Coordinating your marketing activities and tying them back to your business goals helps maximizes profit and amplifies your chances for success. In a nutshell – that’s the job of your business’s marketing strategy.

Irrespective of the marketing strategy you employ, email marketing is a key channel for overall success. It consistently delivers an impressive ROI, making it one of the most effective mediums for brand awareness and increased sales.

Let’s take a crash course on the four main marketing strategies you can implement and how email marketing can be included in the mix for ultimate success. 

1. Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing is the widely used marketing channel that dominated marketing until the 90s when the internet became popular. It refers to any marketing activity that is carried out offline to attract customers and generate sales.  

Traditional Marketing

• Uses offline channels, like print advertisements or collateral.

• Doesn’t segment audiences.
• Facilitates relationships with customers majorly via physical contact or phone
• It is still considered a credible form of marketing, especially for building brand awareness.
• It is the oldest form of marketing.
• Reaches large prospects and customer groups.

Advantages of Traditional Marketing

• Promotional materials and resources can be used for future marketing activities and campaigns.
• Placements are typically in magazines, newspapers, direct mail, or even commercial spots, allowing it to reach a diverse audience.
• Provides extensive brand exposure for businesses.
• It helps to solidify brand identity, brand recognition and increases brand awareness.

Disadvantages of Traditional Marketing

• It requires huge capital investments to see beneficial results.
• Its results cannot be easily measured.
• It allows limited information delivery via its channels.
• There is no room for detailed customer targeting or segmentation.
• It’s a time-consuming marketing type.

Many marketers feel that this method is on the way out. However, there’s still a place for it within the marketing industry, especially if this approach will reach your core audience. 

2. Lead Generation

Lead generation marketing is focused on getting people interested in your products or services and moving them through your inbound funnel gradually till they become paying customers.

Advantages of Lead Generation Marketing

• The sales team spends more time selling than prospecting for potential customers because the leads are constantly entering your inbound funnel.
• It creates a synergy between the sales and marketing teams.
• Boosts business revenue.

Disadvantages of Lead Generation Marketing

• While marketing receives commissions for the number of leads generated, sales get rewards for the number of leads they can convert to paying customers. As a result, marketing may focus on getting a high number of leads that may be considered low quality by the sales department. For this reason, MQL (marketing-qualified leads) and SQL (sales-qualified leads) should be defined appropriately.

How Does Email Marketing Play a Role?

Lead generation generally requires a CRM, content, an analytics tool for measuring metrics, and email marketing for effective nurture.

You can build a database of leads by encouraging email signups using opt-in forms on your website and marketing channels. Once you have a sizable database of active leads, you can move on to nurturing.

Create a series of email campaigns with relevant content for your leads that aligns with where they are at in the funnel for nurturing and conversions. 

This may sound like a lot, but with a tool like Benchmark Email, you can build online forms that will generate leads on your website and grow your email list, and send them nurturing emails that can move them through the funnel. 

3. Demand Generation

Demand generation is a blanket term that refers to a series of marketing activities businesses engage in to drive long-term engagement. These activities are broadly classified into lead generation, demand capture, and pipeline acceleration.

Demand generation marketing uses multiple touchpoints to raise awareness about customer challenges while positioning the brand as the trusted advisor for solving those problems. This helps the business to generate leads while selling the company products or services as the solution.

Why Demand Generation?

• It is a great marketing strategy for building brand trust and loyalty.
• It is a gradual, holistic, and comprehensive marketing approach.
• It comprises five stages – goals, audience, content, distribution, and measurement. 
• It requires excellent and relevant content for prospects, authenticity, and continuous testing for success.

How to Use Email Marketing in Demand Generation Marketing

With 82% of marketers actively using content marketing, content remains an important pillar for marketing, especially in demand generation marketing.

High-quality content curated with your prospects in mind can be distributed via email marketing to your leads and prospects. With dedicated promotional email campaigns, you can increase your prospects’ and leads’ interest in your products and raise the demand for your services.

Include email marketing in early lead-generation activities. 53% of marketers all agree: email is the most effective channel for lead generation in the early stages.

4. Revenue Marketing

Revenue marketing is a comprehensive marketing, and sales approach businesses use to drive revenue growth by improving sales and customer acquisition predictably. 

It creates a partnership between the marketing and sales department through continuous feedback and data exchange. Businesses with greatly aligned marketing and sales teams can generate more revenue from marketing.

As a result of this alignment, sales and marketing know what goes on in the funnel. This enables both departments to better support the prospect through the buyer’s journey.

Benefits of Revenue Marketing

• Sales teams can identify sales-worthy prospects from the beginning and have all the information they need to convert prospects and enable sales.
• Marketing can objectively identify channels, campaigns, and messages that deliver the most revenue for the business through the data that the sales team provides.
• Customers are supported with relevant content which accelerates the customer through the pipeline. This enables prospects to decide quickly on whether to purchase your products or move on if it doesn’t serve them.
• Business goal setting is improved, as it is based on the current reality of where the business is at, with goals that are firmly tied to revenue.

How Email Marketing Can Help With Revenue Marketing

Revenue marketing starts with understanding the prospect. Next is to align the marketing and sales department on business goals and move on to creating and distributing content campaigns.

Once you have a detailed understanding of your potential buyers, create relevant content to nurture your leads and deliver these using a series of email campaigns and strategies that can directly increase revenue. This process can also be automated for effectiveness.

Lead nurturing is vital, as nurtured leads make larger purchases compared to non-nurtured leads.

Engaging prospects through every stage of the buyer’s journey is important. What better way to do this than to have relevant content delivered to them at every step? This not only keeps them engaged but helps to nurture and prepare them for the next stage of the buyer’s journey.

Now that you understand all four marketing strategies and how email marketing can help, which of the marketing strategies will you be using? Don’t forget that you can also combine the strategies!