Email Marketing as Phenomenon

Email marketing encompasses a span of activities and practices designed to attract new customers or create new business with existing customers. It also involves a variety of communication methods, devices, and software, all devised for the purpose of communicating a marketing message via email. 

 

Marketing is defined broadly to mean the process of communicating to buyers of products information about the marketer’s products that will show the buyers how those products will meet their needs and desires (look also for social marketing). Marketing is not selling, but rather, selling is the measure of success in marketing. A product can only be sold to a buyer after the buyer has become convinced that the product will meet his or her needs or serve his or her interests. Only after this is accomplished can selling take place.

 

Email marketing is a new phenomenon in the same sense that the Internet is a new information medium. In fact, email marketing is newer than the Internet itself since at the inception of the Web, marketing was for the most part not done online, but still only offline. Now, however, the Internet has become much like a grand marketplace, the use of email is normal for most people, and email marketing has become a constant process. Nearly everyone who receives email also receives in their email countless commercial messages. 

 

Marketing is very much conducted for the purpose of developing and expanding business relationships with potential customers and existing customers. The term email marketing only expands that concept by specifying the means by which marketing is delivered. Email marketing is marketing like any other marketing in terms of the message delivered and the offers made, however since email marketing is delivered by email, it is also subject to the limitations of that medium. For instance, before an email marketing campaign should be launched, the question will be how should the email be delivered and to whom. It is possible to collect millions upon millions of usable email addresses of people who might truly be interested in a given product, even though they have never bought the product before. Would a seller of that product send email to those millions of recipients? Maybe so, and some do, but this would be what is known as bulk email, i.e., email sent to recipients who are probably not existing customers and who have not agreed to receive it. This, however, is and has been for several years a common practice. 

 

This is nothing more than advertising, even if it is called marketing by the sender, and it is actually prohibited by law in the United States and many other countries. Yet, it is still done commonly by many advertisers. It may even be effective at creating new business, and in many cases it is, whether or not it is legal. This also raises the interesting point that the definition of marketing is essentially fluid. These bulk advertisers are looking to develop relationships with new customers, or even to enhance relationships with existing customers if any of those millions of recipients are existing customers, but there is no real consideration of whether customer needs will be met, and the only concern of the advertiser is whether or not products are sold. 

 

There is a number of companies that do business on the Internet providing their customers with email marketing services like for example email service provider. Some of them are quite sophisticated in their operations. They generally define email marketing to be something close to the "academic" definition of marketing. Before a product can be sold, a relationship must be developed and allowed to mature. As for the mechanics of sending email marketing messages, in all cases these operators restrict campaigns to only recipients that have agreed to receive email or even requested it. At the same time, they allow for the possibility that products will be sold directly in response to campaigns, and feature that possibility on their websites and in their own marketing messages.