The World Wide Web is so full of advertisements that we now take it for granted i.e. almost every website is guaranteed to contain some kind of advertisement or the other. Now these advertisements are not just limited to websites, they have also started creeping into people’s inboxes – welcome to the world of email marketing. The result being that people became increasingly reluctant to even open their inboxes due to the sheer volume of irrelevant email advertisements – these however lead to the rise of spam filters. While the result was a welcome relief for ordinary email users, on the flipside – a lot of good companies also fell into the spam category alongside the genuine spam. But still the email marketing scheme didn’t seem to go down the drain. Instead they emerged with novel and more efficient ways to reach the customer. The most popular of these methods are the opt-in and dual opt-in schemes. Where spam is significantly reduced due the advertisements being sent over on the basis of customer feedback – to simply put it, here the customer has the option whether to receive further advertisements or to put them into the spam folder. But perhaps the most important utility remains to be the ability of the customer to select what kind of advertisement he or she wishes to receive.

Now what are the advantages of email marketing? To start with – it’s extremely fast, comparatively cheap, paper free i.e. it’s green (certainly the buzz word nowadays!) and today’s metric and tracking systems also allow companies to target specific regions and customers. However the most important advantage is that internet marketing is more of a personal kind of experience whether it’s with a potential customer or a loyal one. In internet time this small amount of time is extremely important especially with ongoing debates on whether social networking sites are going to make internet marketing a thing of the past.

In spite of all these advantages there are some significant disadvantages too. Of course there is the problem that spam filters are meant to solve but an even more difficult problem is to distinguish between the genuine trader and the ones that happen to be a scam. In short winning the trust of potential customers via email marketing is an issue, especially nowadays with the fraudulent websites looking more and more genuine.

To conclude email marketing remains stronger than ever before even though passionate debates have been raging all over the internet. Studies have also shown that upcoming utilities like social networking sites tend to complement email marketing techniques, increasing sales considerably.