E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fund-raising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing. However, the main uses of it are to:
- send e-mails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship with your current or previous customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business,
- send e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately,
- add advertisements to e-mails sent by other companies to their customers.
The basic concept of email marketing is simple, mainly a mailing list is used to send direct messages to a large group of potential customers.
It has many advantages such as
- being low cost,
- return of investment can be tracked,
- delivery time is short,
- can reach specific audience
- and many others.
Now a days, companies in Pakistan are seeing its importance. There are many firms doing email marketing, while they are doing good – but they forget to add a very important feature of “Self un-subscribe” at the end of email, which is very important or the email will be termed as SPAM.
Following are two advertisements below which I received through email:
The first Ad is about a new clothing store located in Lahore and the second one is about a charity funded school. So in some way both of the Ads are related and meaningful to us. Like this, ads about restaurants, websites, and other businesses are being directed to us (the potential customers).
However, sending an email without the consent of receiver is illegal, and an email without Un-Subscribe Link is another offense, which should be kept in mind while advertising.
Both of above two elements are missing at most of times, making these marketing emails an offense – and can be charged under Cyber Crime Act of Pakistan.
Pricing: In Pakistan email campaigns are charged on per shoot (or per one email) basis. Usually email-marketers charge from Rs. 2,000 to Rs. 5,000 per email shoot. In one email shoot, they say that 300,000 to 500,000 users will get your message.
From where marketers get your Email: There are companies in Pakistan that offer 1 million email ids in a CD, that is easily available for Rs. 7,00 to Rs. 1,000.
Interesting. Just to add another perspective to it … one of the recent global developments in “e-mail marketing” is towards permission marketing. Permission marketing involves getting permission before you shoot off email. The obvious effects of not getting permission are:
1. Your email are not read and wasted. Therefore your money and time are wasted.
2. Your brand is negatively effected.
More on permission marketing and Seth Godin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permission_marketing
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/
my two cents.
Just upload the CD, you fool.
which Company is offering this CD ?
there are many legalities involved in Email Marketing, Suppression List, Can-Spam Act, W3C is involved, so better make a user Opt-in before doing Email Marketing :)
Thanks Umer Bhai for adding the info :-)
jamals.com is offering this cd its all about spamming but we have to be unity take cd from them and upload and share link because they selling peoples information with buiness name location etc. so we have to complain them to FIA. it is ofence as aamir said 6 month Jail plus 5 lac fine on him. This act is launched by Janab Asif Ali Zardari to avoid cyber crime in pakistan.
not agree with Naila, as jamals.com is not offering email IDs but is offering a yellow pages directory, which is legal throughout world. Peoples are submitting their information to them and even they to pay for this.
E-mail promotion is becoming a very confusing and great advertising strategy. It is my opinion the identical factors which make it excellent could be the things that create it to get infected with countless issues. It’s probably the single most beneficial marketing and advertising application to be found that can be found in the past 50 yrs. I would like that people could work by using it in such methods that it didn’t lead to countless trouble. I’ve got an associate that will do giant scale email marketing campaigns and the guy says it truly is the most economical way of marketing out there if undertaken correctly.
Hi All, Can anyone guide me if we are doing wrong, actually we doing email marketing in Pakistan since 5 years and many of our clients want these type of useful information in this post. We have 85% opt-in users but somehow some users time to time request for unsubscribe and we immediately unsubscribe them. Is it ok or we have to do further so we do not list in spamming.
Thanks and Regards,
Shabbir mahaan_net
asas
Email marketing is good tool to promote the business through electronic media but it must use in a right way and keep the balance but unfortunately in Pakistan it’s miss using and that is very wrong and trouble making.
Nice, Thanks I bookmarked it.