you only $28 a month. 

As you can see, you’re fine as long as it brings more money than it costs you. If you avoid buying a list, that will be the case with you because email marketing has a high ROI.

#5 Deliverability Issues

If you have deliverability issues usually means that your traffic has grown enough, so you need to make sure your emails go directly in the inbox. 

Surely, it’s not the same when you send 1,000 emails a week comparing to 100,000 emails a week. 

If you’re sending more than 50,000 emails a month, you should consider buying a dedicated IP address which lets keep your authority safe.

Here’s the formula for calculating a delivery rate.

Most email providers do this for you automatically, but if we assume that you send 10,000 emails and 9,500 goes in the inbox, will know that your delivery rate is 95%. 

Cleaning the list and creating a subdomain may increase the rate. Also, you should pay attention to Spamhaus, a non-profit organization that worries about blacklists.

  It’s well-known that most ISPs watch this blacklist, so getting you on the list mean you’re in the problems.

#6 It takes time

This is the biggest issue with email marketing. You can’t expect to build your list over the night.

Blogging is the best way of generating new leads. Companies that blog generate 88% more leads, but the thing is that it takes time to grow the traffic.

Once that happens, you’ll be able to collect lots of new subscribers through magnet leads. My experiences say that you can capture the most subscribers by using content upgrades.

But not only that, there are so many other ways of generating new leads, and here are some of them:

• Conferences
• Webinars
• Testimonials
• Facebook Ads
• eBooks
• Infographics
• Quizzes

I think quizzes are great both for B2C and B2B. The idea is pretty simple. You have to create a quiz using apps like LeadQuizzes and Qzzr. 

After that, you need to drive traffic to the site, but the trick is that you won’t let users see the results unless they provide an email address.

If you would like to learn more about getting new subscribers or leads, I suggest you to check this article.

#7 Mobile Issues

According to emailmonday, most emails are opened on mobile devices. Precisely, 54% emails are opened on mobile, 27% on webmail, and 19% on desktop.

This information tells you that worrying about design issues is necessary because it’s less likely people will be interested in your newsletters if they are not responsive.

Next, some email clients don’t support media queries, and it means that you can’t create responsive newsletters for those people. Here’s the list of email clients that don’t support responsivity:

• Outlook.com (Webmail)
• Office 365 (Webmail)
• Lotus Notes (Desktop)
• Outlook 2000-2016 (Desktop)
• BOL (Webmail)
• Libero (Webmail)
• Mail.ru (Webmail)
• Naver (Webmail)
• T-Online.de (Webmail)
• Telstra (Webmail)
• Terra (Webmail)
• Yandex.ru (Webmail)

Unfortunately, you can’t do anything about this.

Next, mobile device users are limited. Subject lines will be truncated depending on the mobile device mobile users got.

Check the first email (Primary tab) from DigitalOcean. It says: There’s an outs…

If users read this on iPhone 6S Plus, then they would probably read There’s an outstanding… or even There’s an outstanding balance.

#8 Some People Don’t Check The Inbox

There will always be people who think the emails are over. Many don’t check their inboxes at all.

The truth is that they sometimes download an eBook (in exchange for an email), but they never check the inbox folder. In other words, a lead you count and celebrate isn’t worth a cent.

Yes, that happens often, and for that reason, the quality of email subscribers matters a lot.

According to Business Insider, 1.6% of Americans NEVER check their email.

If we know that the U.S. has a population of around 320M and about 80% of them use email, we can say that about 256M Americans have an email account. In other words, about 4.09M Americans never check their inbox.

What does it mean?

You have to use other marketing channels because you can’t maximize the reach if you invest only in email marketing. Simply said, consider SEO, Facebook Ads, and Google AdWords for getting the best results.

#9 Almost Every Company Does Email Marketing

How many times have you seen something like the following photo?

There are so many promotional emails today.

As for me, I received a total of 10 emails TODAY, and guess what? I don’t have enough time to read all the emails in the Promotions tab, and I even don’t care about many of them. I’m just too lazy to unsubscribe from many of them, but that’s only me.

The problem with email marketing - everyone does it. In SEO, you can always find a niche and keywords with low competition and good search volume.

In the email marketing world, you can’t expect that. You have to accept that subscriber’s inboxes will always be full of competitors. This isn’t unexpected because 77% of people want to get promotional messages via email.

Only 4% want to get promotional messages via Facebook which is quite surprising. I didn’t expect that, but also, I didn’t expect that for Twitter, too.

So, people still want emails, and companies understand it, so they are all focused on email marketing a lot.

#10 Skills

If you would like to advertise on Facebook, you could do it within a few minutes. It’s not so hard because Facebook made it so easy. You don’t need to open Ads Manager, just click on Boost Post.

But, if you would like to promote your products via email marketing, that wouldn’t happen in a few minutes.

Ok, I know that I’ve been writing that email marketing takes time, but this isn’t about time - it’s about skills. If you wish to do email marketing you need to:

• Grow your list
• Design a newsletter
• Buy an appropriate app

and all this requires SKILLS. Growing the list means you need to drive the traffic to your site. Next, designing a newsletter means you need to worry about terms such as CTA, responsivity, UX, and so on.

Finally, there are so many email marketing apps, so you need to carefully look and check which works the best for you.

Conclusion

Just like everything, email marketing has pros and cons. Luckily, there are more pros. I would highlight sending personalized emails. Imagine the impact of recommending personalized products to your online store customers.

Don’t forget that email marketing is great for building high brand authority. Still, keep in mind that a mix between different marketing channels is necessary for top reach.