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 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?

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.

Newsletter

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.

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.

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