Developing a robust Email marketing channel is so much more than just blasting out product ads to your customers and prospects. You need to build a relationship with customers for emails to remain relevant so subscribers are open to your marketing effort, so email needs to balance giving customers relevant and interesting content and driving sales.
Prestwick House keeps up a robust email schedule in a variety of different categories to not only drive sales and build lead funnels but also to build our brand and drive traffic earlier in the awareness phase of the purchasing funnel. We always keeps a close eye on email marketing metrics to make sure that we’re continually able to optimize and improve over time.
A few recent campaigns:
Content Marketing Support – We’ve found that providing teachers with free, high quality content that is adjacent to the products that we sell has a higher-than-average click through rate and conversion rate than our direct sales emails, so the majority of our emails position Prestwick House as a partner in the classroom and drive traffic to our Free Library and Blog Content which then leads customers deeper into the site.
Contests – We run contests tied to specific events in order to help build and maintain our email lists. These tend to drive great click through rates and keep our email lists fresh and up-to-date.
Sales Emails – Our Sales Emails tend to be the lowest click through rates of our email campaigns, but they serve to drive our customers toward our automation campaigns which drive our highest-engagement rates and lead customers throughout the buying process.
Automation Campaigns – Our automation campaigns are generally initiated when interested customers request sample pages of our books. These then drive a series of emails that run over the course of multiple months throughout the buying cycle by addressing individual buying concerns from Awareness through evaluation and purchase.
Abandoned Cart Emails – Our cart abandonment emails yield some of the greatest ROI in terms of direct click through revenue and browse through revenue, but due to the complicated multi-step school purchasing process, we’re somewhat limited in what we can do to incentivize a direct purchase. That being said, even a simple reminder of what a user added to their cart yields great results.
Testing & Analytics – One of the most satisfying elements of email as a channel is the ability to launch a campaign and get results almost instantly. Thanks to our email solutions partner’s clear A/B testing results and our setup of Google Analytics 4 and Google GTM codes, we can see user behavior throughout the site visit and purchase process.
Social Media
Our Market, high school educators, have been slower to respond to Social Media than some markets and they’re extremely resistant to efforts to sell via these channels, so our primary use of social media is to build our brand and support our content marketing and contest marketing efforts, so we use social primarily to amplify the effectiveness of our other channels with announcements of new content marketing pieces. We also use social to humanize the company, posting videos of team pets, sharing parties, and major events. While the ecommerce value of social tends to be low, our team does a great job of engaging and building relationships directly with our customers.