The email-marketing channel proves to be an important one for marketing to millennials. According to a recent survey by Adestra, 68% of teens prefer to engage with businesses through email, as opposed to 7% for both text and push notifications. Dormify, a dorm décor company, has found success in their recent email marketing strategy. The New York based startup recently saw a 92 percent increase in revenue from email marketing and doubled its web conversion rate.
“Before you can market effectively to a younger audience in particular, you need to establish a solid brand and product offering that will appeal to them,” said Dormify’s CMO Nicole Gardner. “We worked hard in our initial stages of the business to establish a voice that appeals to our audience base coupled with compelling, high quality products.”
Dormify approached its email marketing strategy by looking at the channel as a way to connect with their consumers in a playful and relevant ways. For example, Dormify’s emails contain a twist on a popular song lyric, or a fun saying that is relevant to the topic of the email. “We create compelling content to deliver via email that can resonate, and we have fun with it,” said Gardner. By sending the right message at the right time, businesses can accumulate loyal customers through email marketing.
Even though the primary audience for Dormify is incoming college freshman, the company has expanded its target market to include young adults decorating bedrooms at home, older college students with off-campus apartments, and college students in the Greek system. Dormify needed to segment different messages for their different groups of subscribers.
“Within each of these groups, customers have different interests and needs that we can address,” said Gardner. “Ultimately, even with our strong creative, we found ourselves sending too many messages that lacked relevance for specific pockets of recipients, and without relevance, we ran the risk of training our subscribers to ignore us.”
For marketers looking to get the most out of their campaigns in a cost-effective way, email is a great way to test out marketing to different segments. Email marketing can serve as an expansion of user experience provided from online and mobile websites. Emails are also a service to consumers, rather than a marketing tool, because it provides valuable information about your product and brand in a way that is relevant to their lives.
