Email isn’t just a communication channel. It’s a behavioral insight engine, a testing lab and a conversion machine, all in a single dashboard.
Email can be a powerful audience microscope and your most controllable growth lever — if you know how to use it strategically. That’s a big “if,” because it requires new ways of thinking about and recognizing email’s role in your marketing program.
Too many brands use email to push out messages and generate incremental sales. Why? The obvious reasons are that:
- It’s easy.
- It’s the way they were taught.
- Frankly, it’s all they have time for.
These are reasonable explanations and symptoms of a bigger problem. Marketers don’t understand email’s true power.
Or maybe they do. Maybe they know exactly what happens when they send out a well-organized campaign and see the results pour in. They know what email and only email can tell them about their customers and what spurs them to act.
The problem is often higher in the marketing food chain. Team leaders or executives who’ve never been in the trenches with email and see no need to support it with budget or personnel.
It’s time to flip the script
If you follow my columns here on MarTech, you know I get frustrated when marketers or their higher-ups see email only for its tactical ability to make money.
Most email training focuses on using email as a tool, neglecting email’s strategic value. We’re just now beginning to correct this through educational sessions at professional conferences and a growing emphasis on training that starts with strategy before moving into tactics.
My goal is to help marketers understand what happens when they place email at the strategic center of the marketing program to achieve greater audience insights, build loyalty and create the strong connections that will win the battle of the overcrowded inbox.
Still, email is the afterthought on many marketing teams — the last piece of the puzzle, and often gets handed off to junior team members. It’s the “easy” button you push to drive additional sales or have a hot promotion. How many of you have heard “We’re not going to achieve our monthly target! Send another email!”
It’s time to change the narrative. When you hammer out your overarching marketing strategy, take some time to understand why email needs a seat at the table. It’s not the last job on the list.
Dig deeper: Email marketing strategy — A marketer’s guide
Email is the OG digital push channel
Not apps. Not SMS. Not web notifications. Permission-based mail was doing push before any of these saw their first lines of code.
Once you gain permission, you don’t have to wait for customers to find you through search or scrolling. You can initiate the conversation! That’s a lot of power, and you must use it responsibly (but that’s a column for another time).
Email pioneered developments so woven into the fabric of digital marketing we don’t remember what marketing was like before:
- Direct digital relationships.
- Personalized content on a major scale.
- Performance attribution in 1:1 marketing.
3 ways email delivers value throughout the marketing stack
Email is a built-in target audience for your customers. Did you ever think of it that way? Once you do, you can see the possibilities of using that audience as your testing lab. These are your best customers — the ones who think highly enough of your brand to share a bit of personal information in exchange for a direct digital connection.
Email testing is free of the drawbacks that hamper testing in other channels, such as search, website and social media:
- You already have a built-in audience, so you don’t have to reach out to strangers or wait for people to find out.
- You can begin to see results almost right away. Although you must give your email tests enough time to compile statistically significant findings, this can take less time to achieve than website, social or search testing because of the sample size.
- Because you are researching your actual customers, team members on other channels can use your research as a springboard to learn whether they also apply.
Dig deeper: How cognitive biases influence email A/B tests
Here are three uses for email beyond sending promotions:
1. Behavioral testing lab
What kinds of email content motivate your customers to act? People say they sign up for promotions, but are they more receptive to emotion-driven campaigns in some instances?
Classic A/B split testing is the easiest way to begin testing, but my testing methodology can capture more nuanced differences without resorting to multivariate testing.
Which promotions lead to long-term loyalty? Look at your web traffic rate on the day you send out an email campaign. I predict you will see a boost in organic, paid and direct search.
Seeing your email in the inbox can nudge customers into checking out your site, even if the open and click rates don’t set the world on fire. That’s why I say email was the original nudge engine before nudging had a name.
Further, what do customers do when they land on your email landing page? What other pages do they visit? How long do they stay on your site? How does that compare to customers who find you through search?
All of these questions, which you should be able to answer quickly if you have a good web analytics program, can show you how email drives action beyond opens, clicks and conversions.
2. Content diagnostic tool
As mentioned above, email can show what prompts your customers to act. It can also illustrate what they don’t respond to, which can be equally valuable.
Isolating content areas to see whether sender names, subject line variations, kinds of content (e.g., long versus short copy or promotions with or without supporting copy), buyer persona and copy and image placement are just a few of the ways you can use email activity to measure motivation in and beyond email.
Dig deeper: Optimizing your email program — Finding sweet spots and tipping points
3. Customer relationship builder for sustainability and loyalty
Email can drive immediate conversions, like sales. That’s one of its powers. That’s where many people stop when thinking about email. But you don’t build strong, long-lasting customer relationships with a barrage of 20%-off promotions.
When you combine personalization with email automation, lifecycle-focused email messages and continuous optimization, you turn email from a one-note promotion channel into a long-term conversion ecosystem.
This model builds relationships and uses behavioral data. It uses lifecycle touchpoints to guide the customer through an evolving path from awareness to advocacy. It encompasses the whole subscriber journey, including engagement, education, nurture, conversion, retention and reactivation.
The process begins before you send the first email with a benefits-based opt-in invitation. It builds sustainability with a coordinated series of messages that respond to customer signals throughout their journey with your brand. If you send only “Buy now” messages, you’re missing out on this rich vein of content.
Rediscover the channel you thought you knew
Above all, remember that email is your best and least-expensive tool for retaining customers. Many marketing truths have been upended over the years, but it’s still true that retention is far less costly than acquisition!
I hope you’ve discovered something new about this most misunderstood channel or found material you can use to persuade others to rethink email’s value.
Take a few minutes — maybe on your next break — to think of two or three ways to reposition your email content, journeys, personas and other resources and make email a business driver, not just the last promotional tool on your campaign checklist.
Email is the most powerful, flexible and misunderstood channel in your stack. It’s time to rediscover its potential.
Dig deeper: Why you should track your email’s long tail to measure success (plus a case study)
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