Is Email the Secret Weapon for Luxury Digital Marketing?

Luxury brands have always utilised the power of exclusivity and a better experience to entice high-end consumers into purchasing products. This has certainly been a challenge to obtain whilst using digital channels, which by nature, hold an air of abundance and inclusivity. Recently, luxury brands have been moving further into the digital realm, but which online channel offers the best opportunity to retain an exclusive experience? Could email marketing be the key channel to create a balanced luxury digital strategy?

The Advantages of Email Marketing

The benefits of email marketing have certainly been no secret over the past ten years – and rightly so. With over 82% of consumers opening brand emails and an average ROI of around 2500%, email marketing has been a favourite of digital marketers from the very beginning. This shows the power of email marketing, but how can luxury brands remove themselves from the vast noise of email spam, and create something truly valuable to their target audience?

As you will discover, there are many reasons why luxury email marketing is so successful in both securing new customers and retaining the interest of existing clients.

There are other ways this type of marketing campaign can also benefit a business, including:

1. Greater control – With luxury brand email marketing, you are the driving force. You create the email templates, decide on the best content to suit your clientele; as well as what to include in your campaign as a whole. Best of all, you’re not subject to any algorithms or policies imposed by other corporations such as Facebook or Google.
2. Cost-effective – Email marketing for luxury brands is a form of advertising that can have a much higher return on investment (ROI) than other marketing channels.
3. Easy monitoring – Once you’ve launched your luxury marketing campaign, it’s important to keep an eye on its progress. This can be done quite easily through the use of various email services and software. These tools allow you to measure metrics such as open rates and subscriber retention.
4. Initiates growth – Email marketing allows you to build your brand organically. You can customise messages based on the interests of the high net work individuals you are looking to reach and do so at a frequency that is perfect for cultivating long term relationships.

Quick Tip Takeaways for Email Marketing in the Luxury Space

Prioritise Organic List-Building

The main failure when implementing an email marketing strategy is relying on purchased third party email lists. Most countries utilise the opt-in law, requiring you to first gain permission before sending a single message. This means that creating an organic list, based on adding relevant value is not only a great way to build true engagement, but it also keeps you in line with the law.

Create & promote some insightful ‘Gated’ content and ask customers to subscribe to your list to view it. This will mean you have relevant customers signing up to hear further branded messaging and will stop your brand from becoming annoying. The scattergun email approach doesn’t really provide a very luxurious experience.

Ensure Your Newsletter Contains Value

The classic implementation of our beloved digital marketing friend. Most brands carve basic, uninformative, and irrelevant email newsletters that either heavily self-promote , or just don’t fit their audience. Luxury brands have the reputation of offering customers something truly valuable and unique – why not make your email newsletter reflect this?

Add value by collating truly insightful industry news, editorial on your niche sector, and exclusive insights into the world of luxury. Make sure that everything that you send your customers is relevant and mobile-friendly  – 64% of decision-makers read their email via mobile devices.

Bespoke Aesthetics

As providers of bespokely crafted, luxury products, there is a huge disparity when sharing email communications using a simple templated design. When holding a luxury brochure, you can feel the huge amount of time and effort that has gone into creating such collateral. Why should your digital communications be any different?

Ditch the overused templates and spend the time to create something truly unique to celebrate the individualism of both your products and your valued customers.

Take time to think about your email design in addition to the kind of message you want to display to your customers.

You also want to send a clear message when creating your email marketing campaign, and using a font that is hard to read will not help. This is especially important for subject lines. Buyers want to read short, snappy statements, so you have to make every word count, and every word easy to read.

Close alignment with brand

Is your brand extremely exclusive? Then why not create an invite-only  email list? Are your marketing communications witty and charming? Let that brand persona shine through in your email copy. Email isn’t a quick win . It takes a lot of passion and thought to make sure your customers are receiving value every single time they open your brand’s communications.

Make sure you regard digital communications as equals to their more traditional marketing counterparts. Your brand should be consistent throughout all of your channels, just because email has a strong ROI does not mean you should leave it to the intern to sort.

Overall, there is a huge opportunity for luxury brands to utilise email to better their customer experience. As legendary marketer, David Ogilvy once said ‘direct mail is my secret weapon’ – and email is digital’s direct mail equivalent. When the needed focus and effort is there, email marketing really can work wonders for your brand.

Leverage a Little Automation

In today’s world, we are surrounded by incredible technology, and as well as making our everyday lives that little bit easier and a whole lot more interesting, it can also help massively when it comes to boosting your business.

Abandoned cart emails with a call-to-action (CTA) included within them are one example of how to do this. Sometimes people get distracted when shopping and simply forget to return later on. These automated emails are a great way to give your customer (or potential customer) a gentle nudge to buy.

Just adding this small touch gives them a reminder and can increase your customer conversion rate tenfold. These can easily be set to send automatically after a period of time when an item is left in a cart and not purchased which is especially helpful for those rarer luxury items.

There’s No Shortcuts to Great Content

Once you’ve got your leads, you want to make the most of them. Engaging with a subscriber may seem like an arduous challenge, but with the right content, it can be achieved. Add something catchy and compelling to the subject line of the email as this is what will be seen first. Be sure to keep the email message short and concise while creating a sense of urgency that they need to act now to take advantage of your incredible offer.

A Great Landing Page Is Essential

Having a well-thought-out luxury marketing campaign in place is fantastic. But, if you don’t have a great landing page for visitors to view upon following your email, then you will struggle with both converting new leads and possibly the retention of existing customers too.