An Email is Not a Campaign: the Case for Integrated Marketing

Howard J. Sewell — February 16, 2017 Follow @hjsewell

The reality of life as a professional marketer is that there is rarely, ever, enough time, budget, resources or bandwidth to plan, design, build, launch and manage every campaign as we would if we could.

I get that. We all make compromises. And yet it’s because of those compromises that campaigns often don’t perform as well as they should, and so, results fail to meet expectations.

One prime example of this – and something we see too often in our work with tech companies – is the tendency to execute campaigns in very one-off, siloed fashion. An email campaign here. A search campaign there. Sometimes this is because different groups “own” different campaigns (the Web team owning SEM, for example) and so those programs tend to be managed independently. But executing campaigns – and lead generation channels – in this manner not only robs them of their potential, it’s also a very expensive way to generate leads.

Let’s say you have access to a new analyst report in which your solution is featured prominently. Option 1: You can dial up an email and blast it out to your prospect database. Or Option 2:

• Send an email to your database
• Add the offer to the ad rotation in your Google AdWords campaign
• Promote the report via content syndication
• Create a banner ad to use in retargeting and on your Website
• Design a follow-up email for your BDRs to send to those who download the report
• Run sponsored updates and text ads on LinkedIn

You could extend the campaign even further by repurposing the analyst report into a Webinar, a blog post, an infographic, etc.

Yes, Option 2 seems like it’s a lot more work, but not as much as you’d think. And that’s because you’ll be leveraging creative throughout the integrated campaign. The landing page that you develop for the email can be the same landing page you use for AdWords, the banner ad, and the LinkedIn ads (with different tracking codes, obviously.) The abstract that you write for content syndication will leverage the email copy. You’re not reinventing the wheel here.

Furthermore, because the investment needed to build out all those incremental tactics is much less than it would be were you to create any one of them independently, the ROI is significantly higher. In fact, the overall return from the integrated campaign will be much greater than the sum of its parts – what results each channel would generate independently – because those channels will be working in synergy. The prospect who receives the email may also see the LinkedIn ad, and so on.

The risk from an integrated campaign is much less because you’re not putting all your demand generation eggs in one basket, as it were. Lessons learned in one channel – a copy test on LinkedIn, for example – can inform and optimize the campaign elsewhere. And lastly, it’s far more efficient – and less work overall – to generate more leads from fewer, albeit more integrated campaigns, than it is to attempt to meet your demand gen goals by launching one independent campaign after another.

So the next time the team says: “let’s just do an email” – think big. You’ll be more successful for it.

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