What is Electronic Direct Mail (EDM) marketing?

“The times change, and if you don’t change with them, you get left behind.” Bradley Walsh

I couldn’t agree more with that quote. The ecommerce industry is changing, and believe it or not, 319.6 billion emails are sent every day. To put into perspective, 10.5 million emails have already been sent in the 3 seconds you took reading this sentence. Moreover, several businesses have seen fantastic results, in fact, Mr. Beer reported an 800% increase in customer orders.

So, what is Electronic Direct Mail marketing?

Electronic Direct Mail (EDM) is a form of digital marketing strategy that businesses implement to promote products to a list of potential customers (who are opted-in) via email. In addition to EDMs, brands can also target customers across various channels through cross-channel marketing.

Do you know it takes between 6 to 8 touchpoints before converting subscribers to an actual paying customer?

If you do a bit of research around EDM marketing, you’ll notice they often talk about batch and blast. Traditionally, as the names suggest, an email blast means sending a single email to your entire database irrespective of the customer’s preference or interests.

To put it simply: Never do this. Never ever!

At Dotdigital, our prospecting emails are personalized on a one-to-one level, and as far as the marketers are concerned, it’s the only way to send effective emails.

How to create an EDM marketing campaign?

EDM marketing campaigns are a cost-effective way to garner conversions and to build brand loyalty with a specific pool of customers. With consistent messaging, your EDM campaign is more likely to be top of mind for a customer while they make a purchase decision. Let’s take you through the basics of creating an EDM marketing campaign.

1. Start with your customers’ data

Building an email list can take time, therefore you might be tempted to buy data. DON’T.

We strongly advise you against buying data as this will be detrimental to your brand’s image, it goes against data privacy laws, including PDPA guidelines, and your domain might get punished for delivering emails to inactive email addresses.

Your data needs to have been fully opted in, cleaned (valid syntax, no duplication), and you should have reached a sizable pool of 1,000 subscribers to move on to the next step. If not sure, you can always refer to our guide on how to grow your database quickly.

2. Segmentation

Once the data is collected and based on your customer behavioral traits, identify the segments you need to build. These should then be funneled into your core demographic audience groups based on age, gender, interest, or location.

For example, customers who spent a certain amount over six months, OR recently bought a soundbar, OR have visited your site to look at subwoofers.

You can then begin planning and building out more advanced segments to ensure you’re sending targeted and relevant messages. These can be based on RFM analysis tools, lead scoring, or even web behaviors. By knowing what segments you can and want to target, you can better plan your messaging and the channels you’ll send them through.

3. Personalize your emails

Personalization depends highly on customer-generated data. A thorough understanding of your customer’s interest and source will enable you to personalize your customer interactions.

For example, Matthew is a total techie. He always splurges on new technologies as soon as the pre-order hits the site. You might want to prepare bespoke VVIP codes for your pre-order campaign to send to Matthew, making him feel special and valued as a customer.

4. Track your click and open rates

Be sure to implement tracking before sending an email. Without UTM codes and tracking pixels, you can’t monitor the success of your EDM marketing and improve performance over time.

The word on the street is the upcoming iOS 15 update will likely impact open rates. The soon-to-be-released update will enable iPhone users to hide their IP and email addresses and turn off open tracking. Therefore, it’s critical to start preparing now and integrate best practices to adapt to the changes ahead.

5. Create your campaign

You will need email marketing software (with or without automation) to create your campaigns. Gone are the days where you send plain text or nicely designed HTML emails. Now, most platforms are drag and drop, and you can create a no-code EDM within minutes.

But what you pay for is what you get, and if you are forecasting email marketing to bring you $30,000 in revenue and are only willing to spend $100 to solve a problem, you might not get the best-optimized solution for you to hit your goals.

Customer-centric approach

Customer-centric marketing is more than just a buzzword. It should be at the heart of everything you do, every journey you create, and every message you send.

The only way you can begin to achieve this is by understanding how your customers interact with your brand. It’s essential to consider your ideal journey and what other steps the customer may take.

From the point of subscription to post-purchase and beyond, what are your key touchpoints, and where else can customers find you? This will help you identify your existing channels and where you need to focus your efforts. It will also help you see any potential gaps where you can expand your channel offering.

By taking the time to learn about the customer journey, you’ll create consistent messaging and branding across every channel.

When is the right time to start? The answer is – yesterday!

There will never be the best optimal time to begin your journey in marketing automation; in this day and age, this has become a must-have. I hope you have found the blog helpful in your digital transformation strategy for 2021 and beyond.

If you’d like to find out more, feel free to contact me to have a quick chat. If you’d like to see Dotdigital in action, click here.