Email Campaign • Marketing’s Most Intimate Channel

How can a brand reach its target? Stay connected to a following? While they continue to build an ongoing relationship with its audience?

Few things have as intimate of a connection as an email campaign. For most people, one of the last things you do before you go to bed at night is check your email. One of the first things we do in the morning is have some coffee, check and reply to emails. As such, email campaigns tend to be one of the most intimate connections a brand will get with its following. Aside from this direct connection, there is the huge added bonus of low cost-per-click and cost-per-impression—email campaigning, for the most part, is incredibly cheap.

Who Should Receive your Email Campaign?

In comparison to many other marketing avenues, such as paid social, pay-per-click, display, or print ads, successful email campaigns require active participation from businesses.

For example, it is a good idea for companies to maintain a CRM with every person they’ve ever done business with. (or at a bare minimum a spreadsheet, if they don’t run a CRM) This allows all email addresses to be kept together. If a brand doesn’t do either of those things, it’s still possible to run email campaigns. It just becomes less effective and a little more time consuming, as they put together a database of target email addresses.

Compiling a client database becomes of paramount importance. While gathering emails from any source possible is vital. Brands do best when they ensure they collect email addresses from contact lists, newsletter subscriptions, client inquiries, contest entries, etc.

When companies begin that process, especially those that have been in business a long time, they will sometimes need to go back as far as analog records, such as old paper invoices. That might sound like a hassle, but you never really know where that next big job may come from. When viewed from that angle, every single email address matters.

Brand Awareness

Sometimes an email campaign is simply about brand connectedness and brand awareness.

In those cases, email campaigns tend to be less focused on calls-to-action and have a less assertive tone. Campaigns aimed at keeping a brand front of mind will by nature be more informative, more fun, or just interesting. Often that will include content from various pages on your website, information about your services, or how you deliver your brands various offerings.

That said, consistent blogging is vital. Brands are advised to have a good article writing process in place so that each month they generate and post to the website several new articles. Each article should spark a client’s interest or answer their questions.

Naturally, those articles then get pushed out to email campaigns, social media, Google listings and everywhere else someone might find your brand. However, the great thing about adding them to an email campaign is that you’re then putting a link to your website directly in someone’s inbox. You also decide at whatever frequency—from once or twice a month or more often. Email campaigns based around blog posts are by default a call-to-action. They’re asking the recipient to click a link and go read something, perhaps pointing them towards some sort of conversion and sometimes just to start a conversation.

Driving Sales

The most aggressive email campaigns tend to be comprised of pure sales-based content that offers something. They can offer as a sale, subscriber pricing, or a new product. Essentially content that urges a transaction of some kind. In these cases, email campaigns are a great channel to keep people informed about your other sales and marketing activities and drive sales or conversions.

Often, people stay subscribed to a brand’s emails solely to grab that once-a-season deal or holiday sale. Take advantage of these subscribers, as they are already primed for your pitch.

How Often Should You Send Email Campaigns?

Is there a sweet spot for how often to send email campaigns that allows you to stay engaged with your audience but doesn’t inundate them to the point of frustration?

When determining how often an email campaign should be sent. It really depends on the type of content that you’re sending. Your product offering, and how you want your brand to be perceived are also important factors. The general rule of thumb is not to take advantage of the intimacy of someone’s inbox. How often you reach out, plus and how and what you communicate is like having an ongoing conversation with someone. When we think about social relationships, few people want to engage with someone who constantly talks over them, always talks about themselves, or never shuts up—essentially the is the equivalent of a company that emails twice a week.

From now until the end of the time, nobody’s reading all those emails. Their open rate is probably not great, even if it’s a great company that you adore.

The ideal strategy is to be a thoughtful communicator, as in any relationship. A good agency will help you determine what to communicate and how often someone might like that communication if it’s sales-based content or information-based, brand-boosting content that’s engaging and interesting.

Often we find that when emailing more than four times in a month a subscriber base tends to wither. Ultimately, we want our subscriber base to grow and not shrink—and that’s a core function of a digital marketing team.

How A Digital Marketing Agency Can Help You Grow

A good digital marketing group can boost growth. This happens by helping elevate the number of people your brand reaches in email marketing campaigns. For example, we often create automation on a brand’s website that captures the email address of anyone who submits a form and automatically adds that email to the subscriber base. When someone submits an estimate request, for example, they’re immediately brought into the fold of the upcoming email campaign. In addition, there are many other methods of gathering emails from curious, potential customers that a good team can guide you through.

Ultimately, the cost of running an email campaign and the potential payoff is one of the greatest value propositions in the marketing world. It is a super powerful channel for connection and any company that’s not regularly doing it is most definitely missing opportunities. They are missing both sales and the opportunity to stay connected to their following.

After all, one of the most important things we do in marketing and advertising is simply keeping a brand present in the minds of the people interested in it. Email campaigning is an obvious and fairly straightforward way to do it.

At Verum, our team builds 100% of our email campaigns by hand. Our campaigns are world-class and most would be hard-pressed to find better-looking content anywhere in the world. The campaigns we create for smaller and medium-sized companies compete with some of the industry’s biggest players.

Interested in launching email marketing for your brand? Click here.