Email marketing, a trend in its naive stage and soon catching up, is driven by rising popularity of social media marketing and global Internet reach and penetration. Businesses of all types, irrespective of their size and area of operations, are increasingly adopting to email marketing for the conceived benefits it provides.
A recent study concluded that email is almost 40 times better at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter. (Sarv)
56% of businesses say they plan to increase their use of email marketing in 2015. (The Small and Mid-size Business Email Marketing Survey 2015)
In this article, we’ll discuss what is opportunity of email marketing? What are threats and their solutions? Here we go!
Opportunity
Email marketing size which was at USD 1.5 billion in the year 2010, is growing at a healthy CAGR of 20%, and expected to reach market size of USD 6.5 billion by year 2018. The growth in email marketing market is attributed to rising number of email marketing and hosting service providers and growing number of Internet users.
It is estimated that out of the world population of 6.9 billion, almost 2.27 billion people have access to Internet, which is a hopping increase of 628.1% from the year 2000, when the Internet users were limited to 3.60 million individuals. Internet growth has also seen a market penetration of 32.7% for the same period, which means that there is still huge unexplored market with tremendous potential. Though the Asian market has highest number of Internet users – approximately 1.1 billion with 26.3% penetration, the north American market has the highest penetration levels, approx 78.7%, having 0.3 billion users. The estimate shows that there is still huge potential in the unexplored segments of these markets.
Another factor supporting the growth of the email marketing market is the rising number of mobile users, which has opened a new gateway of mobile marketing. Now people are able to check mails while on the go, and have access to vast information at their fingertips. With smart phones, the opportunities available have become abundant, and can be converted to great strengths. Email is remains the go-to form of communication in the business world.
Threats and Their Solutions
However, the email marketing market growth is facing challenges from sectors and companies in the unorganized sectors, moreover developing market require niche marketing, and email marketing becomes a non-viable option here. Also with changing technology and rise in number of Internet safety issues, individuals are resisting from viewing or reading unsolicited mails The stringent regulations and privacy issues too have a negative impact on email marketing, and users are reluctant to respond to such mails.
Even the big three email providers, Gmail, Yahoo! & Windows Live Hotmail, which together account for 1 billion email accounts, are developing newer solutions to make the web a safe place, free to cyber crimes. They are constantly working on tracking and reducing vulnerable emails. So it’s like race and definitely emails providers are a winning team.
Top email marketing provider companiesare concerned with these issues and from the beginning developed itself in a way to fight against unsolicited mailing. They continuously update their software to align them with Gmail, Yahoo etc. Their strong spam checking algorithms prohibits spammer and allow genuine users to use our services comfortably without any trouble.
