Regular, well-written emails sent to the right people are cheap to send, and very effective if you take the time to send them correctly.

E-mail marketing is very powerful in general, because it enhances your brand and works by acquiring trust and attention over a longer term than a regular commercial does. E-mail marketing also enables sales through other channels. So, for example, a client could choose your products at a store in real life, just because the client knows you from somewhere.

To reiterate, these four reasons make e-mail marketing superior to other forms of direct marketing:

• E-mail marketing is based on trust and long-term gains, thus, if played correctly, it skyrockets the buzz about your products or services.
• E-mail marketing can achieve great results with scarce resources.
• E-mail marketing gets better response rates.
• Permission-based e-mail mostly reaches from 90-100% of your subscribers, as opposed to unsolicited e-mail, which gets deleted instantly by approximately 76% of its recipients. If spam filters don’t delete it.

Permission: the cornerstone of e-mail marketing.

Requesting a permission to e-mail anyone at all; this is what usually freaks people out about e-mail marketing. However, permission is the thing that makes this method of direct marketing different–and viable at all.

Hardcore marketing specialists who come directly from TV or radio advertising often do not really understand this, and resist the very idea of permission. This resistance is in fact quite understandable–that is, until you realize that e-mail is an individual’s private space. Permission makes sure that you only target interested customers, and cannot be offensive in any way unless you slip and make your e-mails offensive yourself.

Secondly, permission efficiently eliminates a huge marketing problem: the lack of attention from the customer. If a user subscribes, you simply know you have his attention, as opposed to direct mail (which costs a lot more), and advertising on television or the radio.

Other direct marketing forms, more often than not, leave you blindfolded.

You can’t really know how many users went to your site or bought your products after a telemarketing campaign. Or your direct mail campaign. Or anything else for that matter.

Although you can try and measure the statistics based on the location of the customers, as well as selling trends, such statistics are unreliable and inefficient. They also lack the depth one could expect from marketing in the 21st century.

Furthermore, it is a lot cheaper to send e-mail surveys if you aren’t quite sure about the direction you want to head in.

E-mail marketing platforms, on the other hand, offer tracking numerous things:

• Was an individual email was opened? When?
• Did the user click a link?
• Which user clicked the link?
• How many e-mails were undelivered? Which ones?
• What is the general efficiency of the current campaign?

And lastly, permission-based email feels a lot better. You can actually see for yourself if the clients like your e-mails and products. A permission does protect you against the seller’s remorse.

It’s cheap, too.

Bandwidth was a problem until… 2002? Because the internet has evolved, sending e-mail costs virtually nothing in comparison to direct mail and phone calls. Yes, you get bargain deals with post companies and phone operators, but nothing can compare to how little sending an e-mail costs.

There is a catch though.

You still have to work hard and find subscribers. It’s a pretty slow process, slower than phone calls, and even direct mail. But it does bring huge results; that’s why more and more businesses slowly catch up with the trend that has been here for a good few years.