What is EDM Marketing, and How Does it Work?

Electronic direct mail (EDM) is a digital marketing strategy that involves promoting your company’s products or services to current and potential customers who have opted in via email.

It takes a lot of effort to turn consumers into loyal customers in the digital age. Your audience wants to feel heard, appreciated, understood, and engaged. And why wouldn’t they when there are so many competitors to choose from?

EDM is about more than sending emails. It’s a multi-faceted strategy to nurture, engage, and convert customers across every touchpoint. We’ll explain how it works and how you can implement an EDM marketing strategy that boosts customer lifetime value (CLV).

Let’s start by clearing up some confusion. What’s the difference between EDM and email marketing?

EDM marketing is a comprehensive marketing strategy employing various forms of media, including emails, social media marketing, text messages, and print materials — all with the goal of engaging and converting customers.

The process always begins with a quality email list. A communication manager will gather contacts, often via lead magnets and marketing campaigns. This brand awareness stage will be familiar to you if you’re already experienced with email marketing. From there, though, the strategy gets more nuanced.

Once the business has its list, it will then be split into segments, either via demographics, psychographics, geographics, or behavioural traits. This is the crucial step that makes EDM so powerful.

The data from segmentation and analytics allow organisations to tailor their marketing approach based on the audience consistently. While companies may send out an ‘email blast’ initially, they can then follow up in various ways based on how different customer segments interact with the content.

This effectively creates a consistent feedback loop, allowing the business to consistently refine its approach, create hyper-personalised content, and send out a tailored email marketing campaign to each segment through different media channels. All of this makes it easier to build genuine, long-term customer relationships with existing and potential clients.

EDM marketing and email marketing may seem similar since both rely on opt-in email lists and prioritise nurturing leads. But there are key differences.

Email marketing is a fairly straightforward strategy. It involves obtaining a list of users (often those who opt in via a lead magnet) and then sending out emails to those users to engage, inform, nurture, or motivate them.

By contrast, EDM is far more nuanced.

• Media: Unlike traditional email marketing, which focuses solely on emails, EDM encompasses various media forms, including emails, social media, text messages, print materials, and more.
• Scope: Email marketing is often quite one-dimensional in its scope. EDM covers more touchpoints and offers more opportunities for businesses to engage with consumers.
• Targeting: EDM involves greater email personalisation. It empowers businesses to segment audiences based on data and then use this information to create tailored marketing strategies for each group.

EDM is a more complex, more time-consuming, but also generally more comprehensive strategy than email marketing. It considers more angles, covers more marketing channels, and helps to connect with customers on a deeper level, making it easier to get your marketing message across to new and current customers.

Before we detail how you can make your own strategy, let's recap the benefits of EDMs.

• Personalisation: The data you gain from EDM allows you to craft personalised emails for every segment. This helps you connect with your audience on a more personal level.
• Building trust: When you deliver personalised emails tailored to each user's needs and wants, this builds trust and improves your relationship with existing and potential customers.
• Customer retention: As you consistently personalise your marketing and meet your customer's needs, you'll find it a lot easier to retain these leads and cultivate brand loyalty.
• Long-term growth: EDM is a long-term strategy, and it gets better over time. The more data you gather, the easier it is to segment your audience through AB testing and deliver tailored strategies that engage and convert.

Cost-effectiveness: EDM is far more affordable than many other traditional marketing strategies. As you’re consistently gathering data on the emails you send, you can make informed decisions and allocate resources more efficiently for future marketing campaigns.

Let’s dive into the main portion of this guide. Here’s how to build an EDM campaign in seven steps.

Step 1: Choose your email service provider

An email service provider (ESP) is the backbone of a successful EDM campaign. It’ll allow you to build your list and send out automatic emails based on the parameters you set. The best ESPs also offer features for audience segmentation — a huge boon when you want to personalise your approach.

Search for an ESP that best aligns with your business objectives. It’s also handy if they include analytics so you can track the success of your EDM marketing campaign.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s email marketing tools include all of the EDM features you need to deliver personal, engaging content to your audience. With easy scalability, unlimited content creation, and AI-powered support, our platform can help you connect with your customers and get the most out of your marketing spend.

Step 2: Create your email list

With your provider selected, it’s time to create your subscriber list. This is the list of leads that you’ll segment and eventually create tailored strategies for.

If you already have an email list, review it to ensure it’s clean and free of illegitimate names — your chosen ESP should be able to help with this.

If you’re building from scratch, the easiest way to get started is with a lead magnet. For instance, to get people to opt-in to your list, you could offer:

• A free eBook, guide, whitepaper, or templates
• A quiz that delivers results through email
• Exclusive videos, case studies, infographics, or blog resources
• Access to a course or webinar
• Free shipping, discounts, or coupons
• Free consultations or product samples

Remember to offer your audience multiple ways to opt in. The more unique ways you can provide for people to sign up, the easier lead capture becomes.

You also shouldn’t neglect targeting here. Know your buyer persona inside out and take the time to understand what your audience is looking for. With that knowledge in mind, you can employ highly personalised CTAs, forms, and benefits that encourage your target audience to opt in.

Step 3: Segment your list

Next, it’s time to segment your list. This is the key process for effective EDM marketing campaigns. It’ll allow you to divide your audience into groups and consequently tailor your marketing efforts for each segment’s needs.

There are four types of segmentation that work best:

• Demographic: Segmenting your audience by quantitative factors, such as gender, age, family status, occupation, and income levels.
• Psychographic: Using psychographics, group individuals based on shared characteristics, beliefs, motivations, personality traits, and interests.
• Geographical: Separating individuals by their geographic location, either by country, region, city, or even neighbourhood.
• Behavioural: Segmenting consumers based on their behaviour towards your brand. This complex method includes metrics like customer loyalty, purchasing behaviour, engagement level, and browsing habits.

Be as precise as possible with your audience segmentation. Doing so will make your personalised marketing materials more effective.

Step 4: Build your email campaign

While EDM can include any number of media forms, it’s always best to start with an email.

Not sure where to begin? To kick things off, you can start with a simple introduction to your brand. You could also opt for a product or special offer announcement. It’s okay to send a batch email at this stage, though if you prefer, you can also design effective emails for each of your different audience segments.

There’s no shortage of ways to deliver an effective email marketing campaign, and we won’t get into too many details in this guide, but here are some general tips.

• Keep it concise and conversational.
• Make sure your emails are consistent with your brand.
• Let your audience know they can unsubscribe at any time.
• Make the subject line a focal point.
• Add engaging visuals to make your content more appealing.

Step 5: Set up autoresponders

Autoresponders are emails that are sent out automatically to subscribers based on specific triggers your audience initiates and can be used in conjunction with AI to automate customer service.

These triggers could be specific actions, such as someone making a purchase or unsubscribing from the email list. They could also be set up in specific timeframes, such as ten minutes after someone abandons their cart or three months after they join the email list. As always, your chosen email marketing platform can help you establish these useful automatic responses.

Step 6: Track your EMD campaign’s progress

The beauty of EDM is that it gets more effective the more data you have to feed into the strategy. Analyse the data you receive from your initial email blasts and use this to refine your strategy going forward. Here are some common metrics to track.

• Open rates: The number of recipients who open your email.
• Clickthrough rates: How many people click a link within the email?
• Unsubscribe rates: What percentage of people have unsubscribed?
• Sharing rates: The number of recipients who forward the email.
• Conversion rates: The percentage of people who complete a desired action.

Once you have data at your disposal, you can begin to experiment with different approaches for different segments via A/B tests.

Step 7: Refine your EDM campaign

The journey doesn’t end once you’ve sent out your initial batch-and-blast emails to your list. Once you’ve gathered some initial data, you should continually evolve and refine your campaign goals to better meet the wants and needs of customers.

You may decide to drip-feed content over time via email, personalising your campaign strategy for different segments to build deeper connections with your audience. Alternatively, you might decide to follow up on emails with different forms of content, like social media posts, experimenting with different Google Ads formats or SMS marketing.

The best part about EDM is that there really is no limit to the direction in which you can take your strategy. It all depends on the audience you're appealing to and the data you receive from your initial approach.

For instance, if you send out an email blast to one of your psychographic segments and find that 35% of recipients viewed the email, you can then split your group into openers and non-openers. From there, you can create two new emails — one to nurture those who opened the email and the other to entice those who weren't interested at first.

Similarly, if you find that 3% of those who opened the email made a purchase, you can use this data to refine your CTA and launch a content marketing campaign explaining why your product is the clear choice over the competition. This data can also help you refine your ideal customer profile (IDP) going forward.

We're only scratching the surface here, and the options are endless. And to show that, we'll now run through some of the different types of EDM marketing available to you.

1. Welcome campaigns

Introducing new arrivals to your brand, often with helpful information or a coupon. For instance, offering someone 15% off for subscribing.

2. Product recommendations

Got a new product on the way? Re-releasing an old favourite? Let your email list know, especially if they've already bought from you.

3. Case studies

Testimonials and case studies add credibility to your brand. Send these to middle-of-the-funnel consumers who are deciding whether your product is for them.

4. Abandoned cart reminders

Set up an autoresponder after a fixed period when a customer leaves their cart without finishing the purchase.

5. Transactional emails

Similarly, when a customer makes that purchase, send them a confirmation email with all their details.

6. “We miss you” emails

For example, a customer stopped opening your emails or buying from your brand? Send them a re-engagement package with a coupon to bring them back.

7. Seasonal promotions

Launch a special promo when the holidays come around, or set up a birthday email for customers who’ve signed up to your website.

8. Limited-time offers

Set up flash sales for limited-time offers to convince hesitant customers to take action.

9. Invitations

Send out event or webinar invitations to get people invested in your brand story.

10. Content marketing emails

Send subscribers links to recent blogs, guides, videos, and infographics. This is an excellent way to encourage deeper exploration of relevant content.

11. “Find us on” emails

Encourage your audience to check out a specific post on social media that backs up your email marketing content.

12. Behaviour-based emails

Send out an email triggered by someone browsing your product page or clicking on a link.

On top of these email chains, there's also a wealth of other methods available:

• For instance, you could set up a content marketing campaign to release to consumers who have expressed interest in your product. This campaign could include blogs, social media posts and infographics that support your email content. Print ads can be hugely successful, too, depending on your audience.
• You can also use SMS messaging to your advantage. For instance, you could follow up a new product launch or an event invitation with a quick text to remind consumers to take action.

The most important part of this cross-channel marketing strategy is timing. All of these media types have their place, and it's when you choose to send them that matters. Set up a campaign for each of your segments, and be willing to adapt it as new data comes in.

EDM marketing is the ideal long-term strategy for engaging and connecting with customers. With enough time and data, you can tailor a personalised campaign that helps you reach your marketing objectives and drive enormous results for your brand.

The best place to start any successful EDM campaign is with a marketing platform that can handle all of your segmentation, content creation, marketing automation and analytics under one roof.

Salesforce's Email Marketing Tools can help you scale your campaign and deliver personalised experiences to potential and existing customers year-round. Watch the demo today to find out more.