No business is too small or too large not to need a good public relations strategy. Public relations is a two-way street.
An effective PR campaign not only disseminates information about a company to create a positive impression in the minds of potential customers or investors, but it also helps businesses gain insights into the perception and priorities of their target audience.
In this short article, we’ll take a look at some of the ways email marketing can help boost a PR campaign. We’ll also cover a few tips on how to craft and launch a successful email marketing campaign for public relations purposes.
Forms of Email Marketing that Boost Public Relations
Build trust with your customers and investors; establish your company as a source of authority on the market; keep the public informed and excited about what your company is doing; these are the goals of an email marketing PR campaign.
These goals can be accomplished through different types of email campaigns.
Press Releases
Informing the media about current and upcoming projects your company is involved in, is the purpose of a press release.
However, in today’s digital world of social media platforms, bloggers, and influencers, what qualifies as “members of the media” has been extended exponentially.
How to go about it
Seek out people active on social media platforms who are active and/or interested in the field your business is in. Address them as influential “members of the media” and provide them with your brief, informative, and engaging press release.
You run the risk of flattering them while providing them with much-needed content they can then share with their social and business networks.
White Papers
Present a theoretical problem, and provide a theoretical solution. this is the gist of a white paper, and its function is to stimulate discussion and present the company as knowledgeable about an area of interest to the market.
White papers make great marketing collateral because they are viewed as content rather than advertisements.
White papers can be useful tools in email marketing as they often elicit a response or reaction from the recipient. This response is often in the form of agreement or disagreement with the solution proposed. In this case, that response will serve as data to inform follow-up campaigns. The white paper will prompt the recipient to take action to learn more about the topic raised.
White papers:
- Open up a dialogue between the company and its target audience
- Serve to gauge the perspective and priorities of the target audience
- Build the authority of the company on a pertinent issue in the market
Event Promotion
Inform the public about an event that is related to your company’s sector of activity. Your company doesn’t necessarily need to be a participant in the event. Sometimes, the best way to promote yourself is by promoting others.
Informing the public about an upcoming event will set you up as a reliable source of information relevant to your company’s sector of activity. this type of email marketing is good for eliciting subscribers to a newsletter or followers to your company’s social media pages.
Charitable Actions and Community Engagement
Boost your company’s PR efforts by highlighting the charitable actions and community engagement initiatives your company is involved in.
An example of this could be as simple as celebrating the growth and outreach efforts of your company. For example, a popular subscription-based company could let its subscribers know when they’ve reached a milestone. This not only serves to promote them as a successful, growing company, but it also lets their subscribers feel like they are a part of a community and are contributing to its success.
Tips for a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
Not all email marketing campaigns are created equal. What sets the successful ones apart from those less successful can often be boiled down to two factors: momentum and flexibility.
Momentum
To generate momentum, it is important to start on the right foot. To a large extent, this comes down to numbers.
You need a sizeable amount of leads.
Here is a tip on how you can generate leads when you are getting started. (You can also use this tip even if you are an experienced email marketer who has already developed a sizeable list of contacts.)
Comb website and social media pages for data, extract them, and turn them into leads. This is known as web scraping for lead generation. It can be done manually or through software programs.
Good websites to start your web scraping campaign include:
- Business directories such as Yelp or trade sites pertinent to your business’s sector of activity.
- Online job portals such as Lensa where you can find businesses your company wants to target for its email marketing campaign
- Social media profiles such as Twitter – which has the added benefit of allowing you to discover the top influencers in your niche for an eventual collaboration in the form of affiliate marketing campaigns or paid advertising
Once you’ve generated a healthy number of leads, you can begin a direct marketing campaign. Cut design costs by using direct mail templates you can easily edit in Postalytics. Remember, a lead won’t generate momentum until you act on it.
What kind of content to follow up with will depend on your predefined goals. Remember the importance of timing (ensuring the recipient receives the emails during business hours is strongly encouraged), the tone (an overly friendly tone may detract from the authority you are trying to convey), and the length of the content. The long and short of it: size matters.
Flexibility
A successful PR email marketing campaign is flexible, meaning it can easily and quickly adapt to a change in the market, consumer preferences, or consumer behavior.
For your campaign to be flexible, it must be a two-way street. This means that the content you send via email should provide the recipient with the opportunity to respond, take action, and give you actionable feedback.
An excellent way to accomplish these important goals is by using email marketing surveys or PR surveys.
PR Surveys
Get insights about your target reader’s opinions, priorities, and needs. These insights should then inform your follow-up emails. Not only will this enable your PR email marketing campaign to be better focused, but it will also demonstrate to your target audience that you are listening.
They, then, will feel more inclined to engage with you further, trust you, and engage with the follow-up content – after all, to a certain extent, they have helped generate it.
In addition to using email marketing to solicit opinions from your recipients, it would also be a good idea to post the results in a public forum such as your company’s social media profiles. This way, the recipient feels like they are participating in the creation or understanding of a topic they are interested in.
You can also share survey results through a newsletter sent to email subscribers. These results can be accompanied by a call for action or an invitation to learn more about your company and the products or services it provides.
A/B Testing
Of course, it is impossible to know ahead of time with a 100% degree of certainty, what kinds of PR email marketing campaigns will work and what kinds will not. The good news is that this type of predictive ability is not necessary. You simply need to use consistent and methodical A/B testing and the best kind of PR email marketing material to use will make itself known.
When conducting an A/B test, bear in mind the following:
- Account for all variables – If your focus is on identifying the best type of subject line, that should be the ONLY quantifiable factor that changes. Emails with differing subject lines should be sent at the same time and to a similar demographic of leads.
- Be wary of small sample sizes – A/B testing is only effective when there is a large sample size. Otherwise, you run the risk of taking anecdotal evidence for verified proof – which it is not.
- Avoid biases through a blind analysis – If you use a CRM program or marketing automation that analyzes the results of A/B testing, you significantly reduce the possibility of letting your biases (either conscious or unconscious) contaminate the results.
Conclusion
Email marketing is an excellent tool to boost PR performance with the right campaigns. When it’s a two-way street, you engage with your target audience, learn from them, establish trust, and are put in a better position to satisfy their concerns. Stay flexible. Always be testing your content, your timing, and your approach.
And be consistent.
Remember that when it comes to email marketing, the adage “less is more” certainly does not apply.
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