What Does a Digital Marketing Agency Actually Do?

Email marketing has been around since the world first began hearing inbox notification sounds. Used well in a strategic communication plan, it is still highly useful for targeting both new audiences and those who have already opted in for messages. In other words, it is far from being ready for the junk folder.

With the ability to be customized and personalized to connect specific audiences within paid digital efforts, email marketing continues to be a trusted marketing channel.

Email allows us to tell a bigger story about our clients and why their product, service or way of thinking matters to the audiences we target. Like native advertising (sponsored content within a news feed), email is a great long-form educational tool providing high engagement with specific audiences who care about the content.

These audiences can be as broad or granular as needed depending on the goal of the campaign.

Odney’s well honed expertise in email marketing strategies started with North Dakota Tourism’s need to communicate with very motivated, niche audiences such as birders, history lovers and golf enthusiasts.

Most of our email campaigns have the goal of building awareness. But a strong call to action can produce real results by asking people to click through to RSVP for an event or to contact the advertiser for information. Some of our more successful examples have included asking people to contact a Relocation Help Desk about moving to North Dakota or to request a travel guide to visit the state.

Seasonal deployments can also be effective and cost-efficient, such as when we have showcased fun fall, winter and spring experiences for our tourism and destination marketing clients.

Typically, we run more than one email throughout the life of the campaign. In what we call a touch/retouch strategy, the first email is followed by a redeployment of at least one more email. Depending on timing, we could send four to six emails throughout the life of the campaign.

While we often repeat much of the message from one email to the next in a series, it is important to use unique and enticing subject lines to get people to open the email. Then once they’ve opened it, it must offer something new in headlines, copy and images for each redeployment based on timing and audience. Redeployments often work best making the call to action more urgent from one deployment to the next.

Many campaigns target “prospecting” audiences — addresses that are not from first-party data collected by the client. In some cases, we purchase hashed email addresses encrypted with a unique code that allows us to target the same individuals with other digital (display ads, video and CTV) and social media tactics. This strategy makes a more fluid media campaign hitting the audience with different tactics throughout the life of the campaign.

Email allows us to move the engaged audience one step further into the marketing funnel, often with a personalized primary call to action. By including email as part of a larger digital strategy, we can target the specific audience across all the media they are consuming — giving us the additional touchpoints and frequency to raise awareness and provide brand lift.

We see high spikes in website traffic when emails are deployed for campaigns. Based on link clicks from email messages, we know people are opening and reading the entire emails as we see clicks on all links throughout the email – from the top to the very bottom.

With email marketing as part of a comprehensive strategic plan, we are reaching highly engaged audiences who are spending more time with our clients’ messages — turning prospects into customers and increasing loyalty to the brands we serve.