In the digital marketing and e-commerce strategy video, you’ll learn about the importance of branding and its relationship to marketing and sales. Brands are more than just a business name – they encompass the values, culture, design elements, and tone of voice that influence public perception. Understanding branding is crucial for successful digital marketing and sales efforts because it guides a company’s mission, values, and unique offerings.
Digital marketing strategies play a significant role in building brand equity and recognition. By running ad campaigns and using various online channels, businesses can shape public perception of their brand and communicate their values, personality, and perspective. This, in turn, influences how people think and feel about the brand, ultimately creating trust and loyalty among consumers.
Creating a digital marketing strategy involves thorough research of your target audience, setting meaningful goals, and determining the most effective tactics and media mix to guide customers through the digital marketing funnel. Understanding these concepts will equip you with the knowledge and skills needed to execute and contribute to successful digital marketing strategies, even as you start your career in the industry. So, buckle up and get ready to dive into the world of digital marketing and e-commerce strategy. Exciting times await! [MUSIC PLAYING]
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Video Transcript
Hi, there. Glad to have you back. In the last part of the course, we explored what digital marketing and e-commerce can do for brands. You learned how customer journey maps can help companies understand their customers and nurture relationships over time. You also discovered how they use digital marketing funnels
To raise awareness, encourage consideration, drive conversions, and foster loyalty. By learning about these concepts, you’re starting to build a strong foundation for the next phase of your career. In this part of the course, you’ll learn that a funnel fits into a larger digital marketing strategy. You’ll explore the relationship between branding and digital
Marketing, and some specific ways companies can build their brands. You’ll also find out what goes into planning a digital marketing strategy and get to know some of the most common channels and tactics they involve, like search engine optimization, social media marketing, and email marketing. Using these channels, businesses can attract customers,
Drive sales, and maintain relationships over time. Creating a digital marketing strategy is one of the most effective things brands can do to reach customers. So it’s crucial to understand how they work, even if you’re just starting out in the industry. In fact, one of the first things I did when starting out
As a product marketing manager was collaborating on digital marketing strategies for social media. I worked hands-on in developing ways to reach and engage our target audience. Digital marketing strategies are so important because they ensure that a brand’s digital marketing and sales activities all work together toward a common goal.
I’m so excited to get started. And I hope you are too. [MUSIC PLAYING] So far, I’ve said a lot about brands, how they find their audiences, how they engage with customers, and how they build loyalty and boost sales. But what exactly is a brand? And how does it relate to digital marketing
And e-commerce? In this video, we’ll explore why understanding brands is so important for digital marketing. A brand is how a business or organization is perceived by the public. There are a lot of factors that can influence a brand, like values, culture, design elements, and tone of voice.
And companies can do things to build their brands. But a brand isn’t a physical asset like a product or service. Products and services are the things the business sells, like clothing, software, or entertainment. A brand is more like a personality or a reputation.
It’s the sum of who you are and what people think about and your products. So why is it important to know about brands and their value? Because a company’s brand guides all of their marketing and sales efforts. Before they can even start thinking about ads or promotion, companies
Need to understand their mission, values, and unique offerings. Marketing efforts can and should change with the times. But a brand identity is permanent. Think of it this way. If a brand is who you are, marketing is how you get people’s attention. So a company can pour tons of resources
Into a digital marketing strategy, but without a strong brand identity, no one’s going to remember who they are. Likewise, they can have great values and amazing products, but they still need marketing to build brand recognition and drive sales. A brand is the foundation of a successful digital marketing strategy.
But digital marketing can also affect public perception of your brand. You can’t have one without the other. A strong brand can be incredibly valuable. And digital marketing can make it even stronger. For example, digital marketing campaigns can help increase value through brand equity. What is brand equity?
It’s the value consumers attribute to one brand’s offering when compared with similar products from another brand. When a brand has positive equity, it means consumers feel good about the brand and might pay more for it than an identical product from another company. For example, let’s say we have two bottles of sunscreen
With identical ingredients, one from a known and trusted brand and the other from a lesser known brand. Brand equity is how much more customers are willing to pay for the brand they know and trust than the other one, even though they have the same ingredients. The trust people have in the familiar brand
Adds to its overall value. Digital marketing is one of the ways businesses build that trust. When they run an ad campaign, those ads don’t just get consumers to take notice, they can also help shape public perception of the brand. Digital marketing can communicate a brand’s values, personality, and perspective,
Which can influence how people think of them. All right, time to review. A brand is more than just another word for a business. It’s how customers think and feel about a company and its products. It’s also the foundation for successful marketing and sales strategies. Digital marketing, in turn, can help build brand equity,
Recognition, and trust. Moving forward, we’ll begin to explore how brands create digital marketing strategies that support their larger goals. [MUSIC PLAYING] Now that you understand the relationship between branding and marketing, it’s time to get deeper into how brands use digital marketing strategies to reach business goals.
When you’re just starting out in digital marketing or e-commerce, you probably won’t be responsible for creating a digital marketing strategy. Unless you’re working at a small company, setting a strategy is usually a broad collaborative effort. But you’ll definitely help execute the strategy, even if it’s set by others.
That’s why it’s important for you to understand what a digital marketing strategy is and what goes into building one. Simply put, a digital marketing strategy is a plan for achieving specific goals through online channels to support and advance business objectives. So now let’s discuss what actually goes into creating a digital marketing strategy.
Before you can start planning things like ad campaigns or social media outreach, you need to research your audience and set meaningful goals. These steps will tell you who you’re trying to reach and what you want to accomplish. You’ll learn more about how to do these things later in the program.
All you need to know right now is that they’re essential to the success of any digital marketing strategy. Once you’ve completed your research and set your goals, it’s time to work out a strategy. That means you’re using what you’ve learned to guide customers through each stage
Of the digital marketing funnel with the most effective tactics and media mix. Media mix refers to the combination of digital channels used to reach your goals and how you divide your budget among them. These are all the activities that go into your marketing funnel. To select your media mix, you’ll first
Review your existing media content to find out if there are any gaps. After that, you can decide which channels to focus on, what content and campaigns to run on those channels, and how to allocate your budget. Let’s try an example. Imagine you’re part of a team that’s
Working with a high-end jewelry retailer who wants to drive a 30% increase in revenue within three years. You know that jewelry customers can take a long time to go from awareness to purchase. So you pick marketing goals that support movement through the funnel, bringing in new customers and nurturing existing leads more effectively.
These are upper and middle funnel concerns that should boost sales over time. That means you’ll need to concentrate on raising awareness and encouraging consideration to achieve them. Here’s a simplified version of a digital marketing strategy for these goals. To increase awareness and draw in new customers,
Your team puts 40% of its budget toward upper funnel efforts. From your research, you know that video ads are the most effective way for raising awareness among your target audience. Another 40% of your budget goes to driving leads in the middle of the funnel. You use this money to engage customers
Across different channels, like social media and a paid ad campaign, to reach customers who are actively researching jewelry purchases. The last 20% is for serving product-focused ads to website visitors and email marketing. The goal of the email campaign is to turn those leads you nurtured in the upper funnel into paying customers.
Each part of your funnel is important, but most of your budget goes to the top and middle sections to help you reach new customers and nurture leads. Once you have a strategy in place, you can start creating the content you’ll need to run your campaigns. That includes everything from email templates
To video animations, ad copy, and banner images. Lastly, you’ll need a plan to measure and analyze the results of your efforts so you know how you can improve in the future. That one’s really important. And we’ll explore some ways to do that later in this course. And there you have it.
There’s a lot that goes into creating a digital marketing strategy. But remember, this is a team effort. You may only be responsible for things like aligning budgets, to marketing activities, or analyzing the results of a campaign. Let’s recap. To plan an effective digital marketing strategy, you first need to research your audience
And set goals that support the business overall. Next you review your existing media for gaps, select marketing channels, and plan the content you’ll use to reach your goals. Finally, you’ll create a plan to measure and analyze results. And if all this seems like a lot, don’t worry. We’ll break everything down for you
Over the course of this program. Coming up, we’ll learn more about setting effective goals for your marketing strategy. [MUSIC PLAYING] So far, we’ve covered the basic elements of digital marketing strategy, the importance of customer research, and what goes into customer personas. Now let’s think about the next part of the process,
Setting goals for a digital marketing strategy. We all set goals, whether in our professional or personal lives. But we’re more likely to reach our goals if we’re clear about why they matter and what they involve. That’s as true at all levels of a business as it is for individuals.
Every company, department, team, and employee benefits from setting clear and relevant goals to guide their work. You already know that digital marketing goals should support a business’s larger goals. But what’s the difference between a marketing goal and a business goal? And how do you make sure they’re aligned? Let’s start with business goals.
Business goals are desired aims, achievements, or outcomes for a business. They’re typically big, long-term, and have the potential to affect an entire company. They include things like increasing profits, gaining new customers, improving customer service, raising productivity, or launching new products or services. Marketing goals tend to be smaller, more targeted,
And you guessed it, related to marketing activities. There are specific objectives in a marketing plan or strategy that should support a business’s larger aims. Some common marketing goals include raising brand awareness, increasing web traffic, generating new leads, and driving sales or conversions. So how do you connect a marketing goal,
Like raised brand awareness, to a business goal, like increased profits? For starters, both your business goals and your marketing goals need to be specific and measurable. So for example, let’s say there’s a company that makes photo editing software, and they want to expand their customer base. A well-defined version of this business goal
Could be something like, grow our number of active customers by 25% over the next two years by adding five frequently-requested features to our software. That’s way more specific, right? It tells you what they’re going to do, how they plan to do it, and when they want to get it done.
You’ll learn more about setting well-defined goals later in this course. For now, let’s consider this goal from a marketing perspective. What kinds of digital marketing goals could help this company expand its active user base? How about increasing website traffic? After all, people need to visit the website to sign up for an account.
But more website traffic doesn’t necessarily equal more new users. It would depend on how many of those visitors are new versus existing customers and what they’re doing once they get to the site. So increasing website traffic might work, but maybe there’s a better option. What about generating new leads?
Since the lead is someone who was already interested in a company, lead generation is more likely to result in more sign ups than general website traffic. A well-defined version of that goal could be, we will increase our lead generation by 40% in the next year by running upper-funnel ads that
Highlight our new features and increasing our mid-funnel budget by 20%. By raising awareness of the new features and increasing the budget for activities that create new leads, the marketing goal supports the business goal of growing its user base. That’s one example of how a marketing goal can support a business goal.
But there are a lot more. In fact, you can think of business goals like the top part of a pyramid. There are a lot of different goals below that support them. So a digital marketing strategy can even have multiple goals that build toward that top business objective.
And you may also have goals for each part of your strategy. For example, you could set goals specifically for your social media or email marketing efforts. When all these smaller goals are aligned to the big things the business wants to achieve, they are much more likely to reach those aims. Let’s recap.
Well-defined goals are important at all levels of a business. Business goals are long-term aims that can impact a company at all levels. Marketing goals are specific to marketing efforts, but should always contribute to business-wide aims. In the next lesson, we’ll explore some of the tactics and channels brands
Can use to advance their marketing and business goals. Meet you there. [MUSIC PLAYING] In the last lesson, you learned all about creating a digital marketing strategy. We covered customer and competitor research, setting marketing goals to align with business goals, and what to consider when selecting digital channels. Let’s expand on that last point.
There are a lot of digital channels to pick from when planning strategies and campaigns, from email to social media, to video, and beyond. But all those channels fit into three main categories of digital media– paid, owned, and earned. And a strong digital strategy takes advantage of all of them.
First, paid media is exactly that. It’s any form of digital promotion a brand pays to put online. Some examples of paid media include banner ads, video ads, social media ads, shopping ads, and pop-ups. You’ll learn more about some of these types of paid ads later in the course.
The big advantage of paid ads is that they produce results quickly. The downside is that those results go away instantly when you stop paying for them. And paying for ads can get expensive over time. That’s why paid media is just one piece of a larger digital strategy.
Paid ads can lead directly to purchases, but they also help drive traffic to a business’s owned and earned media channels as well. Now let’s move on to the second type, owned media. Owned media refers to all the digital content a brand fully controls. Owned media content can be persuasive.
But unlike paid media ads, it doesn’t advertise or sell products directly. Instead, it provides value by giving customers what they need in order to make informed decisions. Think of it this way. If paid ads brings consumers to a company’s website, owned content is what convinces them to stay.
Owned media includes things like website content, blogs, eBooks, and social media content. Documents like white papers and case studies can also inspire confidence by explaining why brands make certain decisions and conveying the results through real-world examples. The thing about own media is that it can’t do much on its own.
No matter how great a company’s website or case studies are, they can’t educate customers who don’t know they exist. Businesses can bring customers to their own content through paid ads and ranking highly on search engine results pages. We’ll break down some ways to improve search rankings in a bit.
Right now, let’s move on to the last type of digital media, earned. Earned media is any positive digital exposure generated through personal or public recommendations. Companies don’t create or own earned media. And they can’t pay for it directly. It’s generated by customers in response to things like product quality and customer
Service in addition to successful marketing campaigns. So if a brand starts a formal partnership with an influencer, that’s paid advertising. But if a customer likes a product so much that they tell their friends about it for free, that’s earned media. Basically, it’s the reputation a brand builds for being
Great at what they do. Earned media can take the form of social media mentions, blog posts, written or video reviews, or positive press coverage, like product profiles or best of lists. Customer-generated content can help businesses sell products. But it does way more than that.
It also helps brands reach new markets and build public trust. Before we move on, let’s review. To be successful online, brands use a combination of paid, owned, and earned media. Paid media is advertising you pay for, like banner or video ads. Owned media is content a brand creates and controls,
Like website content, blogs, or case studies. Earned media is positive, customer-generated content that raises awareness and enhances a brand’s reputation. Now that you know about the different types of digital media, you’re ready to learn more about the specific tactics and channels brands use to reach customers. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Have you ever wondered how a search engine decides which results go at the top of a page and which go at the bottom? What about the results that end up on page 2, 20, or 200? Search engines work by exploring and indexing the content of billions of web pages across the internet.
When you search for a term, the search engine uses an algorithm to rank the results by relevance and quality. Those rankings matter because search engines are the most common method people use to find products and services online. And the internet is a crowded place. Let’s try an experiment.
Say that I want to buy a plant for my home office, maybe a small cactus. If I search the web for the phrase “potted cactus for sale,” I get over 26 million results. That’s more than 2 million pages of links. And just how many of those results
Do you think I’m going to click on before I find the cactus I want? It’s a lot less than 26 million. So ranking in search results is essential for reaching customers. But how do you make sure you’re producing content that a search engine recognizes as relevant and high quality?
The answer is a process called Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short. SEO is a set of practices designed to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to a website. At the most basic level, it involves optimizing content around commonly used search terms, also called keywords, to improve a website’s position
In search engine results pages. Search Engine results pages, or SERPs, are the pages of results produced when someone performs a search. Typically, the higher a site ranks in these search listings, the more likely customers are to click on it. And the more visitors you have, the more chances
You have to drive sales, establish authority, and build your brand. SEO and paid ads each have advantages and disadvantages. You’ve already learned that ads produce results quick. But those results disappear when you stop paying for them. With SEO, it’s the reverse. The exposure you get from good SEO
Can last much longer than paid ads, but rising in the SERP rankings can take time and efforts, which is why SEO and paid ads are often used together. SEO has been around since the early days of the internet. And it’s evolved a lot in that time.
These days, it involves a lot of different activities. Let’s go over a few SEO basics now– keyword research, quality content, and website structure. First, keyword research is the process of identifying common search terms and phrases consumers use to find products or services online. For example, some common keywords
For a company that sells musical instruments might include guitar, drum set, or grand piano for sale. Part of SEO is finding the keywords that are most relevant for your audience and products and making sure they’re part of your content. But you can’t just pack your website full of keywords and expect good results.
You also need quality content that’s useful and usable for your customers. That means not only writing great content, but keeping it up to date. You want website content to match a business’s current offerings and reflect keyword trends. Quality content is a win-win because it’s
Helpful for customers and tends to work better in SERPs. Your content should also be easy to find. So organizing the site in a user-friendly way is important too. A well-structured website makes it easier for both search engines and customers to navigate your content. Time to recap.
SEO is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to a website from search engines. Businesses can improve their search engine results page rankings, or SERPs, in a few different ways, including keyword research, creating useful usable content, and a clear website structure. Of course, there’s a lot more to good SEO
Than we’ve covered here. In the next part of the course, you’ll find out more about SEO as well as some paid advertising strategies. [MUSIC PLAYING] So far in this lesson, you’ve learned about three types of digital media– paid, owned, and earned. You also discovered how brands use SEO to rank and search
Engine results pages and increase traffic to their own content. Now we’re going to explore paid advertising in a little more depth. You’ll recall that paid advertising is any form of digital promotion a brand pays to put online. A big part of their promotion is search engine marketing, or SEM.
SEM is the process of generating traffic to a website through paid ads that appear on search engine results pages. SEM ads are the ones that appear above or below the regular search listings in a SERP. A quick note on terminology here. Some companies think of SEM as a broad umbrella
That includes both paid ads and search engines and SEO. We’re going to simplify things and say that SEO has to do with the ranking of search listings within SERPs, while SEM happens through paid ads. SEM starts out the same way that SEO does, with keyword research. So if your company sells vitamins,
You might want to serve an ad to customers who search for the phrase “vitamin C.” Once you have your keywords, you enter an ad auction to bid on them. An ad auction is how a search engine determines which ads to display and the order they’re shown when someone performs a search.
When you bid on a keyword, you decide how much you’re willing to pay when someone searches for a term and clicks your ad. This is known as pay-per-click or PPC because you pay only when someone clicks on your ad. The amount you pay when someone clicks on a PPC ad
Is called the cost-per-click or CPC. Now, just like in every other auction, it’s possible to lose your bid. That means your ad won’t come up every time someone searches for your keyword. Search engines decide which ads to display based on factors like quality and maximum bid amount.
And you’ll learn more about them later on in the program. SEM is a great way to reach specific customers quickly. But it has other advantages too. When a customer finds a website through search listings, they’ll usually end up on that website’s homepage. But paid ads give you control over
Where those visitors land on your site, whether that’s a sign-up form or a specific product page. But one of the biggest benefits of paid ads is that they create opportunities for remarketing. Remarketing allows you to identify previous customers or visitors to your website and serve
Them paid ads on other sites and social media platforms. Have you ever browsed a website for a pair of jeans and then noticed those same jeans popping up on other sites? That’s remarketing. It’s a way of recapturing the attention of people who are already interested in your brand.
And that’s really important because most website visitors leave before completing an action like making a purchase. Maybe they want to consider their options or do more research before buying. Remarketing encourages those people to come back by reminding them why they clicked on your ad in the first place. Website visitors and previous customers
Are also the segment of your audience that’s most likely to convert. So those extra reminders can have a big impact. You’ll be able to explore all of these concepts more later in the program. Right now, it’s time to review. SEM is a way for brands to generate traffic
To their websites by placing paid ads on search engine results pages. It uses a model called pay-per-click advertising, which charges you when someone clicks on your ad. Paid ads have some big advantages, like reaching customers quickly, controlling where visitors land on your site, and remarketing. Next up, you’ll learn about some other types
Of paid advertising for attracting and converting customers. [MUSIC PLAYING] Now that you’ve learned about SEO, SEM, and display ads, it’s time to introduce two more channels businesses can use to reach their digital marketing goals– social media marketing and email marketing. Social and email each have different strengths
Which makes them much more effective together than separately. So before we discuss each channel on its own, let’s go over what they do well and how they can work together to raise awareness and maintain customer relationships over time. Brands can do a lot on social media.
Because so many people are on social media, it’s one of the most effective channels for finding new audiences. With social media accounts, companies can engage with customers, run ads, and even generate earned media through viral content. But social media also has one big drawback. Businesses can control what they post to their accounts,
But they can’t control the platforms themselves. So if a particular platform shuts down or changes their algorithm, it can affect our brand’s ability to reach their followers overnight. The good news is that social media can help brands grow their email lists, which they own completely.
Email marketing doesn’t have the reach of social media, but it also doesn’t need to. That’s because email marketing is about nurturing relationships with people who are already interested in a brand. And because businesses control their email lists, they can nurture those relationships over time. Email marketing is also incredibly cost effective.
On average, it brings them more than $40 for every dollar spent. And there you have it. Together, email and social media marketing helps brands increase their reach, raise awareness, and connect with customers online. You’ll learn more about both of these channels and how they work together in just a bit. Meet you there.
[MUSIC PLAYING] Throughout this course, we’ve stressed how important it is to find and connect with target audiences where they are online. One of the best places to do that is on social media. Well over half the people in the entire world are on social media. And that number is only growing.
Maybe one audience likes Twitter more than TikTok, or another prefers Facebook to Instagram, but no matter what a business sells, chances are good that social media is a key part of their marketing strategy. Social media marketing is the practice of creating and publishing content for social media
Platforms in order to drive engagement and promote a brand or product. Creating social media content might seem simple. After all, people post interesting, funny, or touching content to their personal accounts every day. But there’s a lot more to social media marketing than writing clever or informative posts. Social media marketing involves a lot
Of the same concerns as a company’s overall digital marketing strategy, like increasing engagement, expanding their reach, and building their brand. It’s just that all of those activities happen on social media platforms. So now let’s explore some of the ways businesses use social media to amplify their efforts and reach their digital marketing goals.
We can break down these activities into five categories known as the five pillars of social media marketing. These pillars include strategy, planning and publishing, listening and engagement, analytics and reporting, and paid social media. Let’s start with strategy. Before planning your content or campaign, you need to know who your audience is
And which social platforms they use. So if your audience is mostly interested in content about home decorating, you might not post on a platform that caters to business and networking. Posting the right content in the right places can save both time and money. To know what types of content to create,
You’ll also need to understand your goals. For example, if you want to build community around your brand, you might focus on interactive content, like polls or questions and answer sessions. But if your goal is to promote a new product, running a contest or giveaway might get better results.
Understanding your audience and having clear goals will help you create effective, relevant content. Once you’ve set your strategy and content, you’ll need to consider planning and publishing. That means deciding when to post content and how often to post content. The goal is to engage followers enough so
That they remember you, but not so often that you overwhelm them. Next up is social listening and engagement. Once your content is out in the world, you can track and analyze social conversations and mentions related to your brand. This could mean monitoring direct responses to a brand’s
Social content or earned media, like posts about its products, which are great ways to find out how customers feel about your business. The insights you gained can help you decide how to respond to and engage with customers on social platforms. Those responses are important because they
Can affect your brand image and customer relationships. Think of social listening and engagement like a conversation. First, a business publishes content, then they listen to how their audience responds. By paying attention to what their audience says, they can determine the best way to reply. For example, if someone posts about how helpful they
Find a particular tool, like a habit tracking app, the brand could respond with thanks and encouragement. But if they post that the app isn’t working correctly, they could share troubleshooting tips instead. Next, you’ll use analytics and reporting to find out how your content or campaigns are performing and communicate results to others.
Social media analytics tools can track and measure things, like comments, shares, follows, or clicks. They can tell you how many people are using a hashtag or the number of positive mentions over time. Businesses can use these insights to respond to trends or guide future strategies. Finally, there’s paid social media.
Paid social media ads have a lot of the same benefits as paid ads for other channels. It can expand a brand’s reach beyond its existing customer base and allow them to remarket products. But advertising on social media has some other advantages too. For one thing, social platforms provide more detailed user
Information than search engines. That means brands serve ads to highly specific customer groups. Finally, paid social media is a good way for brands to grow their email lists. By linking ads to email sign-up forms, businesses can contact their followers directly and send them special offers. Like any digital marketing strategy,
Social media marketing involves getting to know your audience, finding them online, and setting meaningful goals. Only then can you plan, create, and publish content. Next, social listening and measurement can tell you how to engage with your audience effectively and refine your strategy. Lastly, with paid social ads, you can expand your reach,
Address specific customers, and grow your email lists. Coming up, you’ll learn more about social media marketing and how to use email to maintain customer relationships. [MUSIC PLAYING] So far, you’ve learned that social media marketing enables brands to extend their reach and build a list of email subscribers. In this video, we’ll discuss some
Of the things brands can do with those subscriber lists once they have them. But before we get to that, let’s define what email marketing is and what it isn’t. First, most importantly, email marketing is not spam. Spam, also known as junk mail, refers to any unwanted emails sent out in bulk
To a mass recipient list. These are the emails that land in your inbox even though you never signed up for them. Spammers might make claims that are too good to be true or send the same content to everyone on their lists, regardless of their interests. And they’ll often send so many emails
That they end up annoying potential customers. So how is email marketing different from spam? Email marketing is when a brand sends messages to a list of existing subscribers to share information, drive sales, or create community. That means sending relevant, helpful content to people who’ve agreed to receive it.
When it’s done well, email marketing helps brands build and maintain relationships with potential and existing customers. So how do brands avoid coming across like spammers? How do they make sure they’re sending the right content to the right people at the right time? They use segmentation and personalization.
Let’s take these ideas one at a time. First, segmentation. Email segmentation is the practice of dividing an email subscriber list into smaller groups, or segments, based on criteria like interests, location, or purchase history. It allows brands to customize emails for different groups and send subscribers content that’s relevant to them.
And the more brands learn about their subscribers, the more they can segment their lists, which makes it easier to build relationships with customers. So if someone buys cat food from a pet store, they might appreciate getting ads about other cat-related products like treats or toys. But if they get a coupon for birdseed,
They might delete that email. And they could even unsubscribe altogether, which is the opposite of what the pet store wants. Let’s move on to personalization. While segmentation helps marketers decide what email content to send to which people, personalization is a process of customizing email content for individual subscribers.
That doesn’t mean writing a different email for every single subscriber. If email marketers did that, they wouldn’t have time for anything else. But there are some things they can do to deliver an experience that feels specific to each individual. Here are a few examples. Email marketers can address each recipient directly
By putting their name in the greeting or subject line, send promotions for special events like birthdays, holidays, or anniversaries, send messages that match where customers are in the marketing funnel. For example, an email about a loyalty program probably shouldn’t go to subscribers who are still at the consideration stage.
And finally, they can follow up on previous interactions, like asking a customer to share their opinion on a recent purchase. Now, the difference between email marketing and spam and how brands use techniques like segmentation and personalization to build and maintain customer relationships. Coming up, you’ll learn about some different types
Of emails that can engage, convert, and retain customers. Congratulations on finishing this video from the Google Digital Marketing and E-commerce Certificate. Access the full experience on Coursera, including job search help, and start earning the official certificate by clicking the icon or the link in the description.
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