Marketing is the key to developing and creating a successful business. Good marketing can help you to acquire more customers and understand them better. You can also make your business stand out by creating a unique brand through a continuous marketing strategy. Most importantly, you can expect a good amount of sales if your marketing strategy is done right.

There are plenty of types of marketing that you can utilize, each with its strategy and purpose. Back in the old days, you market your products or services directly to your customers through direct marketing. With the rise of technology, a good number of marketing strategies started to appear. Today, you can utilize email marketing. With social media, you can partner with an influencer and do influencer marketing. You can also use a more precise and robust marketing strategy such as STP to segment and target your customers much better.

One good marketing strategy that you can use to create and grow your brand is EDM. This strategy allows you to use other marketing strategies to reach and engage your customers. Surprisingly, EDM is relatively easy to execute. However, what is EDM? This article will tell you everything you need to know about EDM and how to utilize it to grow your business.

What Does Edm Stand For in Marketing?

EDM stands for Electronic Direct Mail. You might have heard about email marketing and might think that they are both the same. In some sense, both terms can be used interchangeably. However, there are several crucial differences between EDM and email marketing.

The only similarity between the two strategies is that both utilize email to gain and engage customers. With EDM marketing and email marketing strategy, you also build a huge database of subscribers’ or customers’ emails. You then send them newsletters or emails and then measure your performance, such as how many people open your email and how many of them follow up on your email.

This is where the two start to differ. With email marketing, you simply repeat the process above: create a database, send an email, measure the performance, repeat. EDM strategy, however, utilizes various channels to reinforce your message even further. You can use social media, SMS, ads in magazines, and so on. Not only that, but the EDM strategy also segments your customers’ database based on various categories, such as demographic, psychographic, geographic, and behavioral segmentation.

With such a precise and more robust method, you can see the difference between EDM and email marketing. Both ways utilize email to engage and gain customers. However, email marketing does segment its customers and simply sends a similar email to each customer. With EDM, on the other hand, you need to segment your customers and send personalized emails to each customer segmentation. You then need to utilize other marketing channels to strengthen your message and reach more and more audiences.

Benefits Of Using Edm

With that being said, you might have expected that EDM has lots of benefits to offer. The answer is true. With EDM promotion, you can expect to receive these several benefits:

• Engage Your Audience Closer: With EDM, you can appear in their email almost daily and engage them on multiple channels. There is no better way to create a presence than popping up in your people’s email and telling them about your product and how it can help them. With EDM, you can also create a personalized email that targets customers much better.
• Save Your Money: When it comes to marketing strategy, cost is one of the key factors to consider. With EDM, you do not need to spend much money to reach your customers. Technically, you can do this for free by sending emails and promoting your products and services on social media. However, you can always opt for an EDM platform, such as MailChimp, to conduct your EDM business more effectively and create some premium content, such as ebooks, flyers, or even posters, to boost your EDM marketing strategy.
• Understand Your Audience Better: To use EDM effectively, you have no choice but to understand your audience better. You need to segment your customers carefully and craft the right message for them. Learn from your every attempt at your EDM; what kind of email subject works? Are your call-to-actions effective enough? Is your message clear enough? With EDM strategy, you can learn to understand your audience better and use all the data and knowledge you have to create a strong brand and business.

How to Do Edm Marketing

As has been mentioned before, EDM marketing is quite similar to email marketing: Collect your customers’ contacts, such as email, phone, and so on, send your messages to your customers, and measure the performance of your marketing. However, EDM comes with several additional steps, and sometimes, you need to spend some money on the required tools. Let us look into the steps on how to do EDM:

1. Choose an EDM Platform

There is always a free one when it comes to an EDM platform. You can use Google Docs or Microsoft Excel to collect and maintain your customers’ contact details. However, as your customer grows more and more, which is also what you want for your business, you need to have a tool that can help you to manage all of this.

Introducing MailChimp, a freemium EDM platform. MailChimp offers you a free plan and a premium plan. The free plan allows you to manage 2.000 contacts and send up to 10.000 emails/month and 2.000/day. MailChimp also offers you a free basic email template in their free plan and basic reporting about your EDM performance. As has been mentioned before, it is always a good idea to invest in the right tools for your EDM. With a paid plan from MailChimp, you can execute your EDM effectively and gain valuable insights about your customers.

2. Collect Your Customers’ Details and Segment Them

The more contact details you have on your database, the more likely it is that you can find a valuable customer. There are several ways you can gather your customers’ contact details. You can offer free ebooks or consultations about your services and products for example. Or, if you have a website, which is a must if you want to create a good online presence, you can always gain a good lead by having a landing page with strong CTA’s to sign-up for your website’s newsletter.

Once you have enough leads, ask them to provide more data about themselves. This data will help you to segment your customers better. With good and accurate segmentation, you can craft a good message for your leads and turn them into customers. There are several basic categories that you can use to segment your customers: age, gender, education, occupation, income, and so on.

3. Craft Your Message

Once you have enough data about your customers, it is time to craft a message for them. There are several tips that you can follow to create a good EDM message:

4. Keep It Simple

This is the number one rule that you will often encounter in any marketing strategy. Your products or services might be a high-tech cutting edge technology but that does not mean you should speak to your customers in technical jargon or scientific term. Throw most of them away. Speak in simple language.

Make a goal or purpose of your message. What do you want to convey in this particular email? Do you want to tell your audience about the upcoming sale? Or that your company has this new product that can help this particular segment of your customers? Once you have a goal, create a structure for your message so that your customers can understand your message better.

Do not forget that you are competing with tons of emails that your customers might receive in one day. Try to come up with catchy and engaging email subjects that make your customers interested in opening your email.

5. Target a Specific Audience

With EDM, you just do not send the same email to your whole customers. You need to have a specific audience in mind and think about what might interest them and what benefits that they care about from your products or services. In short, be customer-centered in creating your EDM message.

6. Mind Your EDM Design

A great designed EDM can always help you to make your customers click on the CTA’s that will generate sales for you. Great designs also help you to convey your brand. If you do not have an in-house graphic team, it is always a good idea to invest some of your money to hire one.

Other than that, you also need to make sure that your design is mobile-responsive. More than 40%f of emails are opened on a mobile device. This means that you need to consider the size of your font, images, and so on. Again, hiring a graphic designer can help you to make a good EDM design.

7. Have Strong and Clear Call-To-Actions (CTA’s)

Your message has a goal, nice designs, and people want your products or services. What should they do? What is the next step for them? This is where you turn people into customers with strong and clear CTA’s. Make sure to align the goal of your message and CTA’s. For example, if your goal is to inform customers that a new product is coming next month, your CTA’s can tell them to pre-order the product.

8. Keep Track of Your Performance

Make sure to evaluate your EDM marketing regularly. Keep track of how many people open your email and find out which part makes people open or do not open your email. Find out whether your CTA has successfully turned people into customers or not. Track how many people share your email with others.

This is the biggest reason why you should use an EDM platform. Platforms such as MailChimp allow you to get all the data you need to measure your EDM performance. Most of them also offer suggestions and templates that you can apply to make your EDM more successful.

9. Create A Campaign

The main difference between email marketing and EDM is that EDM does not only sell your product but also offers your customers more benefits. For example, you can create a campaign where you distribute some coupons for your upcoming sales. You can also do EDM sales to welcome old-time customers when they come back to you by throwing a special discount.

How Strikingly Can Help You Run EDM Marketing

When it comes to marketing, online presence becomes more and more important as people are now going online when they are looking for something. Having a website can help you to build an online presence.

But what does having a website have to do with EDM?

Well, with Strikingly, you can create a website to gather your customers’ contact details and run EDM marketing at the same time. Strikingly allows you to create a great landing page that can convert visitors into leads. Once you have a lead, you are just one step away from gaining a customer.

You can also integrate your MailChimp account with your website. This way, every contact you ever receive from your website can be immediately recorded to your MailChimp and ready to be used for your EDM marketing.

You can also utilize the newsletter feature provided by Strikingly to help you run a smooth EDM campaign. The newsletter feature allows you to send up to 2.000 newsletters each month and you can even send a newsletter from your custom domain.

Now you know what EDM means. With EDM, you need to segment your customers based on the data that you have. Next, you need to craft the message that resonates and speaks directly with the segment that you target. You also run several campaigns with your email; veteran comeback promotion, coupon distribution, and so on. Your EDM campaign also runs alongside your other marketing strategy, such as social media marketing.

Are you ready to grow your business using EDM campaigns? Start EDM marketing today with Strikingly!