E-mail marketing has come up as a hugely popular direct marketing tool by business organizations. These enterprises use electronic mail as a means of sending messages which can be either of commercial nature or fund raising nature. In other words the e-mail sent by these companies to the audience is like a marketing device targeted at potential customers. There are a number of purposes for which such a promotional e-mail is sent to people over their mailing addresses.

Such marketing enhances the relationship of the company with its existing or potential customers. It also wins customer loyalty and the business can have repeat orders. These mails are sometimes even sent to convince potential customers regarding a new product to buy it. The business organizations build a list to reach out to a large number of prospective customers at comparatively cheaper rates. As compared to other marketing tools such as newsletter printing or direct mail, e-mail marketing is much faster and less expensive.

It is no doubt one of the most effective tools in online marketing as it allows keeping a track of the investment made on a particular product’s marketing. It also checks the return the company was able to get on such an investment. The messages sent by the company are easy to check and keep a track of. The advertisers uses certain tools like web bugs, unsubscribe requests, bounce messages, click-throughs and autoresponders to keep a track of the users. List- building also helps the company know the success of the marketing strategy adopted by it by way of the negative or positive response it gets via mails and can easily establish a correlation between the sales and the strategy for marketing.

This also helps them to generate repeat orders automatically by reaching out to the number of e-mail subscribers who consent to receive such communications. Great benefit of e-mail marketing is that it is eco friendly and uses no paper. The advertiser is able to come closer to the audience by pushing his messages as against the web site advertising which requires audience to visit their site. Better optimization can be attained for e-mail marketing as tracking enables the advertisers to test different variants. The response metrics also help him in calculating results and plan better ways to reach out to the audience.

There are however some serious disadvantages also of using this marketing tool. The spam messages on the net are one of them. It is difficult to differentiate between a spam e-mail and a legitimate e-mail at times as spammers try to show themselves as legitimate people. They use similar looking massages using HTML and graphics which makes it difficult to distinguish between a spam and legitimate mail.

Author's Bio: 

Listbuildingmaximizer.com provides List building software for email marketing and free email advertising.