A DEM is an email (or a series of emails) with one specific goal: promoting a product, service, or event.
The acronym DEM refers both to a single send and to the overall direct email marketing strategy.
What does DEM stand for?
The acronym stands for direct email marketing. In other words, it covers every email campaign whose purpose is purely promotional.
DEM falls into the category of “push” activities, meaning those designed to acquire new customers or prompt them to take action. With a carefully crafted call to action, the goal is to get the reader to buy a product or service, or to attend an event.
Your own contact lists or third-party lists?
When deciding who will receive your DEMs, you can use contact lists supplied by third parties or lists you have built yourself.
In the first case, you pay a provider for a list of potentially interested users. Pricing is usually based on CPM (cost per mille, i.e. the price set for a list of 1,000 contacts).
A better approach is to build your own list of interested users by collecting sign-ups for your newsletter. This is a permission marketing strategy, so it ensures that your prospects are genuinely interested in your brand.
Keep in mind that direct email marketing is also regulated across all European Union countries by the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).
The key elements of a DEM
Make sure you know your prospects well. Solid targeting and segmentation work will make your direct email marketing more effective and give you a much higher conversion rate.
In DEM marketing, a few visual elements (often built and optimized in HTML) are essential to capture the reader’s attention:
- your brand logo, clearly visible;
- a clear, attractive discount or offer;
- the expiration date of the promotion;
- an eye-catching image.
When should you use direct email marketing?
Although it is always an effective strategy, there are times when DEM marketing works especially well.
Seasonal DEMs, for example, consistently achieve high conversion rates. This is due to FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out. Customers know when the promotion ends and act as soon as possible so they don’t miss the offer.
FOMO also applies to email marketing that promotes an event. The same happens when you send DEMs about a new or exclusive product that users will want to own right away.
Upgrading your customers
You can also use DEM marketing to turn interested users into paying customers by telling them about yourself and your products and services. In industry jargon, this type of email is called a “Did you know?” email, since it opens with lines like “Did you know that…?“, and it falls within the scope of personal branding.
One way to make users feel pampered and part of an exclusive community is to send an upgrade DEM. Here, customers who have already bought a product or service in the past receive a reward for their loyalty.