Using email marketing to generate reach and insight
In a world of endless changes to the search landscape and (soon to be) disappearing cookies, it’s no wonder email marketing is becoming a priority channel. While email isn’t the most “vogue” platform, it would be foolish to ignore the power email marketing has when it comes to reaching a brand’s target audience.
When someone signs up to be part of a brand’s email list, they’re essentially admitting that the brand already provides them with some level of value. In other words, this user has given the brand permission to engage with them! While marketers continue to lose control over targeting on other channels, email remains a channel where brands remain in the driver seat. So, let’s unpack why a strong email strategy is a cornerstone to a brand’s first-party data approach, making it critical to succeed in a cookieless world.
Overcoming marketing industry changes
On the brink of third-party cookie deprecation, marketers will start to experience limitations on their ability to precisely target consumers. Third-party datasets that had been generating insight into consumer preferences will slowly disappear, requiring brands to develop creative solutions for understanding and reaching their audience. Enter the need to promptly develop a first-party data strategy.
But, Google’s cookie deprecation isn’t the only limitation marketers must prepare for. The tech giant is beginning to own more of the search landscape through the release of SGE (Google’s Search Generative Experience). This means users no longer need to leave the search engine results page to find what they are looking for, which in turn means they aren’t visiting brands’ websites as often. As a result, brands should prepare for potential losses in visibility and traffic, and marketers need a solution to supplement their current efforts. This is where email marketing comes into play.
Three core email strategies
Here are three email strategies for marketers to consider to reach target audiences and build their first-party data strategy:
1. Acquire addresses: Creating purposeful, thoughtful email lists will set the foundation for a successful email marketing campaign. Marketers can acquire emails through tactics like promos to gain subscribers. A user path analysis is also a helpful tool to understand what efforts are working to acquire emails and implement those findings.
Bonus tip: Using email as a conversion point can also allow for a supercharged approach to paid media efforts by providing these first-party lists back to the platforms so they can better optimize media toward users who are more prone to sign up for an email but are not yet ready to make a purchase.
2. Segment your audience: Consumers are subscribing to brands for all types of reasons. So blasting your entire audience with the same messaging isn’t going to protect this valuable list. Segmenting audiences based on how they discovered the brand or their last interaction is a simple way to group first-party data and ensure associated email efforts are adding value and maintaining retention.
Bonus tip: Use scored segmented audience lists in paid media efforts. Target users with these different recency or frequency scores and message them differently in paid media. This leverages the work being done with an email strategy in paid efforts, truly creating an audience-first approach to media.
3. Gather information: With an engaged audience to reach, an email content strategy is imperative to render this channel as both a tool to collect information and supplement disappearing details. Using interactive features like polls or quizzes is another way to gather insights from email campaigns. How and what type of content users engage with can illuminate how often the audience wants to hear from the brand and what’s most important to them when considering a purchase.
Bonus tip: Use this consumer analysis to feed a content strategy, informing what topics to prioritize in content creation, optimization, and distribution to social channels based on poll or quiz results.
Email marketing can be a brand’s hero by supplementing a brand’s existing first-party data strategies. With media platforms’ ability to ingest first-party data for targeting efforts — data that can be collected by email campaigns — brands can maintain their audience-first marketing approaches in a cookieless world.
What marketers need to know
By implementing an email marketing strategy, brands can take steps to reduce negative impacts created by cookie deprecation while still meeting traffic and targeting goals. With the owned nature of this channel, email can be a powerful supplementary effort to your multichannel marketing approach when executed effectively. By keeping our three key strategies top of mind, brands can navigate impending landscape changes with ease.
