The Basics of Email Marketing

In today's fast-paced digital era, consumer packaged goods companies face numerous challenges when it comes to reaching and engaging with their target audience.

Traditional marketing channels are becoming less effective, and competition is fiercer than ever. In this landscape, email marketing emerges as a powerful tool that CPG companies can leverage to build meaningful connections with consumers, drive sales, and foster brand loyalty.

But why email marketing? The answer is simple: it works. In fact, email marketing provides an average ROI of $36 for every $1 spent.

As a CPG business owner, especially one that is in the initial stages of business development, maintaining a high ROI on marketing efforts can be hard to do—money spent on building brand awareness through social media and other efforts requires long-term investment with no guarantee of immediate returns.

Email marketing provides a shorter return timeline and gives you near immediate feedback on campaign success, making it easy to adapt and adjust your strategy to best match your client base.

Finding the right email marketing platform for your CPG business can be tricky.

With a number of different options available on the market, you need to know what to look for. When choosing a platform, pay attention to these things:

1. Ecommerce friendliness. Look for platforms that are e-commerce friendly & make sure they are set up to track the success of individual email campaigns when it comes to product sales. This helps you hone in on sales campaigns and find which approaches work—and which don’t.

2. Smart segmenting tools. Segmenting tools on e-commerce friendly email platforms allow emails to be targeted to those who haven’t purchased in the past 60 days, abandoned cart, those who are only 1x buyers, etc.

3. Watch for dealbreakers. A platform should be a deal breaker if it’s not easy for you to use. You can create a lot of disasters this way, like mass-send all of your emails in an automated drip by accident. Here are other dealbreakers:

• You have difficulty performing simple actions like customizing audience targeting, creating an email drip, or pulling up reports.

• It doesn’t track sales results per campaign.

• You can’t customize email targeting according to common customer behaviors like abandoned cart, 1x buyers, non-purchasers, haven’t purchased in 60 days, etc.

Tune in next week for a complete breakdown of the pros and cons of the most popular email marketing platforms on the market. We’ll cover Mailchimp, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, and Omnisend, helping you determine which platform is best for your business.

Until next time,
The CPG MBA Team

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