Email Marketing

Email marketing is a digital offshoot of direct marketing, and as a result has much the same advantages and disadvantages. Done right, it's a highly effective, fast and cost efficient way of advertising and building customer relationships. Done wrong, it can be a time consuming way of reaching an unresponsive or hostile audience. The 'push' nature of the practice means that marketers often employ email marketing to either encourage customer loyalty,  garner new customers or to sell products and services. Compared with the likes of display or search advertising, email marketing is extremely cheap. What's more, while other forms of advertising can take several days to reach their intended audience, sending an email is instant. The medium is also highly accountable, letting advertisers track bounce backs, responses and click throughs with relative ease. Despite these advantages, email marketing has been hobbled by its association with its illegimate relation, spam. Some recipients can find it hard to distinguish between legitimate and spam email marketing, as many spammers pose as legitimate operators. 

Spam is banned by nearly all ISPs and is an ongoing subject of laws and regulations aimed at curbing the practice. The rise of spam has subsequently led to the increasing employment of spam filters and filtering technology, which can sometimes block legitimate mail. However, email marketing remains an effective tool for marketeers, and the UK sector is continuing to prosper despite these setbacks. The sector is becoming revitalised by increased targeting and personalised delivery technology, along with more experienced branding and copywriting skills. The following listings provide a wide selection of email marketing firms, which provide a variety of solutions to help you get the best out of email marketing.