Email Marketing: An Ideal Tool of Customer Relationship Management

What is Customer Relationship Management?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a customer-focused approach that managing a company’s interaction with customers, in order to build a long-term, meaningful relationships. It specifically focuses on the customers’ lifetime value and boost company’s sales (Parvatiyar & Sheth, 2001).

To form an effective relationship with customers, companies need some useful tool to assist with, one of the tools is Email marketing.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message by email to a group of people, these people may be its current and potential customers. The features of it are 1) extremely cost effective; 2) highly targeted; 3) customizable on a mass scale; 4) completely measurable.

In terms of digital marketing, the application formats of email marketing can be always seen in these ways: 1) promotional emails and 2) newsletters.

After introducing the features and application formats, it’s time to talk about the pros and cons of email marketing.

To the company, email marketing is a cost-effective way to deliver its campaigns and engage its customers. It only takes company a few hours to create an email then using it to reach amount of people. Though emails can build the relationship to some extent, they may have a high risk of annoying the recipients. Since when recipients receive an unsolicited email, they have the choice to classify the email as Spam and potentially create a negative impact on your brand. As a result, the company should create the email which contains a good design, simple contents, making the emails look more professional.

An example successful email marketing:

The success of Uber’s emails is because of their simplicity. In the email content, they let their subscribers know about the promotions and news by a brief and instructive description. The email is also paired with a clear call-to-action, suiting for people who like skimming the email. For people who want to know more about details, it also provides a step-by-step explanation of what the promotions or news are.

After reading my post, does it remind you the experiences of receiving promotional email from different companies? Do you feel annoyed and want to get rid of these emails and newsletters? Hope you can leave your comments, thank you!

Reference:

Parvatiyar, A., & Sheth, J.N. (2001). Customer relationship management: emerging practice, process and discipline. Journal of Economic and Social Research, 3(2), 1-34.