When it comes to launching a new digital marketing campaign, there’s a lot to consider. You need to align your campaign across teams and make sure each platform (and team member) is ready to do its job.
Are your current digital marketing campaigns telling a complete story? Are they bringing clarity or vision? Are your campaigns clearly defined in your content marketing strategy?
These questions can be tough to answer. For a lot of digital marketers, creating a campaign that is thorough, complete, and cohesive can sometimes turn out to be scattered, vague, and cursory.
As you create new campaigns, you need to make sure your email strategy is as robust as possible. It shouldn’t be an afterthought, as email generates $44 for each dollar spent. Additionally, you are 6x more likely to get a click-through from an email campaign than you are from a tweet.
To help you take your next digital marketing campaign over the finish line, here are five ways to use email in your next digital marketing campaign.
1. Standardize design across channels
Perhaps the most important piece of a digital marketing campaign (alongside messaging) is to standardize the design of your content. It’s vital to create a complete and comprehensive vision for the campaign.
People are going to view your content on desktop, on mobile, in email, on social, and on your website. These combinations create a wide variety of experiences that must be consistent. Losing consistency could weaken the effect of your campaign.
Need an example of how this is done? Schoolhouse ran a content marketing campaign about their founder. You can see the cohesion between design on their website, email, and social media.
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Before launching your next digital campaign, think about all the channels on which you’ll want to push content and place them in a list. Then have your designers create assets for every channel before even beginning to publish content, so you’re sure you have all the right designs in the right places.
2. Build a cohesive message
Similar to design, your campaigns need to have a cohesive message. According to Saas Entrepreneur Myk Pono: “Consistent messages are more likely to become memorable. Consistency improves message effectiveness, that’s why advertising works — it consistently repeats a simple message over and over again.”
Looking above at the Schoolhouse example, they center the communication around their announcement: “Schoolhouse turns 15.” This message is extremely clear as you view this digital marketing campaign across various platforms. After centering the message, they expand based on the channel.
Schoolhouse uses consistent language with words like “milestone” and the phrase “celebrate everything that brought us here.” They weave consistent messages likes these into their various channels when appropriate, being fully realized in the final content piece.
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Write down the core message you’re trying to deliver in your digital campaign. Boil it down to one phrase. Then create various bullet points for the other points you want to make, and place those in priority of importance. Now you should have a range of messages you can use, all with different lengths, so you can pick and choose based on the appropriate platforms.
3. Introduce a story with email
A great tactic is to use email as an introduction to the story of your content or product.
You can provide a snippet from your digital campaign messaging, hitting on the most enticing points. This will inspire your customers to click through, where they can find more context and convert to the action you’re calling them to.
The below email from Trello is a great example. They launched a content marketing campaign centered around new templates for their product, and a quick snippet: “Wondering how others are using Trello? Check out this brand new gallery of Trello templates for any project.”
Creating a story with their copy, Trello opens a question in the reader’s mind that must be answered.
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Consider your campaign’s messaging from the second section above. Isolate the part of your messaging that is the most enticing. What opens the biggest question in your reader’s mind? What is going to pique their interest enough to click through to your primary content? Try using email to get your subscriber engaged with the more central parts of your digital campaign.
4. Tell a story with email
Another tactic within email storytelling is to give it all away (or almost all of it) in a single email. A lot of email viewers don’t expect to see an entire story when they’re opening up an email. Usually, it’s a lot of scrolling, little clicking, and even less reading. However, changing the pace with some hearty text can create interest in the piece.
While you don’t want to give away the entire story in a single email, you can definitely give away a handful of paragraphs. Here’s an example of telling almost the entire story from InDesign.
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Write out the entirety of your digital marketing story. The background, the problem, the solution, the value proposition—everything. Now trim that down to just the essence, and limit to a handful of paragraphs. Make sure the place your audience is headed after they click through your CTA keeps them enticed while you tell the more complete story from a new perspective.
5. Highlight unique and interactive content marketing media in email
What’s meant by “unique” may be different depending on your content marketing strategy or industry, but unique still remains separate from just good ol’ text. To name a few types of unique content: videos, quizzes, games, polls, and GIFs.
Using an interactive piece as part of a bigger digital marketing campaign, you can entice viewership by posting these elements in emails. Since interactive content can boost click-through rates upwards of 26%, it’s a great idea to use these types of media to get readers to click through, where you can present a more complete view of your campaign.
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Brainstorm interactive content that supports your digital marketing campaign. Come up with as many pieces as you can. Now think about what your subscriber’s experience will be like as they click on this piece in an email and actually interact with it on your website or landing page.
Wrap up
Email can serve as a powerful tool to make sure your next digital marketing campaign is a success. Bringing a cohesive design and messaging to your content marketing campaign, you can use email as the bridge for your subscribers to experience the story your campaign is telling.
Want to stay in the know and see more insights about email for content marketers? See all 13 in our latest infographic.