Email media: the hidden marketing potential in your employee communications

Filling in my response to the current DMA’s National client email survey it was great to see email media featured for the first time. I have personally used this marketing channel for three years now, and although I work with companies and have many peers that leverage their one-to-one employee emails with dynamic signatures, headers, and footers, it appears that this is still a new topic for some.

Hopefully this survey will highlight the opportunity that email media offers marketers and encourage them to become more familiar with the channel. It is becoming increasingly important for companies to use every touch point to drive conversion, reinforce branding and maximise revenues – and email media is a marketing opportunity right under your nose that should not be wasted.

In case you are not sure what it is, email media helps you promote your business by adding marketing messages and links to those ordinary emails sent by your employees to customers and partners. It is different from just adding nice email signatures as email media offers a dynamic way to control this, plus all the segmentation, data, and analytics tools that marketers need to measure and optimise results. This changes the opportunity from just being a branding opportunity and moves it up a gear to being a revenue driving, data-driving conversion-increasing machine.

In my various email communications with the DMA over the last few months I have also noted how they use email media in their signatures and footers to promote the various different events, surveys, research and lobbying activities that they do. It’s great for me as a recipient to get easy access to the relevant part of their website or to see what’s going on – but it probably also helps them to understand more about what is interesting for their members.

If you want to know more about email media, I suggest you check out the new white paper from Gleanster Research (below) which explores the hidden potential in employee email communications. The paper addresses the challenges in controlling and personalising signature media in email communications, and explains how email media optimisation platforms work – with real company case studies that show ROI and results.

This chart may also help to illustrate the main difference between email media and email marketing.

By DMA guest blogger, Jill Quick, Founder, Quick Marketing Consultancy Ltd