Let’s face it. Your email is flooded with all sorts of information at any given moment. The spam folder is flooded, your ‘Promotions’ tab is overrun with services you subscribed to in the past, and your ‘Social’ tab is not even worth opening. This is known to consumers and advertisers alike. So, this begs the question: why bother with email marketing?
The simple answer is this: email is still widely used! In spite of bad marketing techniques and Gmail’s capabilities to filter out promotional content, millions of people rely on email on a daily basis as a means of communicating with family, friends, professionals. To get off the Promotions tab and into your customers’ inbox, you’ll need to take advantage of PPC and Custom Audience strategies. These require minimal paid investment in hopes of a maximized ROI if employed correctly.
In a 2016 Stukent Expert Session on Email Marketing featuring Larry Kim, we get a glimpse of how effective these strategies can be. A custom audience is exactly how it sounds – you create a custom list of the people you wish to advertise to, and exactly what you want your branded message to be. This is advantageous for several reasons:
- Get away from the mass/large-scale email blasts that users are tired of.
- Tailor your messaging to be as specific and relevant as possible to potential consumers.
- Increase the likelihood of engagement and conversion with these personalized messages, thus, expanding ROI.
The conclusion here is to avoid email advertising that looks like email advertising! (Who would’ve thought, right?) That means email marketing at scale will send your ad right into the spam folder. It also means ads that look like blatant, impersonal commercials will be avoided by users.
Think small and well-targeted over massive, impression-based ad strategy for email.
In today’s digital landscape user fatigue is prominent. The last thing advertisers want to do is compel users to abandon subscriptions or send ad content to ‘spam’. Another thing advertisers might want to consider in optimizing email marketing is tying our Custom Audience with a Remarketing campaign. The best Custom Audiences are those already familiar with your brand. Once brand awareness is out of the way, you can focus on the specificity of your message to consumers.
