CPM, PPC, CPC vs Cold Email Marketing or the advantages of Cold Email Marketing and why it is not a bad idea.

The world of online advertising can be complicated, sometimes even biased. There are many marketing channels and each has its own pros and cons. For a startup can be incredibly difficult to choose the best approach, weighing the budget in the various actions. One of the most common forms of paid advertising is the Paid Online Advertising which is divided into CPM and PPC. However, both have barriers that can create difficulties for small and medium enterprises.

The problem with CPM and PPC

CPM = Cost per thousand impressions, i.e. for every 1000 users who view the ad, a sum is paid to the advertising company (eg Google or Facebook). It’s an economic method, easy to finance, activable as needed. It guarantees that the ad it’s viewed of a predetermined number of users, however it doesn’t give guarantees on the results of those views, therefore it’s difficult to determine the success of this channel and justify this investment.

PPC = pay per click (also known as CPC, cost per click). In this case the cost is calculated when the user clicks on an ad, thus ensuring greater traceability to the success of the action. The cost of each click is regulated by an amount on a single click and by a daily total, however all the competitors of the same keywords participate in an auction, creating a competition that affects the number of final views. If their cost is not competitive enough, there is the risk that their ad will appear rarely or never.

The opportunity of Cold Email Marketing

Cold Email Marketing is among the best methods for quick and effective user conversions, yet its application in the marketing mix is mistreated.

The (wrong) equation “Cold Email Marketing = Spam” has spread due to bad practices and is poorly representative of a more structured and sophisticated tool.

Misunderstandings about Cold E-mail Marketing

Email Marketing is simple, but it’s not for everyone! With little knowledge and too much haste, cold email marketing was badly used by inexpertly users who have sent the same communication repeatedly, copying and pasting it, to thousands of recipients without caring about the appropriate sending methods and targeting the contents. This type of Emails, often sent by its own client, easily collide with the isp and the mail-clients antispam filters.

The point of Email Marketing, its convincing and main aspect, is that of being able to determine the establishment of a direct conversation with potential customers: for this reason the lack of a real message or the poverty of a content become fatal factors in the attainment of this objective.

Collecting emails from potential candidates is a true profiling activity, but sending indiscriminately “in the pile” is spam!An effective cold email marketing strategy requires a complete understanding of the target to send to and the ability to introduce a topic in a direct and appropriate way at the same time. An important factor in giving authenticity and interest is to personalize the email with the elements that a good database offers.

One of the misconceptions that has damaged the reputation of Cold Email Marketing has to do with the poor quality of many providers on the market. A quality database is able to guarantee to the customer its own validity, both in terms of correctness of the provided addresses and in relation to the regulatory aspects.

The advantages of Cold Email Marketing

Identified the misconceptions about sending cold emails and the contraindications of other marketing tools, let’s see the advantages of email marketing:

• It’s the most economical form of paid advertising: if we choose a good database provider, which can give us the necessary guarantees, then we possess a valuable asset that will allow us to send persuasive messages to highly profiled targets with a very low cost and probably already absorbed by other activities. Given the low cost, the potential for results is very high.
• It’s direct, without intermediaries: unlike other forms of paid advertising, an email creates, by definition, a link with the reader, tending to involve it. It’s easier to start a conversation and creates interest with an email in comparison with an ad that is less interactiv and too depersonalized.
• It’s personalized on the reader: if the email, as seen in the previous point, is already a personal channel, the possibility of entering the recipient’s information collected from the list of purchased emails or taken from a suitable post purchase research, increases this capacity. A personalized email is more educated, professional and functional for the reader’s attention.
• Unlike spam, it’s true: if spam exists to generate the highest number of views, cold emailing is “born” to offer real products to readers with interests.

So Cold Email Marketing wins over everything?

It would be unfair to say that Cold Email Marketing is the only winning channel of a Marketing strategy or to base a campaign only on this methodology. Differentiating tools to achieve goals is fundamental: more channels are functional for the targets to be reached and a good strategy is based on the support of more tools. Cold Email Marketing is one of them and it’s the key to immediately increasing sales.