The importance of Email in your Digital Marketing Strategy

Email plays a very important role in your digital marketing strategy since it’s the most common mode of corporate communication. Email marketing trends are constantly changing as the market for digital marketing is expanding with every passing day. Although in recent times, social media marketing and other forms of video marketing are taking precedence over traditional methods - email will forever remain a tried and tested method of marketing for probably as long as humanity exists. Let’s find out more about this: 

Why should you send personalized emails to your customers?

Through email marketing, you as the email sender have the ability to send highly personalized emails that is custom-tailored to your recipient’s needs and desires. This makes your email heavily targeted and relevant to what your customer may be potentially interested in, this automatically increases your chances of getting sign-ups or leads through this. 

How can your message be personalized?

There are several ways you can create personalized email messages. To start off, you can:

• Research and use existing customer data like the history of previous purchases, intent, and behavior
• Pay attention to the demographics of your customers, i.e. are your customers mostly male or female? What are their age groups? What is their ethnicity? What is their educational background, etc?

Customer demographics can play a vital role in determining how successful your email marketing campaign will be. If you are a company selling menstrual hygiene products you would ideally cater to a demographic of females between the ages of 13 - 45, since your products will be more relevant to them and they may benefit from it in comparison to biological males or women above the age of 50 who are in menopause.   

• Another way your messages can be personalized is by appending your brand logo to your emails. You can do so with the help of Brand Indicators for Message Identification. BIMI allows your brand logos to be displayed on emails sent from your domain, providing a centralized and consistent approach to logo display and allowing recipients to instantly recognize you in their inbox. This can help you: 
• Enjoy consistent branding across all channels 
• Increase your email’s engagement rates 
• Add a more professional touch to your emails 
• Increase brand recognition and brand recall 
• Promote brand awareness among a wide segment of potential customers 
• Prevent your mailbox providers from appending a random logo to your emails 
• Authenticate your email-sending sources 

BIMI does allow you to authenticate your emails by making it mandatory for email senders to implement DMARC. 

DMARC or Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance is a technical protocol that is used to verify a message’s authenticity by working together with SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and/or DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) - both of which are also industry-acclaimed authentication protocols. 

You can test whether your domain has SPF records configured already with an SPF checker tool.

BIMI requires senders to configure a DMARC policy of “quarantine” or “reject” (DMARC at enforcement) in order to ensure that the ensure is complying with BIMI-specific standards and is eligible for BIMI logo display. 

Let’s explore what these policy modes are: 

• DMARC policy at none: This represents an inert policy where the recipient takes no action against unauthenticated emails, and is primarily used during the beginning stages of your DMARC journey to monitor outgoing email traffic and send sources 
• DMARC policy at quarantine (required for BIMI): This policy will work differently from “none” by providing a way for your receivers to actually review emails sent from your domain that have failed to be recognized as legitimate. This policy is excellent for users who are hesitant to opt for complete enforcement. 
• DMARC policy at reject (also recommended for BIMI): We finally come to the last policy that enables complete enforcement, i.e. DMARC reject. The reject policy is ideal for domain owners who want to protect their customers from phishing, spoofing, and ransomware attacks as it allows receivers to reject unauthenticated emails from entering their inboxes. 

Depending on the above-mentioned information you can choose a DMARC policy that fits your needs, however, make sure you are not configuring “none” as your policy in order to achieve BIMI compliance. 

Additional Recommendations 

To leverage emails to the best of their ability and gain maximum profits in your digital marketing campaigns, here are some tips: 

• You can maintain regular communication with your esteemed partners, existing customers, and potential customers to ensure that you are building a relationship with them and nurturing your professional bond, without allowing it to go cold 
• Follow-up is key! Always remember that just because your recipients didn’t respond to your first email isn’t your call to simply give up. You must consistently follow up numerous times to see any positive results - hence patience is also an important factor that can make or break your campaign’s success 
• You can also track and monitor your conversion rates and ROI religiously to understand which campaigns failed for you and which were a success, helping you gain future insights into tried and true methods that may work for your business

Final Words 

Blending traditional email marketing methods like AWS Mautic and other new-age technologies can help you stand out among your peers and competitors and gain better returns on your investments. With more than 4 billion email users worldwide as of 2023, it is only natural that email is here to stay and marketing through email will always be an effective strategy for reaching your next potential customer.

However, with the changing landscapes and entry of automation, it can be a highly competitive ground to conquer. By following best practices and having the patience to see things through - you can emerge as a true champion in the arena of marketing!