Direct email marketing, often referred to simply as DEM, is a highly specialized strategy of digital advertising.

It consists in an email campaign sent directly to subscribers. It can be a great way to maximize your selling, increase brand awareness and turn prospects into loyal customers.

What is direct email marketing?

It’s a strategy of email marketing in which special communications (called DEMs) are sent directly to prospects. As a result, a potential customer is convinced to buy your products or services and become a loyal one.

With a message like this, often realized in text or HTML, you can advertise a special offer, a new product, a particular service to a targeted audience.

EmailAn email (or electronic mail) is a method of exchanging communications through the internet. It is one of the most used features on the web and the number one mean... Marketing vs. Direct Email Marketing

What’s the difference between direct email marketing and any other email marketing strategy? Segmentation is key! When you send a DEM to a specific target audience, you know that they are at least interested in it beforehand.

How can you do that? With a precise and analytical segmentation of your customers. The most important element of direct email marketing is an impeccable mailing list.

Should you buy your email lists?

Some services for direct email marketing sell email lists and contacts. That is designed to make you feel like your strategy is going to work better, but this is not always the case.

Pre-set up mailing lists are likely to contain a lot of contacts of people uninterested in your brand. Your message will not be opened and probably be perceived as spam and you certainly don’t want that.

Create your own email list with potential customers really interested in you and your work.

How to curate a perfect mailing list

An experienced email marketer know how important it is to send the right message to the right people. After all, you don’t want to offer a promotion on furry coats to an audience of vegetarians, do you?

So, firstly you need to know your customers. You can learn something about them in several ways. First of all, make a few questions when a user wants to subscribe to your newsletter.

You can learn their gender, their location, in which of your products they are more interested. You can also add some personal data like name and birthdate. How nice it is to receive a personalized birthday wish and a special promotion? Your customers will love it.

How can you use this strategy?

Direct email marketing is important for a lot of reasons. You can use it to implement these aspects of your relationship with the customers:

• turn your prospects into customers;
• increase brand awareness and brand loyalty;
• monitor different strategies to analyze which works better;
• track you users’ response.

Personalization is always a good way to establish a direct relationship and enhance your customer’s experience. Remember, your customers are bombarded everyday by millions of communications: make your brand stand out letting them feel special.

Examples of Direct Email Marketing

You can use a DEM in several occasions. Sales and offers are always welcomed, but please be cautious with them: an overly attractive message can be reported as spam.

Make good use of the holiday seasons. Your customers, for example, will be more likely to buy a product if you advertise it as a Christmas gift and send a festive DEM in December. The same goes for Valentine’s Day, National and religious holidays, special occasions such as birthdays.

Use a special occasion for your brand too: you can advertise a promotional event, the launch of a new product or the opening of a new shop through direct email marketing as well.

A direct email marketing template

If you need an example of direct email marketing to get started with your campaign, here is a template. This has been craeted to advertise a new product, but you can personalize the text as you need.

“Hi [name of you customer]

How are you? We noticed you loved our recent [service or product the customer has bought]. Why don’t you complement it with [new product related to the first]?

They will be lovely together! To help you create your perfect ensamble, we’ll give you a free delivery: just click here [enter the link of the new product’s page] and insert [enter a code] in the coupon area to receive it home.“

Be sure to choose a simple yet recognizable template; enter your company’s logo in a promiment area of the DEM and insert a clear call to action in the text. Also, don’t forget to follow the rules: the General Data Protection Regulation, for example, states that you need to include an opt-out button in every communication.

Now monitor your results

There are several ways in which you can monitor your direct email marketing strategy. Open rates and click-through rates are two of the most important things to look for.

In order to increse the former, you can optimize the headline of your DEM. Remember not to make it too obvious nor to use exclamation marks and all caps, so that your email won’t go to the spam forlder.

Your click-through rate, instead, will be increased by a clear and direct call to action, preferably placed a prominent area of the template.

Some tricks and tips

Be creative with your messages to customers. Remember to personalize them accordingly to your brand’s tone of voice, their age segment, their geographical area.

Don’t forget to experiment with your direct email marketing startegies: A/B tests can be very helpful for instance. You can also send direct questionnaires to your customers in order to better understand what works and what not, what is perceived as too intrusive, which frequency is the best for them and so on.

Always remember to make your DEM responsive (which means it is mobile-friendly). Recent studies had confirmed that most of internet users surf the web and read their emails from smartphones and other portable devices.

How much time will direct email marketing require?

If you are going to implement this startegy in your email marketing usual management, you may need some help.

Direct email marketing can be very time-consuming because of the detailed segmentation and attention it requires. So why don’t you enlist someone to help?

Choose a freelance email marketer or address one of the services of direct email marketing out there. Here are some of the most efficient:

• Mailsenpai
• Mailchimp
• SendinBlue
• GetResponse
• HubSpot

How to choose the best service

You should ask yourself what are your goals with every direct email marketing campaign and how a mail service or an email marketer can help you reach it.

Read reviews of previous customers online; compare their prices; understand how they work. Be sure the service you turn to follows your Country’s rules for data protection and privacy. Then choose how much you want to invest in the first campaign and test out how it works.

Conclusions

You now know a lot about direct email marketing, but this relatively new field of digital advertising is still expanding.

Choose an expert or a service of direct email marketing such as Mailsenpai in order to be up-to-date with every news in this field and start sendind your words out.