In this age of mass internet and social media usage, marketers are constantly utilizing email in their influencer campaign media strategies to reach their consumers on a more personal level. Email marketing is a highly effective digital marketing strategy of sending emails to customers and prospective customers by sharing news, updates, product spotlights, newsletters, and more. Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels, as Statista reports that 90% of 15-24-year-olds, 93.6% of 25-44-year-olds, 90.1% of 45-64-year-olds, and 84.1% of adult internet users above the age of 65 are on email. In fact, email marketing beats out search engines by 15% and social media by 22% in terms of effectiveness, according to SEO expert Neil Patel. As one of the most popular ways to drive visitors to a company’s website, email has become crucial to understanding the outcomes of successful marketing campaigns.
What Makes Email Marketing Beneficial For Influencer Campaigns?
From its inception, email has proved to be a highly efficient and powerful way to market to clients and potential clients. The use of email has grown and become more advanced, allowing marketers to improve brand awareness, nurture strong customer-brand relationships, promote certain products, share company news, tell authentic customer stories, and recruit influencers to share their reviews. As a cost-effective option that can connect brands to their audiences to increase sales, the return on investment is high. According to a study by the Data and Marketing Association, they found that for every $1 spent, email has an average $38 ROI.
Email marketing becomes especially compelling when influencers are involved. As an email marketer, familiarizing yourself with popular online influencers is a helpful addition to your marketing strategy. Nowadays, some digital marketing strategists would even say that knowing the proper ways to work with influencers is necessary. With these online creators, email campaign performance rises, as your readers are more inclined to value outside opinions, user-generated content, and the recommendations of public figures. In fact, according to Nielsen, 92% of consumers honor recommendations over traditional advertisements.
How to Create an Effective Email Marketing Influencer Campaign
Now that you know how exactly email marketing can help a brand amplify their influencer campaigns, it’s imperative to understand the ways to create an effective campaign. Here are some practical and useful tips to keep in mind:
1. Find the right influencer for your brand
To ensure that your campaign draws in many readers and subscribers, it’s imperative to choose an influencer that truly embodies your brand. While it may seem like the best idea to work with influencers with bigger followings, it’s much better to opt for an influencer that has a persona and values that align with your brand’s mission and identity.
Ask yourself: Does it make sense for this influencer to promote our products or services? Pay special attention to your audience, as a bad influencer partnership could hurt both your brand and the creator.
2. Consider working with micro-influencers
Especially if you’re aiming to reach a younger audience, working with smaller influencers can be beneficial because they receive stronger and more genuine engagement. More than 15% of all Instagram users count as micro-influencers, making them more relatable to their followers and much easier to find or contact.
They also usually have smaller rates than influencers with larger followings, allowing more wiggle room with your budget and opportunity to work with more than one creator.
3. Allow the influencers to add their personal flair
Especially when it comes to marketing to Gen Z and Millennials, ads that are highly scripted on email do not prove to be successful because they come off inauthentic. Rather, let the creators flex their creativity muscles. Take full advantage of their media content ideas and trust that they know the type of content their audience wants to see. This way, you’ll create a fresh, successful, and trustworthy campaign.
4. Offer incentives
To draw in more and more subscribers to your email list, offering incentives through your collaboration with an influencer is a great way to encourage users to sign up and read your updates. You can team up with your chosen creator to provide their audience free downloads, discount codes, blog links, exclusive updates on products, and sneak peeks at new releases.
5. Add an appropriate call-to-action
To yield great results from your campaigns, adding call-to-actions in your emails is essential. To build and maintain an engaged subscriber list, aim to provoke an immediate response by them that is beneficial for your brand.
For example, you can persuade your subscribers to visit your website, follow your social media channels, send in their photos with your product through an influencer-related hashtag, watch an influencer’s video reviewing your product, shop for a new product that has been promoted by your chosen creator, complete surveys, and more.
Email Marketing Examples: Take Note
Since email inboxes can easily get flooded with messages, taking note of the brands that attracted attention with their influencer campaigns provides valuable inspiration for your own. These email examples demonstrate the brilliant ways in which different companies have improved email engagement, worked with featured influencers and their content, and created personalized experiences. Read on to discover some great examples from some brands you already know and love:
Brooks Sports’ campaign with Desiree Linden
When Linden won the 2018 Boston Marathon, she made history as the first American woman to win the race in more than 30 years. For Brooks Sports, Linden’s shoe and apparel sponsor, her win gave them the opportunity to commemorate their partnership by creating an email campaign focused entirely on her accomplishment.
Through this campaign, Brooks Sports showed their commitment to their sponsored influencers and increased their sales by adding value to their products. When sending out their email, Brooks Sports included a strong call-to-action, “See Desiree’s go-to gear”, which encouraged readers to check out the products that Linden actively uses and recommends.
RedBubble’s Featured Artist Emails
RedBubble is a website that sells merchandise featuring designs from artists all over the world, which gives them the chance to feature popular submissions from the RedBubble community. User-generated content, or UGC, is any form of content that has been posted by users online that a brand can use to further promote their product and improve their relationship with their users by spotlighting their work.
Once an artist sees RedBubble feature their content, they’re more likely to forward it to everyone they know and improve their sales by highlighting certain merchandise and art. This method can be applied to any brand when it comes to UGC or promoting content created by sponsored influencers.
Stitcher’s “Recommended For You” Emails
When it comes to personalized experiences, Stitcher is an expert. Knowing that users often listen to the same podcast or struggle to find a new podcast to listen to, Stitcher decided to help out their email readers by listing out shows they have not discovered yet. The on-demand podcast/radio show app Stitcher sends emails that offer five links to trending shows they think the reader would be interested in based on the content they engage with the most. In terms of call-to-action, Stitcher consistently puts a button at the bottom of the email that opens the Stitcher app on a reader’s phone as soon as they click on it.
Overall, it’s clear that email marketing has changed the way companies reach out to their current users and potential clients, and it’s not going anywhere. Since 1978, email marketing has become a part of our everyday lives, as we check our emails constantly for work and personal communication. As more companies continue to use and optimize email for business, knowing the correct ways to incorporate email marketing into a media strategy is a crucial skill that can take any influencer campaign to the top.