What Is Direct Marketing With Email?

There are many different types of email marketing emails that can be sent out, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. The key is figuring out which is best for your business at which time. Most companies use a variation on these different types for whatever marketing campaign they are working on at any given time.

Let’s take a closer look at some of these different types of marketing emails.

Welcome Emails

Most consumers are not ready to buy when first introduced to a new company. Nurturing a lead is critical to getting your potential customer ready to buy. You want to avoid pushing products or services until you have built this relationship up.

A welcome email is a good way to offer a personal touch and introduce your company without going straight into a sales pitch. When introducing a new customer to your company it is critical to make a good first impression. Don’t use this type of email as email marketing, think of it more as building rapport and customer loyalty.

The advantages of the welcome email are the potential to start forming a new relationship with your consumer and to boost your metrics. When a welcome email is done correctly it can be a positive experience for your new lead. In fact, subscribers who read at least one welcome email read 40 percent more content from the sender over the next 180 days.

Welcome emails tend to have a higher open rate and click rate that can boost your metrics. The disadvantage of a welcome email is the potential to make a bad first impression. A good practice when using email to welcome new customers is to avoid the sales pitch altogether.

Direct Email Marketing

Weekly newsletters are a common marketing tool for most businesses. They’re useful for brand awareness and education. These emails can showcase your new services and products. Email newsletters can also be used to highlight employee profiles, company passion projects, and relevant infographics. When sending out marketing newsletters you should consider what your ultimate goal is for the campaign and which metrics you want to track to monitor progress toward that goal.

Email newsletters can also be used for two-way communication with existing customers by asking for feedback to fuel valuable insights.

If you want to drive traffic to a specific page you can use a call to action (CTA) for customers to go to that page. Also pay close attention to which messages generate the most unsubscribe requests so that you can track who is unsubscribing and what is turning them away from your newsletters.

Work on creating an email template where you can keep the overall structure of an email message while tweaking the content to suit different needs. When creating the template be mindful of your goals, design, and where you place the call to action.

There are many benefits of direct email marketing. You can raise brand awareness while maintaining relationships and improving retention. You can also repurpose blogs, link to articles, and share social media posts. You can generally make your newsletter content a little more diverse than other campaigns because it doesn’t need to be tied to a specific promotion.

Dedicated Emails

A dedicated email is a standalone email that contains information about a specific offer or promotion. This type of email marketing can introduce a featured call to action. The advantages of dedicated emails are that they’re relatively easy to build and fast to measure.

The majority of the information you use to build the email should be the same as the information on the landing page that the CTA directs to. With a single call to action, it’s easy to track click-through rates, landing page views, and conversions. You can also use these landing pages to showcase other relevant information about your organization.

Promotional Emails

Promotional emails can help nurture leads. This type of direct marketing campaign is all about understanding your target audience. It’s important that you already have an audience persona in mind before sending promotional emails in order to reach your target audience effectively.

Promotional emails are a tightly connected, share an overarching purpose, and are full of useful content. You can use these emails to promote marketing materials, discounted service offerings with the use of a coupon, and inform your email list about what’s happening within your organization. These emails can be curated to target a specific stage in the customer buying journey.

Use market segmentation to divide your email list into different segments such as new customers, engaged customers, unengaged customers, and so on. Many organizations will send a special offer to their newer customers or unengaged customer to entice them to encourage conversions or reengagement.

Sponsorship Emails

All of the email types described above assume that you are sending email marketing campaigns to your own email list. A sponsorship email is a great way to reach a new audience and gain new leads.

With a sponsorship email, you usually pay to include your copy in another organization’s email newsletter. The advantage of sponsorship emails is that they are highly targeted and the ROI is predictable. You know exactly how much you are spending for the placement ahead of time.

However, this can also be seen as a disadvantage because you’re contacting an unknown audience and you’re paying upfront whether the campaign is a success or not. Sponsored emails require a large marketing effort and tight control. This type of email marketing can be difficult to execute with a small marketing team.