In the year 2018, around 281 billion emails were sent and received every day. By 2023, this number is supposed to zoom to 347 emails. EDM marketing thus becomes one of the best ways to reach your prospective customers. Though many of the customers are on social media, not all of them are there, but nearly everybody has an email address.
You need an email address to create social media account so that you can target those users too. EDM, therefore, is a center point of any marketing campaign. It has the potential to target a vast audience. But what separates email marketing from EDM marketing. Read on to know more.
Definition Of EDM Marketing
Electronic Direct Mail Marketing (EDM) is a strategy that businesses use to build up a database of subscribers. This information is then used to reach out to the potential prospects using both online and offline channels, leading to the generation of leads, the building of a relationship, and increasing sales.
In layman’s terms, EDM marketing uses multiple channels like print, SMS, and social media to send your message to the target audience. But EDM marketing mainly relies on using Email.
What Is The Difference Between EDM Marketing And Email Marketing?
Many people think Email and EDM marketings are one and the same. Let us tell you the difference.
Using email marketing, you can create a list of subscribers and then send them emails through your email service provider. Your email service provider offers you the analytics to track and measure the impact of these emails; there is a limited scope of email marketing.
However, in EDM marketing, we just do not send personalized emails. We focus on forming a relationship with the customers through engagement and conversation. Then we follow it up with a cross-channel retargeting campaign taking into account the behavior of the email subscribers. This helps in emphasizing your message to the customers.
A perfect EDM marketing campaign will use the following channels.
- Pay Per Click advertising (PPC)
- Remarketing
- SMS
- Social media and
- Print media
The aim of EDM and email marketing is to inform, engage and convert subscribers into customers. EDM marketing, however, is slightly more impactful as it could be a flexible and multi-channel campaign that uses both offline and online channels.
Impact Of EDM Marketing
EDM marketing focuses on using the traits of email. It offers a broad reach and offers precise targeting options. It provides a versatile segmentation and separates the content on the basis of the user’s behavior.
But email marketing still remains the most critical aspect of EDM marketing. The benefits that accrue to email marketing apply to EDM marketing too. However, EDM marketing uses other channels too and has some additional features.
1. Significant Reach
By 2022, an estimated 4.6 billion emails would have been sent. That means nearly everyone would have an email ID that helps them to check out other digital platforms. In case you are using the best practices in email marketing, you can easily make a move to EDM Marketing. This means a benefit for EDM marketing. You have other offline and online platforms to reach out to the email subscribers.
2. It Helps You Connect With The Customers
If you maintain a mailing list, this implies that people present on this list want to receive your message. This means they are interested in the product or service you offer. If you try to connect with the customer by building relationships through the content, people will trust you and happily receive the message. Using EDM marketing, you may reach those subscribers through channels like social media and other offline channels like Billboards, TV, etc.
3. You Get More Insights Into Customers’ Behavior
Email personalizes your content taking into account the user behavior. Most people remember a business message when it is personalized as per their needs and the occasion. In EDM marketing, you get access to multiple touchpoints apart from email. Thus you get more insights that you can use and segment and personalize the subscriber list.
4. Drives More Traffic
When you use a combination of online and offline channels to inform about a service product or sale, more customers notice you. Even if you can generate curiosity in them, you will find an increase in the traffic in online channels. You may also get more footfalls in the offline store.
5. Higher Conversion Rate In EDM
With EDM marketing at your behest, you are sure that people in the contact list want to receive your communications. When you work with a vast group of interested individuals, you will grab more interest in the product or service. Though this may immediately not lead to high sales, you will see them converting in the future.
Apart from that, with EDM, you can use retargeting campaigns and see that the message reaches the audience at just the appropriate time. Thus, chances of getting a high conversion rate in EDM are higher.
6. People Pay Attention To Your Brand Every Day
The crux of EDM marketing is to employ as many channels as you can. When you are noticeable in both online and offline space, people pay attention to your brand every day. People also remember your brand and identify it for the qualities you are known for.
7. Unmatched ROI
In email marketing, when you invest your time and effort to build a highly targeted list of email subscribers, you are setting yourself up for guaranteed success. But we get distracted by the metrics of other channels and go off track quite often, isn’t it?
When you invest time and effort to build a list of email subscribers through email marketing, you intend to achieve instant success. But the metrics of other channels divert our attention.
Suppose we talk of ROI, traditional email marketing still rules. But in EDM marketing, you get all benefits of different channels to bring back a considerable ROI.
Getting Started With EDM Marketing
Whether you are into EDM marketing or have just started, you have to develop a flexible strategy. Let us explain to you the process of devising a solid EDM marketing strategy.
1. Choose An Email Service Provider
If you have already put your foot into email marketing and have chosen an email service provider that works for you, you are off to a flying start.
If you have already started working on email marketing, then you must have chosen an email service provider. But if you have not done that, many service providers provide all the automation capabilities you need. They integrate with the present tools and give you the flexibility in starting with simplicity in the beginning and growing later on.
Remember that the email service provider you choose should be one that provides the best results. You might have to try out many products to find a platform to work as per your needs.
2. Prepare A List Of Subscribers
The next step is to prepare a list of people who want to hear about the features and benefits you have to offer.
If you have an email marketing strategy ready, you must have an up-to-date and compiled list of such contacts. However, if you are making a new list, you can pull the contact details into the email client.
3. Categorize Your Subscribers
You have to make sure that you are providing the right content to the right person. The timing of sending the content is also essential. Segmenting the email list helps you achieve that. In simple words segmenting is like classifying your email contacts into several categories based on factors like the following:
Demographics are non-personal factors about an individual. This includes facets like age, gender, etc. With this detail, you could divide the subscribers and base your emails on these factors.
Geographics are the locational classifiers. You can use it to group the contacts as per their physical location like the state, country, city, region, zip code, etc. You can use this information to send region-specific offers to the customers. You will also avoid sending requests to people in places where you cannot deliver the products.
Interests are factors that divide your contacts on the basis of their goals, preferences, hobbies, etc. You will find it tough to get this information. Often you may find that a few people with distinct interests would prefer your product to others.
Behaviors are somewhat easy to recognize. You just have to see the behavior of the contacts on the website or channels like social media and email. Some factors in this category could be purchase history, product preferences, purchase patterns.
Now that you have a segmented list of the contacts on the basis of their interests, behavior, and demographics, you can send them personalized content without any worries.
4. Create An Email Campaign With Autoresponders
Next, you to have to create an email campaign that is going to engage. Irrespective of the email platform, you can start by following the practices that were established and always succeed. Some such techniques could be:
Begin with an excellent subject line, and do not forget to introduce yourselves.
Make your content simple and easy to understand.
Use stunning visuals that are in accordance with the message and can grab your subscriber’s interests. Do not try to over exceed; stay true to the brand identity to get a consistent experience.
Be careful that you are placing suitable CTAs at the right places in the email, and.
Make sure you have clear instructions for your email recipients to opt out at any time they wish.
Ensure that you have mentioned clear instructions for them to opt out if they want.
Now everything is sorted, you could send emails like transactional copies, messages that are based on the user activity, greeting them on special occasions, reminding them about any future events or any left items in the shopping carts, promotions, and more marketing content.
5. Measure The Results
Frequent and regular analysis of the campaigns is the only way in which you can find how effective you have been in achieving the goals or KPI’s. If you measure the performance as per the various metrics, you get an insight into the choices you have to improve the current campaign to perform.
Some important Key performance indicators that you could focus on are:
Deliverability: This is the number of successful deliveries of the messages into the contacts inbox vis a vis number of contacts in the segmented list.
Open rate: It is that factor that identifies how many people have actually opened the email. If you have performed better than what averages for the industry, you will find that audience has received the content strategy well.
Click-through rate: It identifies the number of people who accepted the CTA’s by clicking on the links or buttons present with them.
Unsubscribe rate: It will be the rate at which the subscribers decide to opt out of the campaign based on the number of emails that were delivered. The lower this unsubscribes rate, the better it is for you.
All the email platforms can track and analyze the above metrics apart from the platform-specific metrics.
6. Complimentary Retargeting Campaigns
Once you find out the findings of the analysis and the KPI’s, you could create a complimentary retargeting campaign. This campaign should be run across various channels so that your results improve.
For instance, if you have added a prevalent feature to the product or service, you could send an email to inform your subscribers about the same. After a few days, you could follow it up with campaigns on different channels. When you reach out to them through various touchpoints, it will ensure that you make the customers aware of the new feature.
You can also use multiple channels like social media ads, SMS promotions, Pay per click (PPC), and other offline platforms like TV ads, flyers, billboards, etc.
Why You Should Choose EDM Marketing Software
Email marketing software can be an effective tool for any modern marketer. The applications help you in creating and planning the campaigns, tracking the results, automating the daily tasks, and collaborating with the team members. Apart from that, these email tools also come with marketing analytics features that will track and measure the campaign efficacy.
Data Capture And List Management
Email marketing systems come with contact management functions that you can use to find out all the subscriber data from the website. Once you have got your database created, you may segment all the lists as you want. You can do so based on factors like gender, location, engagement with the brand, or income status.
Task Automation
The email marketing software is also helpful in setting up if/then scenarios. This further helps in automating the tasks. For instance, you could configure your autoresponder to send a follow-up email to those subscribers who opened the campaign email.
Team Collaboration
With the help of these email marketing software applications, you can get your teams to collaborate on various campaigns. Mailchimp’s campaign builder, for example, supports editing with collaboration. It also shows how many people are working on the same campaign. It also allows the users to send test emails to their colleagues to know their opinion.
Reporting And Analytics
The features help in keeping track of the email marketing campaigns and EDM. It also provides an idea of the efficacy of each campaign and what you should do to improve future campaigns. The metrics that these apps can monitor are clickthrough rates, open email rates, bounce rate, and how many unsubscribes happen.
