Why is Email Marketing Important for Food Brands?

In today’s ever-changing digital marketing landscape, there can be a big temptation to put your money, time and energy on the latest technology. However, we can’t forget email. Here are few key points as to why email is a vital part of marketing for your food brand:

  1. You can actually own your audience. What does that mean? When you have an audience that you’ve worked hard to build on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, those platforms can change the rules. When they change the rules, that changes how many people you can reach. Although not 100% of people will open every email you send, you still have the direct ability to reach and engage with them. You can even follow up with them!
  2. It’s a very direct connection with people. Everyone has email, everyone checks their email on a regular basis, so you’re really able to get directly in front of the person that you’re trying to reach and communicate with. As a food brand, you’re at an advantage! Get creative and descriptive with your copy. There’s a good chance that someone’s stomach is growling as they’re checking their email throughout the day.
  3. It’s transferable! If you have an email list for one brand and you launch a new food brand, you can promote that brand to that list, so it’s easily transferable.
  4. Another form of communication.  It’s never a great idea to go all in on one platform for various reasons, but one of the things you can do with email is really curate and aggregate content from other platforms to increase your reach. If you have great posts going up on social, you can then highlight that in email. If you have a blog, you can also highlight that in email. It’s a solid way to communicate with your customers and give them multiple options as to how they want to consume your content.

  1. eCommerce. It’s still one of the top ways to convert sales. According to MarketingSherpa, over 72% of customers prefer email as their mode of business communication and 91% of Americans are eager to receive promotional emails–that’s huge! Here are a few types of emails you can use to drive sales:
    • Welcome email – get new customers for your food brand by sending a coupon code
    • Abandoned cart email – encourage interested shoppers to pick up where they’ve left off
    • Upselling – show them add-ons or products with a higher price point
    • Cross-selling – recommend similar products that they’d be interested in
      • Post-purchase emails, such as an upsell or cross-sell email, are very successful because the customer is already familiar with the brand and has shown a willingness to buy. If you have it all set up and tied into your eCommerce platform, you can see the average order value, how many things they’ve purchased, which products they purchased, when they purchased, and other information. This allows you to segment and communicate with your audiences in a much smarter and more direct way.

  1. You can get specific with your messaging. This is one of the coolest parts! Unlike social, you can segment out certain customers that have bought specific products, signed up for certain events, or really whatever data you choose to capture. This will increase your engagement, your open rates, and your click-through rates with email. There are even ways to give an email a personalized touch for one specific customer.
  2. Tracking & Analytics. Emails are a great way to see open rates, click-through rates, and engagement with your brand from an individual basis. With social media, you don’t get that one-to-one information. You do get that with email. You can see one subscriber that came from that trade show in Anaheim and they’ve opened every single email, but they haven’t bought anything yet, then you can communicate with them in a very specific way. It’s a great tool for segmentation, which helps you then craft your communication for better results.
  3. Ad Retargeting. You can leverage a dedicated email list to retarget users on other ad platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube. You can also use an email list to build a lookalike audience to find people similar to those who have signed up.

What’s next? Collect emails!

Take the next step by adding a sign-up form on your website, acquiring emails from customer’s purchases on your site, and creating events. Don’t forget that the goal here is not just quantity, but to build a trusted relationship with the customer. Once you do this, you’ll be one step closer to utilizing one of the most powerful tools in digital marketing!

Have Questions? Ask us! We’re happy to dive in and help.

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How Much Should I Budget for My Paid Media Campaign?

You may be wondering, “How much should I budget for my paid media campaign?” As much as we’d like to give you a magic number, it’s almost impossible to do so. Why? Because every business is different and it depends on a number of factors. Here are a few things to consider when you’re budgeting for your paid media campaigns.

  1. Goals. What are your specific goals? Are you trying to increase video views and drive website traffic? Or maybe you want to get more Facebook page likes, email signups and so on.  The key here is to be specific. If you have a specific objective in mind that you know you want to hit, you can then take a step back to determine how much money you need to spend. With estimated cost per results, you’ll be able to get an idea of how much to spend in order to hit that goal.
  2. How much content do you want to promote? Whether it’s an engagement campaign, brand awareness, or video views, knowing how much content you want to push will help you gauge the amount of money to put behind it.
  3. Targeting. Who is your audience? How many different audiences do you want to reach? Do you want to just target existing fans or website visitors? Do you want to test between multiple interest audiences on Facebook, for example? It’s very important to know who you want to target. Some marketers bundle their audiences into one, but we don’t recommend that because you won’t get any insights or analysis on which audience performed best. The size of your audience and the number of different audiences you want to test directly impacts the media budget.
  4. Timeframe. How long will these campaigns run? One day? One week? One month? One year? You want to make sure that you’re not spread too thin with your budget.

In general, you want to budget enough to achieve your goals, promote all the assets that you want to be seen by the right audiences, and get the maximum amount of juice and learnings from your campaign.

It’s super important to focus your efforts. If you have a smaller budget, prioritize the most important metrics you want to test at once. If you have a larger budget, you can reach more people, do more creative testing and achieve more varied marketing objectives all at once. However, even with a small budget, you can also do all of that over time. For example, if you only want to spend $1,000 per month, you can test one audience one month and another audience the next. This way, you can allocate your budget across multiple months and still gather data and insights without spreading it too thin.

Know your goals. Know how much content you want to promote. Know your target audience. Know your timeframe. Once you answer these questions, you will be able to plan your paid media budget and get things moving in no time!

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