The subtle art of effective communication is essential to marketing that delivers results. With that in mind, we wanted to take a look at how email (being a historically formidable form of marketing and communication) could better work alongside the other pillars of your communication marketing mix.
Brand Awareness
When advertising your brand, your goal is to generate as much awareness as possible. As more people become aware of your brand, more of them are likely to engage with it. Email provides an effective additional touchpoint to most traditional marketing campaigns. If people are seeing your brand on social channels, noticing a clever billboard or even hearing you on the radio, shouldn’t they be seeing you in their inbox as well?
Public Relations (PR)
The reputation of your brand is something that every potential client, stakeholder or partner will consider before deciding if they want to engage with you. It’s not enough to have the best product offering, they need to be able to trust every facet of your business from manufacturing to corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects. The applications for email marketing within PR are endless. Have you made your manufacturing processes more eco friendly? Tell your audience about it. Speak about your CSR projects. What do you do if your brand is facing a crisis? You need to effectively communicate that response directly and gauge the response received. Simply put, email should always be a part of any PR campaign.
Sales Promotion
More often than not, the main objective for any effective marketing campaign is promoting sales. Why should email be a central pillar to your sales promotion? For starters it allows you to understand how your audience is responding to your promotions. Using A/B campaign testing alongside in-depth reporting metrics will give you insight into the efficacy of your campaigns. The example below shows how luxury shoe retailer, Aldo uses email to support newsletter sign-ups on their site.
Use highly personalized content to encourage purchases. A well-timed email from my favourite sneaker brand, telling me that there’s only one pair left in my size has resulted in more impulsive purchases than I care to admit. By tailoring the content (style and size) to me personally and adding an element of urgency, the sale was almost guaranteed.
There are countless more ways to use email to promote sales, it’s where email shines brightest as a marketing tool.
Personal Selling
While personal selling is not often associated with email marketing platforms, there are brilliant practical applications to be found. Integration between sales team CRM systems and email marketing platforms are becoming vital. Sales directors can manage the influx of new business by having automated processes set up to assign new business queries to sales reps. Many sales teams have seen the benefit of automating client check-ins and follow-ups. A personalized birthday email that comes directly from the CEO can help build and maintain sales relationships.
The idea is to save your sales team time and effort so they can focus on what they do best, while still keeping communication personalized and making sure nothing falls by the wayside.
Direct Marketing
Email has historically been an essential arm of direct marketing. It can’t be argued that one of the reasons is due to the level of personalisation that can be achieved, compared to other direct marketing channels. The communication can be tailored directly to the individual, furthermore, it’s presented in the least intrusive way possible. As an age group, millennials currently hold the most buying power in the retail space. It’s no secret that most millennials prefer to communicate with retailers via email, but what’s more interesting is the reason why. According to a whitepaper published by Brightwave, the most common reason millennials prefer to engage with retailers via mail is “I can check my email when I want to”. Quite simply put, customers want to engage with your brand, but it has to be on their own terms, not yours.
Email is a comparatively inexpensive and completely invaluable tool in your communication marketing mix. It’s ability to directly engage clients, stakeholders and partners in a very personal and effective way while providing insight on how they respond to your content can’t be understated.
Get in touch with us today if you would like our team of experts to advise you on the best way to incorporate email into your marketing mix. We would love to help.