Benefits of email marketing over other types of marketing. ROI(return on investment)is very high and customer is easily reached. Reasons for investing the time and resources the marketing program using bulk email are listed below. Reduced Time & Effort : Postal service,telemarketing are quiet expensive and consume lot of manual labor,other resources. The potential customers may not answer the phone call or miss the post. Marketing using email requires less than two hours. Templates which easily allow changes to be made in the content are used for the purpose. The senders list is retrieved from the database and the emails are sent by the click of a button. A single person can perform a week's work in a few hours. Messages of marketing are sent in real time with out any delay. Special promotional offers which usually last for short duration are immediately sent to potential or existing with out any sort of delay. The customers can be geographically segmented and everyone receives the same email. Personalized messages can be sent to individuals. Marketing of specific products or services is easily accomplished using database of customers. Daily communication with the customers is possible. Testing of different marketing strategies is easily done using accurate tracking tools. Information flies thick and fast. Many customers forward their emails regarding products or services to others in their mailing list. As a result marketing information reaches more potential customers. Highly cost effective due to less overhead and administrative costs. Number of employees is less. There are tools to track information such as number of users opening the email,clicking on the provided link,among others. Sales are easily tracked to the original marketing tool used,email. Customer response is monitored easily leading to further marketing actions. Tons of paper are saved. Large scale felling of trees is avoided when compared to print marketing.(Kevin)
The Disadvantages of Email Marketing:Bulk distributed emails are commonly referred to as spam. The in-boxes are full of spam. To reduce unwanted emails, filters are used. Personalized filters are used to receive specific marketing emails. The probability of the bulk email landing in the spam folder is very high. In that case the marketing email is not viewed and all the effort is wasted. Further there are strict guidelines to be followed for bulk email marketing. To prevent the recipients
of the emails from unsubscribing to the emails,the advertiser has to offer freebies,discounts,promotional offers for using the products or services. The appearance of marketing email may look differently on user's computing devices due to different settings in the computer. Images are blocked allowing only text messages to appear. The purpose of bulk email is not served. Cost of launching a marketing campaign based on bulk email strategy is expensive. Hiring the services of graphic designers for creation of professional templates,technical specialists,consultants all add to the cost. Just buying an internet connection to send emails is not the only cost to be considered. (Forneris)
Companies consider spam as byproduct of on-line digital life. The following measures help businesses fight the spam menance. Spam bots collect email addresses form the Internet web pages to build mailing lists and send spam messages. Therefore business email address should never be listed on the company website. A client contact form is include to enable the clients to establish contact with the company. In any kind of networking meeting on-line,the company representative should use discretion before sharing email address with strangers. The spam messages are marked and then deleted. The process of marking ensures that the spam messages are correctly identified by the email service provider. The junk or spam messages should never be opened. If they are opened out of curiosity on the part of the user, then some hidden software code gets activated and the email address is confirmed. Any action on the part of user like replying or attempting to unsubscribe only confirms the email address and leads to more spam emails. Spam blocker services can be used effectively along with default filters. Regular contacts known to the user are included in a white list while unknown senders of email are asked to verify their credentials. It is advisable to use a clients of popular email providers while accessing business email through the browser. These act as powerful countermeasures against spam and also help in managing genuine non spam email with add on programs (Poland).
Approaches used by spamsters to over ride spam reduction methods:Today, millions of spam messages reach their destination in minutes. This spam originates from zombie networks. This is a network of infected computers. There is no universal ‘silver bullet’ solution available in the battle against spamsters. Multiple technologies need to be integrated in the antispam products. Else, the effectiveness is low. Distributed Checksum Clearinghouses,razor and pyzor are the technologies used for detecting bulk,completely identical emails or those with slight variation. Spamsters penetrate this defense using street smart technologies. Every spam message varies in content like text and graphics among others. Spamsters are one step ahead of antispammers. Custom softwares developed by spamsters generate spam messages. They are then immediately sent to destination. The message headings conform to RFC standards and the messages are not detected as spam when scanning takes place to detect incorrect message headings. Spamsters bypass content filtration technology by including random noise in messages. This trick hampers the assessment and disclosure of the spam characteristics in the message. Spamsters have become successful in over riding Bayesian filtration using different methods.(spam protection technologies)
Artisanal spam criminals deliver high quality spam messages and select small targets. The messages appear to arrive from world famous software companies. This has worked and artisanal spamsters have stolen billions of dollars each year from small and medium size companies. The spamster criminals phished out login details and gained access to people's bank accounts. The hosting companies used for sending spam messages were small and inexperienced and spam filters were effectively bypassed. Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance is the protocol used for email authentication. It loses effectiveness when even a single company fails to implement it. Artisanal spammers plan well,get all the information and then strike at the selected targets. Email spoofs have resulted in $1.5 billion being stolen from companies in the last year alone. Spammers infiltrate organizations through trusted employees. Spammers usually target businesses having only digital credentials as the sole authentication procedures(Gontovnikas 2016).
Works Cited
Kevin. "The Top10 Benefits of Email Marketing
"<https://emailmarketing.comm100.com/email-marketing- ebook/email- marketing-benefits.aspx>.
Forneris, Julia . "The Disadvantages of Email Marketing. "<http://smallbusiness.chron.com/disadvantages-email-marketing-3472.html>.
Lessard, Tom . " 5 ways to stop spam email today." 31 Jul. 2013. <https://www.abine.com/blog/2013/stop-spam-email-today/>.
Poland, Ashley . "How to Reduce Spam on a Business WebsiteEmail ."<http://smallbusiness.chron.com/reduce-spam-business-website-email- 59208.html>.
" Spam protection technologies."<https://securelist.com/threats/spam-protection- technologies/>.
Gontovnikas, Martin . " The New Trend of Artisanal Spam: Scamming Gets Smart ." 2 Mar. 2016.<https://auth0.com/blog/2016/02/29/the-new-trend-of-artisanal-spam/>
