Table of Contents
Introduction
Every brand needs an audience, customers or clients to serve, but how do these brands stay in touch with them?
How can they grow or even maintain their customer base?
Direct marketing helps solve this problem, by marketing or selling your products and services directly to the end consumer, through some medium of direct communication.
Old-School Direct Marketing
Before the internet became what it is today, many businesses relied on telemarketing or mail letters as direct marketing channels. These channels are not nearly as popular as they once were — for obvious reasons:
- telemarketing is disruptive and obnoxious
- direct mail is costly
Telemarketing is too direct, which is why it’s not as effective now for most businesses. These days, people like to live in their protective bubbles, and inviting yourself into that bubble can lose customers for you.
On the other hand, direct mail still works in today’s world, but it’s been largely replaced by email marketing because of how cost-effective it is.
Digital Direct Marketing via Emails
Email marketing is exactly what it sounds like: it’s marketing through emails and it’s the most popular direct marketing channel used today.
Email marketing lets brand owners do two main things:
- collect email subscribers
- send promotional emails to these subscribers
It’s so simple, right? And yet on average it accounts for 30% of e-commerce revenue 🤯
4 Advantages of Email Marketing
Like other digital marketing channels, email marketing benefits from the global accessibility of the internet.
However, the technology behind email marketing is very powerful; it enables your business to do things that other marketing channels can’t.
Automate Your Customer Experience
With most email marketing platforms you can set up email automations, also known as flows.
Email flows are a series of emails that will automatically be sent to customers on your list when they perform certain actions on your site.
Example – New Customer / Welcome Flow:
If a new customer visits your store and signs up for your email newsletter, this action can trigger your welcome flow, which welcomes the customer to your newsletter while also delivering important information like what to expect, benefits of subscribing, and maybe even a welcome promotion.
Example – Abandoned Cart Flow:
If a subscriber visits your e-commerce store and abandons checkout with some items left in their cart, this action can trigger a sequence of abandoned cart emails! These emails can remind the shopper of the items left in their cart, and maybe even get them to shop again by offering a discount coupon.
Precise Scheduling
Email marketing apps like Klaviyo and MailerLite lets you schedule your campaign emails at a specific time, within a specific timezone (or even to the recipients’ local timezone!).
This lets you A/B test different hours of the day to find the optimal time to send your emails!
Data-Driven Personalization
When a person has consented to your email marketing and subscribed to your newsletter, you can personalize their messages through the use of segments.
Segments are smaller ‘sub-lists’ created from your master list of subscribers.
They are made based on your subscribers’ profile information such as their name, location, email preferences, and the actions they take on your website.
Example – eCommerce Snack Store:
If your online snack store has a surplus of a salt and vinegar chips and you want to sell the rest of it, you can create a segment of people who have ever visited the chips’ product page, added the chips to cart, or added the chips to their wish list. Then you can promote these chips to this segment in a campaign email, perhaps even offering 10% off.
Example – Food Blog:
If your cupcake recipe isn’t getting enough views organically, you could create a segment of subscribers who have viewed other desserts or similar recipes, and promote your cup cakes to them in a campaign email!
You can take segmentation even further by integrating surveys to your email marketing platform, so that you can use a customer’s survey responses to send them appropriate messages!
App Integration
There is no shortage of marketing software available online.
So if you’ve chosen an email marketing platform that doesn’t have the functions you want, there’s a good chance that you can find a third party app that will do the job, and it may even integrate with your platform.
Direct Mail Integration – If a customer isn’t responding to your emails, it might be worth following up via letter mail! Direct mail platforms like Poplar accomplish this by integrating with many email marketing platforms.
Transactional Email Confirmations – Merchant apps like Shopify or WooCommerce usually come with their own transactional emails, which automatically sends order updates such as order confirmation, shipping and delivery updates; but these emails usually follow a blank template with little customization. Apps like Route not only offers package protection, but also seamlessly integrates with Klaviyo so you can customize your transactional emails.
There are also integrations for surveys, loyalty programs, customer review apps, partnership platforms, the list goes on.
Conclusion
To summarize, email marketing is the most popular form of direct marketing used in today’s world.
It has 4 main advantages over other marketing channels:
- automation
- scheduling
- personalization
- app integration
As a brand grows, so will their email marketing strategy.
That’s why marketing agencies choose our white label email marketing services, so that we can handle the entire email channel while they focus on getting more clients.
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