We hear all the time how email marketers are constantly looking for ways to increase the reach to their target audiences. Email is usually the first method of choice. However, email is great for simple, one-on-one communication, but it is inherently limited by the inbox, open rates, and frequency. As an example, with prospecting emails an 8% open rate is a strong result, and the clicks generated from those opens have tremendous value. But, this still reaches only 8% of your target audience. Why leave the other 92% out? With a multi-channel promotion approach, your reach can be significantly increased by complimenting the inbox and serving more passive promotions on social media and/or across the web.
Adding display advertising to your marketing toolkit
When an ad campaign is run alongside an email campaign, it allows you to reach a much larger portion of your target audience than you would reach with email alone. Oftentimes, the passive marketing of display advertising can drive audience members to a website that would normally never be reached by stand-alone email. This tactic may be the perfect fit for audience members who never open unsolicited email, but who may be more likely to click through a Facebook ad or promotion on another social channel or website. Here at MDR we try to maintain an average frequency of five impressions across our customers’ digital advertising campaigns. This means for every 100,000 ad impressions served, we will reach 20,000 audience members on average, each viewing the ad 5 times.
When do educators engage with email vs display ads?
The below graph shows the correlation between when educators open email and then view and/or engage with related display advertising. You’ll see that while the emails are typically opened in the morning, but in the evening is when the most engagement happens.
We have been able to aggregate response times of the channels we serve advertising to and send emails from. The trends we have found inform the foundation of our multi-channel efforts. We see the majority of email activity occurring between 9 a.m. and 12 p.m. Inversely, we see the majority of ad engagement across social and display advertising between 7 p.m. and 12 a.m. There are two peaks of engagement occurring at opposite ends of the daily 24-hour user cycle.
Educators are engaging with email during the work day, primarily in the morning. They are engaging with advertising at night, mostly at home on their mobile devices. By embracing the multi-channel approach, we are leveraging this usage cycle. Spending the night(s) before your email messaging serving consistent brand messaging through display ads to the same audience that will be receiving your emails in their inbox allows you to bubble wrap your messaging and improves your chances for success.
Picture this scenario: an educator from your target audience sitting on their couch at night, browsing social media or reading their favorite news website while being served our ads. The next morning, that same educator receives an email with similar messaging, imagery, and branding as the ads they were exposed to the night before. You have now laid a soft landing for your email campaign by building familiarity and consistency with the audience preceding the email deployment.
When we consider the increased reach of multi-channel marketing coupled with the engagement cycle of email as compared to digital advertising we can start to build a strong foundation to our marketing campaign. A foundation of consistency throughout your messaging, audience, and brand. This foundation is laid by nightly ad engagement as your audience uses their favorite device, and then reaches a crescendo when your message is delivered to their inbox the next day.
