Email marketing has been around for how many years now since the emergence of the internet. For successful internet marketers, it’s an ageless method to advertise your products and build trust to both your clients and potential customers. It doesn’t take much of your effort since you just have to make sure you have bunch of email lists, and have valuable information to share on them. A lot of small businesses around the internet have become successful with this method but you must also be aware that like many other marketing techniques, it has advantages and disadvantages.

The Pros

There are countless ways that email marketing can help both big and small businesses. Here are the lists of advantages of using the email marketing:

• Cost- Effective – Based on statistics, email marketing have huge “return of investments” than other methods in marketing like radio and TV ads, billboards, posters and more. In every dollar spent, the business owner can get about $15 dollars in return. You didn’t pay for advertisers, you didn’t pay for TV and Radio appearance which cost bucks—just effort on sending emails and researching for valuable information for them to make use of. It’s the perfect method especially for those who are just starting up on their small business.

• Fast and easy – After building your email lists, you can just then send your mails out of your list. It’s easier and not that complicated compared to other methods. Aside from that, there are already numbers of software that helps you in sending out the mails automatically which makes the process faster. Comparing with other methods, email marketing can give you faster results which will only take hours and days.

• Build Long Lasting Relationship with Clients – in marketing, there’s nothing more important than making your client stick with you. In order to do this, you need to have constant communication and they must see you valuable. In the long run, as you continue to send them out emails and giving them valuable information, asking for their comments and feedbacks, or even asking what they want to know about, you will be able to build a long lasting relationship with them. On top of that, since you directly send out emails right on their inbox, it’s a more personal approach than just sticking a poster, paying for billboards, or just flashing your products on screen.

The Cons

Like any other marketing schemes, email marketing has also downsides. Here are the following:

• Being labeled as SPAM – people nowadays gets tired of receiving “spam” mails from other businesses. It’s natural for them to see your email also as spam.
• Other companies might copy the content of your mails –Just like in the real world fraud is inevitable on the web. One disadvantage of this marketing is that small businesses might just copy your contents and send them to their own list and claim that it came from their company.

As a rule of thumb on this marketing, it’s very important that you get your own list of contacts rather than buying on email lists for sale to prevent from being labeled as scam. Email marketing is the surest way to generate sales leads and bring your internet business into a success. Why not try it?