Email Marketing interview questions and answers

What is email marketing? What are the types of email marketing?

Email marketing is directly marketing by using electronic mail as the communication medium for commercial marketing or advertising to a group of people at a time. This internet marketing strategy generally works by using emails to send ads, request business or solicit sales or donations and any form of email communication that is meant to built customer interest, loyalty and increasing the current customer base. It basically aims at encouraging ‘repeat business'.

List and briefly explain the types of email marketing strategies

The following are the various types of email marketing techniques:

a. Email newsletters: They are direct emails sent out to a list of subscribers or customers on a regular basis. They may be sent out daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or even annually. They primarily aim at building and strengthening the customer relationship with the company.

b. Traditional emails: They are triggered transactional messages sent out based on a customer’s action with a company. They include dropped basket messages, purchase or order confirmation emails and email receipts. They primarily aim at conveying and confirming the actions that triggered it. These days many email newsletter software vendors provide transactional email support which gives companies the ability to include promotional messages or advertisements within the body of the transactional emails. Some software vendors even offer specialized email marketing services such as providing targeted and personalized transactional email messages and running specific marketing campaigns such as customer referral programs which thereby
enhances the vendor’s or website owner’s online marketing strategy.

c. Direct mails: This email marketing strategy includes sending an email solely for the purpose of communicating a promotional message, such as announcement of a special offer or catalogs of products. Companies generally maintain a list of customers or potential customers or even hire a list of email addresses from service companies to send direct mails to.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of email marketing?

Advantages of email marketing are:

1. Large audience.
2. Internet users check emails on regular basis.
3. Return of investment generated can be huge if email marketing is planned the right way.
4. Email is the most basic and popular service of internet and thus most people are familiar with it.

Disadvantages of email marketing are:

1. Filtering causes large number of emails to be rendered undelivered.
2. Spamming in emails may lead to legal action against internet marketers.
3. Needs to be planned very carefully as very minute factors may lead to an email being rendered undelivered or filtered out.

What should be kept in mind when drafting an email for marketing?

Following things should be kept in mind when drafting an email for marketing purposes :

1. Use an effective subject.
2. Make sure the email does not go into spam. To ensure this make sure the email does not have too many links and restricted words which lead to mail ending up as spam.
3. Keep the email body crisp and up to the mark.
4. Make your point and do not drift away from it.
5. Avoid any form of grammatical mistakes.
6. Reiterate atleast once.