Why is Email Marketing Important for Food Brands?
In today’s ever-changing digital marketing landscape, there can be a big temptation to put your money, time and energy on the latest technology. However, we can’t forget email. Here are few key points as to why email is a vital part of marketing for your food brand:
- You can actually own your audience. What does that mean? When you have an audience that you’ve worked hard to build on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, those platforms can change the rules. When they change the rules, that changes how many people you can reach. Although not 100% of people will open every email you send, you still have the direct ability to reach and engage with them. You can even follow up with them!
- It’s a very direct connection with people. Everyone has email, everyone checks their email on a regular basis, so you’re really able to get directly in front of the person that you’re trying to reach and communicate with. As a food brand, you’re at an advantage! Get creative and descriptive with your copy. There’s a good chance that someone’s stomach is growling as they’re checking their email throughout the day.
- It’s transferable! If you have an email list for one brand and you launch a new food brand, you can promote that brand to that list, so it’s easily transferable.
- Another form of communication. It’s never a great idea to go all in on one platform for various reasons, but one of the things you can do with email is really curate and aggregate content from other platforms to increase your reach. If you have great posts going up on social, you can then highlight that in email. If you have a blog, you can also highlight that in email. It’s a solid way to communicate with your customers and give them multiple options as to how they want to consume your content.
- eCommerce. It’s still one of the top ways to convert sales. According to MarketingSherpa, over 72% of customers prefer email as their mode of business communication and 91% of Americans are eager to receive promotional emails–that’s huge! Here are a few types of emails you can use to drive sales:
- Welcome email – get new customers for your food brand by sending a coupon code
- Abandoned cart email – encourage interested shoppers to pick up where they’ve left off
- Upselling – show them add-ons or products with a higher price point
- Cross-selling – recommend similar products that they’d be interested in
- Post-purchase emails, such as an upsell or cross-sell email, are very successful because the customer is already familiar with the brand and has shown a willingness to buy. If you have it all set up and tied into your eCommerce platform, you can see the average order value, how many things they’ve purchased, which products they purchased, when they purchased, and other information. This allows you to segment and communicate with your audiences in a much smarter and more direct way.
- You can get specific with your messaging. This is one of the coolest parts! Unlike social, you can segment out certain customers that have bought specific products, signed up for certain events, or really whatever data you choose to capture. This will increase your engagement, your open rates, and your click-through rates with email. There are even ways to give an email a personalized touch for one specific customer.
- Tracking & Analytics. Emails are a great way to see open rates, click-through rates, and engagement with your brand from an individual basis. With social media, you don’t get that one-to-one information. You do get that with email. You can see one subscriber that came from that trade show in Anaheim and they’ve opened every single email, but they haven’t bought anything yet, then you can communicate with them in a very specific way. It’s a great tool for segmentation, which helps you then craft your communication for better results.
- Ad Retargeting. You can leverage a dedicated email list to retarget users on other ad platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube. You can also use an email list to build a lookalike audience to find people similar to those who have signed up.
What’s next? Collect emails!
Take the next step by adding a sign-up form on your website, acquiring emails from customer’s purchases on your site, and creating events. Don’t forget that the goal here is not just quantity, but to build a trusted relationship with the customer. Once you do this, you’ll be one step closer to utilizing one of the most powerful tools in digital marketing!
Have Questions? Ask us! We’re happy to dive in and help.
