5 Elements of a Powerful Electronic Direct Mail

Electronic Direct Mail, or EDM, is an email marketing tool that revolves around building an email database of customers and prospects. It involves directly sending timely, relevant promotions via email that keep your company in front of your audience until they are ready to engage your service.

As a digital marketing strategy, EDMs utilise various forms of communication to deliver a campaign. These communication channels can involve remarketing advertising, PPC and social media campaigns, with the goal of building consumer loyalty and generating conversions.

Let’s further discuss what benefits an EDM can bring to your business.

Benefits of Electronic Direct Mails for Businesses

Stronger Client Relationships

Sending emails to your clients is a great way to improve consumer relationship because your message is being delivered effectively. What’s more, you can add personal touches to your EDMs, making your customers to pay attention to your message more and to follow through with the action you want them to take.

Add to that, EDMs are also an opportunity to understand your customers, provided that you are consistent with your efforts. When you finally have the ample knowledge of your consumers’ behaviour, direct emails will eventually become one of your most effective tools in maintaining strong client relationships.

Cost-effective

How much resources you are allocating in a marketing effort is always an important consideration, whether you are managing a small business or a multinational corporation. Luckily for EDMs, directly reaching a large number of audiences is simpler, efficient, and feasible.

In fact, all you need to do is create an account and pay for the email marketing platform you want to use for your EDMs. From there, you can already begin sending out as many emails as you need with minimal to no added cost.

Unlike other targeted and direct mail campaigns that send out brochures or flyers with design, printing and mailing costs, electronic direct mails promise better results for a much lesser budget.

Also read: Email Marketing Is Still the Top Way to Generate Leads by Forbes

Useful Audience Insights

As mentioned earlier, EDMs help you understand consumer behaviour because most email platforms have powerful and built-in analytics that let you view how many people opened your email, how many converted, what device they viewed it on, and even the location where they viewed it. These are useful information that can help you know and calculate your return on investment, on top of knowing how well your campaigns are performing.

With these insights, you can easily determine what kind of content bodes well for your audience, and what content still needs improvement.

Whether or not you were able to execute a successful email marketing campaign, the analytics you get from your EDMs will surely help you execute better email strategies in the future.

Found this article useful? Before reading on, don’t miss out on other related articles:

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5 Characteristics of a Successful Electronic Direct Mail

1. Simple and Interesting

Often, people in your mailing list don’t have enough time to read promotional emails. Always make sure that your EDMs are worthy of their attention by having content that is straight-to-the-point. In doing so, you are enabling your readers to grasp your message without any fuss.

Writing a clear-cut message for your audience goes alongside having a well-structured content from start to finish. As such, it’s important to be sure about your content’s goal and purpose. Eliminate unnecessary information such as bits and pieces that they already know and any other written materials that you think won’t encourage them to take action.

Keep in mind that your copy should be consumer-centred. That said, your reader should easily understand your content even with a quick scan. A short and powerful copy will require more work than usual, but you can always utilise techniques such as coming up with catchy headlines to pique their interest and curiosity immediately.  

2. Targeted at a Specific Audience

Aside from having clear-cut content in general, your EDMs must target a specific demographic. This will involve segmenting your mailing list for you to sell services aligned with their needs, especially if you cater to both consumers and businesses.

If you own a liquor store, for instance, you could create a segment consisting of email addresses of consumers, and offer discounts they can share with their friends and family. The other email list would contain businesses, talking about having a basket of wine as a corporate gift for hardworking employees.

Segmenting your mailing list allows you to gain a better reputation in terms of email marketing because you are creating content that is engaging for a particular set of audience. Remember that not all your customers are the same even if they know you’re only selling one type of product or service. In a way, they have different problems and needs, so sending out an EDM that speaks to what they really want will be more effective than something that feels broad and conventional.

Click here to know more about the importance of email list segmentation.

3. Clean and Professional

Besides having concise and focused content, your EDM must be organised and pleasing to the eye. Just like how someone in a business attire projects a clean and professional image, a sleek-looking EDM delivers an authoritative type of branding to your audience.

In order to achieve this, it would be best for your EDM to go under the hands of a qualified graphic designer. They will know how to utilise colours and negative space, among other relevant EDM design thinking principles that will surely help you catch your audience’s attention.

Furthermore, your graphic designer would have ample knowledge on how to make your EDM fast-loading, paving way for a better user experience, which also brings us to our next point.

4. Mobile Responsive

According to Campaign Monitor, 41% of users open their emails on their mobile devices. This shift in mobile has made it difficult to get them engaging your email marketing content. For that reason, mobile responsive EDMs are necessary for you to achieve the number of engagement you want across your market. A mobile responsive electronic direct mail ensures that your images load fast and your contents display gracefully across devices.

To ensure mobile responsiveness on your EDMs, you should:

• Only use a single column layout for your content to avoid condensed text
• Opt for larger font sizes and clean font families for readability
• Add alt tags on images for them to easily determine the image description while it’s still loading
• Set the max-width attribute to 600 pixels so that your texts are optimised for desktop and mobile screens.

Always tap creative graphic design experts who can help you create a mobile responsive EDM for your customers.

5. Clear Call to Action

Now that you have met the necessary requirements of an effective EDM, the only thing left for you to do is to come up with the right words for your readers to take the action you want. Without your call to action (CTA), it would seem that you are sending just another marketing paraphernalia to your customers; they would feel that it’s a waste of time if they don’t have any idea on what to do after reading your EDM.

Always ensure that you have a clear vision of what you want people to do when they receive your EDM. Often, your CTA is the key to gaining conversion rates.

In fact, if you start thinking about your CTA first and work backwards, you will be able to guide or structure your content around that one thing you want your customers to do, resulting in a solid train of thought for your email.

In creating a successful EDM, just think about the emails in your inbox that catch your attention and those that you never bother reading. Analyse what’s good and what’s bad about them and use that knowledge as leverage for your next email marketing efforts.

Need more advice for your promotional EDMs? Schedule a free consultation with us at 6841 1680 or email us at [email protected]!