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This is the definition for email marketing:
Email marketing is a structured, systematic process to deliver marketing messages to targeted subscribers.
You may want to print this out and put it up on a wall somewhere in your office, because it will guide the work that you’re doing on a regular basis.
Data management is very important, because we don’t want to just send emails for the sake of sending emails. We want to actually collect information on our readers and use that to continue to hone and evolve our structures, and strategy, and our content. And so we’ve got to look at three different points.
The user experience is central, and it’s almost a mantra that you should repeat on a regular basis when it comes to your email marketing. In email strategy, it must consider the user experience of individual users and the reasons why they are using the email platform.
Everybody is different but think about your user first and foremost, because that’s really who matters in this context. Not you, the emailer, but the person who is receiving your message. Think about various audiences. Users email to run a business, or they maybe use email to keep in touch with their friends. People use email to email members of a club. There’s a lot of different ways in which email marketing is utilized based solely on audience.
And this goes for any digital marketing endeavor. Focus on your audience first. Those are the most important people in this channel.
The growth strategy in email list is incredibly important because, if you don’t have people there on your list, you’re not going to have readers and it’s not going to be as successful as you would want.
One of my favorite examples of an e-newsletter is called NextDraft. It’s by a man in San Francisco whose name is Dave Pell. And it’s a wonderfully written 10-point, almost news list of the day. And he has segmented out his emails, so that each sort of bit of content is easily shareable, easily linked to, in such a way that if, for example I read something in his email, I can then tweet it out, or share it on Facebook, or post it on LinkedIn, or put it somewhere else, or just email it to a friend. That ability to cross-sell his literally engaging, informative content, incentivizes me to do something with it. Look at the structure, look at the way he puts it out there, look at the way he has created something like a WordPress blog that kind of goes along with his email strategy which works really well for him.
Let’s now look at aligning email with strategy. Branding your email and making your email connect with your brand is one of the things that must be at the core of what you’re doing. Because, again, if you have your brand over here and your email is over here, it’s not going to connect. And as a reader I want to make sure that I’m acknowledging or familiar with the brand that you’re putting out there.
And so you want to have the sort of sense of your email design that it connects with your branding strategy. And then ensure that you’re communicating a consistent brand message, and experience across all your communication channels. And that will go really well for you as a company. You’ll see that the best emails in terms of email marketing are the ones that connect brand with strategy, and then deliver that as an output via their emails.
Back to TopEric Stoller is a Higher Education Strategic Communications Consultant and Blogger at Inside Higher Ed. With a background in student affairs, academic advising, wellness, technology, and communications, Eric educates clients and audiences on digital identity development. As a blogger, he generates conversations, answers questions, and provides insight about a variety of tech topics, including Social Media Strategies and Email Marketing.
By the end of this topic, you should be able to:
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ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE
The Email Marketing Strategy module will introduce the key concepts of email marketing and enable you to develop the knowledge and skills to build highly effective email campaigns. You will learn how to think like an email marketer and recognize that your subscriber list growth and quality is a key metric for the success of your campaign. Finally, you will recognize the role of various email delivery techniques as well as the importance of balancing frequency and volume of email sends.