Inbox Standout: How Email Marketing Can Help Build Your Brand
Email marketing is often overlooked or taken for granted when assessing brand strategy from a holistic perspective. Yet email continues to rank first among everyday online activities, reaching nine out of 10 total internet users. Not only does email marketing allow your brand to connect with its audience at regular intervals, it allows your audience to engage with the brand explicitly on their own terms—an important distinction.
Because users voluntarily subscribe or opt in to email marketing, it represents a powerful avenue of engagement with a loyal subset of your audience, with the potential to spark still greater brand engagement in the future. For example, PayPal emails subscribers to highlight underutilized functionality in its popular mobile app, such as the ability to send money directly from person to person. This approach encourages users to use the app more often by providing a solution for new and potentially unexplored contexts.
A solution-based and personalized approach is essential in developing a well-rounded email marketing strategy. Brands may see short-term benefits in running purely sales or promotion-based campaigns, but this transactional strategy often produces a sharp decrease in open rates and a steady increase in unsubscribes after the consumer has taken the desired action. Brands must thus strike a balance between overt entreaties to influence purchasing behavior and offering solutions of tangible and immediate value to consumers.
To help streamline email marketing processes, campaigns can be automated via templated workflows. This allows brands to test messaging to determine what is or isn’t successful in achieving the objectives set forth in their digital marketing strategy, and it also provides an avenue for engagement at every step of the purchasing journey. These tests can also help your brand segment its audience and customize messaging, which can have a greater impact as the subscriber moves closer to making a purchase. Insights into what messaging your audience responds to can then be applied across all marketing channels. This allows for additional personalization and ensures the right message is reaching the right users at the right place and time.
Keys to improving email marketing effectiveness:
- Include an engaging subject line that compels action
- Create personalized content tailored to segmented audiences
- Utilize A/B testing to further develop audience personas
- Employ an enticing call to action
Email marketing provides a valuable opportunity to engage and deepen relationships with your audience. Contextually relevant email campaigns based on informed targeting can offer more in-depth insight into what your audience values, and all of the pieces should work together to communicate your brand’s core purpose. By delivering the right content directly to their consumers’ inboxes, brands can position themselves as a consistent, reliable and valuable source of relevant information.
To learn more about this topic or to discuss an issue impacting your business, contact Bailey’s Vice President of Client Services, Jamie Gailewicz, at 610-818-3103 or click here to contact us via [email protected].
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