Definition eDM – Electronic Direct Mail. Used to send emails to a customer email list of updates to the site or marketing promotions.
One of the best things you can do on your website is to grow an email list. Why? Because it’s a great way to connect with your audience and market your site, products and services. The bigger your email list the more chances you have to sell your products; it’s a numbers game. But there’s also a little thing called affiliate marketing.
How eDMs can help your business
Affiliate marketing is when a supplier of a product approaches you to sell their product on your site. When you make a sale of this product on your site you get a commission. This is where owning a well trafficked website and a large email list can be very lucrative.
Having a large email list enables you to send an eDM to your customer base promoting affiliate products and your own. It is a great way of communicating marketing campaigns on your website like End of Financial Year Sales (EOFY) or Christmas Sales. This way your customer base will always be in the know.
How I use eDMs to communicate to customers
My personal websites have email lists that I regularly broadcast to using the Mailchimp platform. I build eDM’s from scratch – write content, create the artwork, test and send. All of the eDM templates I use have been configured by myself using out of the box functionality and HTML coding for customisations.
My experience working for GE as a project manager gave me enormous exposure to email marketing. During my time at GE I built responsive (mobile friendly) eDM’s and broadcast them to audiences of 300,000+ customers. I also led the project to move all exisiting emails and templates to a newer Oracle Responsys platform.
Email platforms I am familiar with
- Salesforce Exact Target
- Mailchimp
- Oracle Responsys
- Marketo
- Concep
Technical skills building emails
- Build responsive eDM’s using code (media queries).
- Design email and make creative using Photoshop and Indesign.
- A/B testing.
- Analytics.
- Litmus testing for rendering on different email clients.