Have you heard of Electronic Direct Mail marketing (EDM) before?
In 2020, 306.4 billion emails were sent and received every day worldwide. Almost everyone in the world has an email address and email marketing continues to boast the highest ROI, making email marketing strategies essential for your business’s marketing efforts.
But what is EDM actually?
EDM is a marketing strategy used by companies to connect with existing and potential customers
Marketers use EDM marketing to send personalized emails that build strong customer relationships, foster brand loyalty, and drive conversions. An EDM marketing strategy uses various forms of media – email, social media, printed materials, text messages, out-of-home, and more, and tools such as lead capture software – to help build your list and convert people to customers. By using other forms of marketing communications, you can reach potential customers and reinforce the campaign message.
EDM marketing vs email marketing
Both use emails to build a list and grow conversions so understandably they seem very similar from the outset.
While an email marketing campaign is just that – sending emails through a third-party provider in hopes that those emails convert customers – an EDM campaign is much more complex.
A fully-fledged EDM marketing campaign starts with e-blasts but follows up with retargeting ads to capture those who have seen the email, a supporting social media campaign, and even billboards or print ads in magazines.
An EDM marketing campaign helps you reach those seven touchpoints by creating a comprehensive marketing strategy that goes beyond simple email communication as you do with email marketing. Here is some example :
EDM marketing campaign benefits
Saves time and costs
EDM and email marketing are extremely cost-effective – once you have your list, you can email them at quite a low cost based on a schedule you set out for your business. You can create beautiful emails using templates or the skills of an in-house design team at a fraction of the cost of creating a traditional mailer.
Builds trust and increases conversions
Being able to speak directly to your audience is one of the ways that a business can build trust with its customers – and email marketing is the most effective way to do this. There is a study that found that, for millennials, trusting a brand is second only to loyalty discounts in importance when choosing which companies to support.
Enables advanced personalization
EDM marketing campaigns allow you to highly personalize your email strategies based on how you segment your audience – more on that later! With proper audience segmentation, you can accurately address the different sections of your audience.
Traditional email marketing is all about gathering leads and trying to build a relationship with them, often with the help of lead capture software. EDM marketing takes it one step further and tries to leverage the valuable information you have already collected to improve how you market to your target audience members. Personalized communications are just one way to improve the customer relationship.
