As you already know, email is one of the most effective digital marketing tactics available. Which makes your email marketing software one of the key tools in your marketing toolbox.
Here are some of the reasons that marketers still love email:
- Email allows you to segment your target audience, so you can customize and personalize your marketing messages for each audience group.
- Many email marketing software programs offer free basic subscriptions, so you can get started on a super-low budget.
- Digital marketing software simplifies the process of designing and formatting professional-looking email newsletters, even if you don’t have much experience.
- It’s easy to measure the results of email marketing campaigns with the right digital marketing solution.
- Hopefully, you’re sending digital marketing emails to people who chose to receive them, which means you’re connecting with an audience that is already engaged and is ripe for conversion.
Email Marketing Covers the Entire Customer Journey
You can use email marketing at every stage of the customer journey, from awareness all the way through to retention.
Here are some of our favorite examples of marketing emails at every stage:
Awareness
You know that you’ve done things right so far, because this contact has entered their contact details and agreed to receive your emails. Now you want them to confirm their subscription and interact with your digital marketing campaigns.
The best awareness emails are simple, clear, yet still show personality, like this one from Buzzfeed.
Consideration
Next, you want to get your subscribers hooked on opening and reading your digital marketing content. You don’t want to come off as too pushy with discount offers and promotions just yet, but you do want to make it worth their while to read your emails.
Poncho, for example, sends weather forecast updates every morning. As you can see, the upbeat design and fun jokes don’t take away from the actual content.
Decision
Now your contacts know to expect great digital marketing copy from you, it’s time for an attractive discount offer, exclusive sales information, or an enticing invitation to view your new collection, menu, or product.
A great example is this cute, playful, and eye-catching email from MeUndies.
Retention
As you know, digital marketing doesn’t end with a purchase. It’s time for follow-up emails like this one from Birchbox, to encourage your customers to keep coming back for more.
This is a clever way of offering a special discount for repeat customers, with a subject line, “We Forgot Something in Your February Box!” that compels you to open it just to check what was missing.
But Email Can’t Do it All
Although email marketing is awesome, you know that you can’t rely on it as your only digital marketing channel. You need to harmonize other digital marketing efforts to form a smooth and effective cross-channel digital marketing funnel.
Let’s take a look at the main ways that digital marketing channels can work together to boost your overall customer attraction and retention rates, increase conversion, and raise customer lifetime value.
Organic Social Media
Social media marketing is a powerful digital marketing method to build connections with new potential customers. Maintaining a high social media profile with regular organic posts nurtures brand awareness, while social media influencer marketing helps you to reach more eyes.
Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and more enable you to carry out two-way conversations with your audience, reacting quickly to complaints, suggestions, or praise to cement your company’s reputation as responsive and caring.
Nurture followers with regular information, offers, and sneak previews until they sign up to your email list, and then you can use digital marketing software for A/B testing, monitoring conversion rates, and measuring customer response.
PPC and Paid Campaigns
Paid ad campaigns using Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, and paid search campaigns on other search engines can be highly effective ways to gather brand new signups for your email marketing list.
With good keyword research and the right keywords, you can attract new leads that match your target audience, direct them to your landing pages, and convert them to subscribers through carefully-worded landing page copy.
SEO
A combination of the right keywords, valuable content, linked assets, and a fast, bug-free website boosts SEO to push your site up the search engine results pages (SERPs).
There are a number of tricks to improving SEO, like using meta tags, adding alt image descriptions, and cleaning up broken links.
Good SEO means that when someone searches for a topic connected with your business, your website will appear at or near the top of the SERPs.
It’s ideal for driving top of the funnel traffic to your landing pages, so that you can turn them into subscribers.
Once potential customers reach your website through SEO and find that it’s relevant to their needs, they’ll be open to subscribing to your email list and receiving your regular content.
Content Marketing
Email is itself a form of content marketing, with 87% of B2B marketers reporting that they used email campaigns successfully as part of their content marketing in the last 12 months.
That said, content marketing goes way beyond just email. Most importantly, it involves writing appealing blog posts with valuable content that visitors find useful.
Your attractive content brings in new leads and engages existing ones to continue to connect with your business, helping you to stand out in the crowd and leading visitors to subscribe to your emails out of a desire to read more.
Affiliate Traffic
Depending on your line of business, affiliate marketing can prove a powerful digital marketing channel.
An affiliate marketing program means that you connect with affiliate partners, who might be bloggers, social media influencers, or website owners, each with their own circle of followers and readers. You pay them a commission every time they direct a new subscriber to your list.
There are a few different affiliate marketing models, some of which pay per click and some of which pay per new subscriber.
Popular affiliate marketing networks like Rakuten Linkshare and CJ.com make it easy to launch your affiliate marketing program. Affiliate marketing can be a cost-effective way to reach new leads that might otherwise be inaccessible.
The Right Digital Marketing Channels Make Email Marketing Even Stronger
Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels around. Conversion rates and ROI are both high, the cost of entry is low, and with the help of an email marketing solution, you can monitor and measure customer response, personalize your marketing messages, and design attractive emails with very little effort.
But when you add other digital marketing channels like social media, PPC ads, SEO, content marketing, and affiliate marketing, together they can drive marketing campaigns further than ever before.
Do you have any email digital marketing tips or insights to add? Please share them in the comments below.
The post How to Improve Your Email Marketing Results Using Other Digital Marketing Channels appeared first on Shane Barker.