How Email Marketing Can Support Any Campaign

Email is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, and it has stood the test of time for a reason. Initially created as a bit of entertainment, a sort of social side project, it is now hard to imagine any organisation operating a marketing campaign without relying on it in some way.

Whether your campaign is to increase sales, drive traffic, build a following, or just to get views, email can help.

Organic and paid social are often touted as the best way to get your message across in today’s world. But 73% of millennials prefer brands to contact them via email than through any other channel, and trust in social is declining.

Email marketing is a channel that can not only build trust between your audience and your brand, but it also offers some of the highest ROI you can get, so it’s worth investing some time in.

It is so successful because it’s a direct channel to your audience. Email content is more likely to get seen than social, as your audience should have opted in to receiving your content.

You can then use it to build your relationship with customers, segment your audience into smaller groups so you can send tailor-made content, and increase your conversions.

Here’s some top tips for using email marketing to support your campaigns.

Use email to increase your brand awareness

One of the most immediate benefits of email marketing is that it makes your audience more familiar with you as a brand. If you use email consistently, you can build a relationship between you and your audience members, reinforcing your brand, your services, and your values.

If the content you’re sharing is useful, they’ll begin to think of you as a resource, and will be more likely to open your emails and click onto your site.

But in order to do that, you need to have good content first. Luckily, you can use email to help with that too.

Use email to generate ideas for content

Email is such a strong medium for marketing because you already have a strong base of customers built up. You can go directly to your subscribers and use questionnaires and quizzes to learn what matters to them.

You can then begin to create content on those topics to help you rank for things you know your audience cares about, and will be searching for. This will almost always result in more traffic, more engagement, and a higher CTR for your emails.

Once you’ve created that content, you can then use email to ensure it generates traffic.

Use email to boost your content

Firstly, decide which content you want to push, and why. Is it a blog post designed to explain your services? A competition designed to increase engagement? This will determine the tone of your email, the visual style, and the all-important subject line.

If you have access to a CRM or email marketing platform that lets you test different subject lines, give it a try to see which performs best. Sometimes even a small change can make a huge difference in terms of open rates.

Your content should benefit your audience, it should give them something that makes them want to engage with you, and be more likely to open your emails in the future. No one will open an email pushing content that isn’t interesting or relevant to them, so if you can segment your audience down into smaller categories based on how much you’ve interacted with them, or what you know they’re likely to be interested in, that should help increase your open rate.

Whether it’s a newsletter or a one-off alert about a new offering, don’t overload your audience with links and calls to action. Keep things simple, with a clear button CTA that explains exactly what they stand to gain from clicking it.

You’ll need to create tracking links Include so you know which campaign is resulting in traffic. UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) links allow you to add certain tags to traffic that comes to your site via those links, meaning you can see exactly how many people clicked a certain email in a certain campaign. Analysing your email campaigns will help you improve, so keep at it.

Over time, if your emails are bringing in more traffic, you might see more traffic coming in from search too. That’s because your email efforts can also help you in terms of SEO.

Email marketing can improve your SEO

You might think that SEO is only about on-page optimisation and link-building. While those are a large part of it, email also has an important part to play in your SEO strategy.

The overall level of traffic your website gets can positively impact your domain authority, so consistent email marketing that results in traffic can eventually begin to boost your search rankings. Even small increases in traffic can eventually lead to big gains, so don’t neglect email as a growth tool.

Beyond traffic, people who click through to your site because of an email are more likely to have a high interest in that content, and should lower the bounce rate and increase the dwell time on the pages you link to. This shows Google that your website is high quality, and can boost your rankings in search.

Use those UTM links to track the traffic you get from emails and see if it increases over time. See what content performs best in terms of CTR, and create more content like that to pull in more visitors. Over time your emails will get better and better, and so will your search rankings. All of this can compound into more traffic, more leads, and more conversions.

Jack Terry is a Content Manager at Eulogy