What Are The Real Disadvantages Of Email Marketing?

In the lead generation world, we tout email marketing as the most practical and effective method for nurturing and obtaining leads. Well, because it is. There are many advantages of email marketing like the stickiness of emails, gaining loyalty, and keeping customers. We rarely discuss the disadvantages of email marketing.

Email Marketing Disadvantage 1 – Too Many Leads

Sure, your lead gen team has their process down now, but what happens when you actually start using your lead magnets? You’ll get all of those leads. Then what? 

You may actually experience inefficiencies with your workflow now that some stress is being put on it. But don’t worry, it is an opportunity.

Look at your marketing automations with fresh eyes. Is your copy consistent? Maybe you used to call the home insurance policy process “easy as pie” on your website. But the emails say it is a “piece of cake.” Choose one and fix it. 

Are you using a no-reply email address for your email marketing campaigns? You shouldn’t. In lead gen, we want replies. And how are those saved snippets working in your CRM, by the way? 

From the copy to the format of your email address, getting more leads will force you to put your email marketing to the test. You’d better do an audit of your whole process if you start using email marketing. The time you spend auditing the process is one big disadvantage of email marketing. 

Email Marketing Disadvantage 2 – Too Many Sales Appointments

With too many sales from your epic landing page, you may have to actually hire (gasp) more sales people. It’s true. Just like your email marketing workflow, a well-oiled lead gen machine will test the sales team. One or two of your team may not like the change but they won’t even have to fight one another for the good leads.

You’ll be posting job openings on Indeed and LinkedIn just to attend to all of your qualified prospects when your email marketing is done right. So where your marketing team sees that as an advantage, the CFO may disagree.

When you have multiple sales appointments, you’ll see how many each salesperson can actually handle per day. And, depending upon your sales cycle and average lifetime value (ALV), you may need to add in more buffer time for hand-holding as they say. 

So, what? You hire more people. That’s okay; it’s all part of the process. More leads equal more appointments equals more people. That could be a disadvantage of email marketing.

Email Marketing Disadvantage 3 – Too Many Mentions

Your email marketing and sales process is working. Money is coming in. Customer acquisition is easier and retention is up. What could be a disadvantage now? Well, those happy customers will be talking about you online. 

Whoops! Now the sales team and the CEO are having to interact on LinkedIn. You may even have to outsource or hire. With too many mentions on social media, your marketing director may ask to hire a social media manager – or two. Monitoring your online reputation and replying to tweets and mentions is a good thing for lead gen. 

Increased customer loyalty has an adverse relationship to customer attrition. But you know the saying, “it takes money to make money.” If you’re budging 15% of your revenue for marketing efforts, you’ll have plenty of money to hire a social media manager or even a fractional marketing director.

Choose The Proven Leader - AWI’s Email Suite Team

Any worries about email marketing can be quelled by AWI’s Email Suite Team. With data-driven project requirements, Andrews Wharton is the proven direct-response solutions provider with a long-standing reputation for solving your toughest email marketing challenges. 

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