Email marketing: the annoying but effective way to grow sales
Online marketing gives you plenty of tools for attracting customers and actively promoting a product or service. One of the best known is email marketing. In both e-commerce theory and practice, it’s seen as a core way to win new customers and a dependable part of any strategy to grow sales. To the average person on the receiving end, it can look a lot like spam. But for online entrepreneurs, email remains one of the most effective ways to promote their products and services.
We may call it “annoying spam that clogs the inbox,” but it still works remarkably well. You know the old business maxim, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity”? Email marketing works much the same way. It grabs attention and tells your audience that your product exists (whether they wanted to know or not). The message also lingers in the back of the mind, like a file you deleted but never emptied from the recycle bin... On top of that, email campaigns almost always pay off in some way. Even when they fall short of the new-customer target, they still bring new people into your own audience. Email marketing is also fairly cheap (free, even, if you already have a customer list), so it fits a startup’s budget. That’s why most entrepreneurs make room for it when they build their marketing strategy. Besides the low cost, its ability to deliver results fast has always been one of its biggest advantages.
Put simply, email marketing is direct advertising: a small dose of creativity, fast conversions and the ability to reach your target group with real precision. That target group is the people who would find your product interesting or useful. In business, no one can guarantee you a certain number of sales or new customers. But email marketing gives you a clear, very real chance to aim your campaign at the people you believe fit your niche.
I’ll let you decide whether the drawbacks or the advantages win out. Either way, email is a cheap, effective tool that can strengthen your online marketing and even lift your sales. Just remember: unsolicited email is illegal 😉
Petar Dyaksov
Entrepreneur and founder of a digital agency, in e-commerce since 2009. He grows online businesses such as Fragrances.bg and Timedix and shares his experience as a speaker, moderator and mentor at nearly 80 conferences and trainings.
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