Email marketing is the modern incarnation of a traditional mail merge. Of course a traditional "snail mail shot" is costly, wasteful, resource-hungry, time consuming and comparatively ineffective.
It is costly when compared to email marketing as the cost per recipent is generally between £1 and £3 when the factors of postage, paper, envelopes, and undelivered mail are considered.
It is also incredibly wasteful. When someone moves house, their address changes. However an email address can travel the world, and is much less likely to change. The medium its self doesn't involve ink, paper, or fuel which are all consumed in a traditional mailshot.
Because people move house, there is much more scope for address information to be incorrect or out of date. The time taken to deliver the message can easily take a week, makling the message less relevant than when it was concieved, and due to the massive cost of printing and sending a mailshot, the return on investment is much lower. In fact email marketing offers around 40 times the ROI of traditional mailshots.
This can also be attributed to the fact that it's easy to respond to email marketing: You recieve an email when you are already at your computer. Clicking the email takes you to the site where you can part with your money - compare this to recieveing a leaflet for a shop through the door, or reading a magazine article with an advert beside it.
Recent evolution in computer software brought us the "mail merge" - combining a letter with a list of names and addresses to produce a mass mailing. Email marketing is the very latest incarnation of this medium. While mail shots are still adopted by large firms such as banks and insurers, email marketing is so cheap and effective it is being adopted by businesses and organisations of all sizes.
However, the immediate benefits of email marketing In addition to the old method of personally addressing a letter with a mail merge, email marketing facilitates this; yet also adds another feature which allows you to segment customers and market to them accordingly. Say for example you were an online electronics retailer. If you group all the customers who recently purchased an LCD TV together, and then sent them all an email offering; an extended warranty, a discounted blu-ray player, or wall mounting bracket, all of these offers will be relevant and targetted to that customer group.
When a specifically targetted customer recieves a proposition, they are much more likely to respond positively; hence email marketing adds a new dimension to the modern-day marketing world, with a low-cost and highly effective marketing platform.
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