Free Email Marketing

One of the most popular marketing strategies these days is email marketing. Email marketing or email advertising is the act of reaching possible clients through mass distribution of emails that are often targeted to the people who might be interested in a certain company's products and services. Email marketing can either be paid or not. While paid mass email marketing strategies may have a bit more features, free email marketing schemes are not too bad, and they do not exactly fall far from the performance level of paid versions.

There are many ways free email marketing can be advantageous to companies as well as some disadvantages. Some of the advantages of free email marketing are the following:

• Cost free
• Free email marketing can be considered as a way to help the environment as it is paper-free
• More than half of people using the Internet check their email accounts at least once a day
• Companies can send out advertisements through free email marketing repeatedly
• Types of messages can be delivered easily and clients can choose which updates they prefer

As much as free email marketing has its advantages, it also has some disadvantages that need to be considered. One of the major disadvantages free email marketing has is called SPAM. While many companies make use of free email marketing to connect with their current clients, when messages are sent out to other people without solicitation and by bulk, this becomes known as SPAM. For some system administrators who hold a huge dislike for SPAM, they consider any form of unsolicited email as SPAM which should then be blocked from entering the system. During these instances, free email marketing becomes futile is it will surely reach deaf ears.

It is often hard to distinguish legitimate operators from spammers. Even messages that come from either free email marketing or from spamming come off as similar to each other. This is where opt-in lists come in handy as companies allow users or clients to have the freedom to ask for their newsletters through a marketing list. This would then also allow clients to simply "opt-out" when they no longer wish to receive newsletters or updates from the company. Having this disclosure and feature will help systems distinguish the SPAM from the legitimate ones.