In the fast-evolving world of digital marketing, email often plays second fiddle to flashy social campaigns or extensive SEO strategies. Yet, when leveraged correctly, email remains one of the most powerful tools for brand awareness, often reaching audiences with precision and depth. Traditionally seen as a retention tool, email marketing can extend its prowess to significantly bolster brand visibility.

Here are five inventive ways marketing managers can transform their email strategies from retention-centric to brand-awareness-focused.

Email allows brands to tell their stories directly to consumers in a personal and compelling manner. Craft a narrative around your brand that resonates with your audience’s values and aspirations. With innovations in larger image formats, interactive elements for email, and compressed video images being used in the email campaigns, there’s a plethora of opportunities to tell great stories in email that often goes overlooked. This not only enhances your reach but ensures your message touches those who are most likely to resonate with your brand’s ethos.

Understanding consumer behaviour is crucial in delivering the right message at the right time. Whether you’re personalising emails based on the on-site actions of known customers in your CRM or running acquisition-led campaigns, behavioural targeting is the key to relevance. With access to rich data sets including interests, intents, and real-time actions, marketers can deliver tailored content that drives deeper engagement. For brands focused on growth, partnering with a provider that offers advanced behavioural insights and data ensures your outreach resonates from the very first email and accelerating both retention and acquisition.

Nothing builds trust and authenticity like user-generated content (UGC). Encourage your existing customers to share their experiences and weave these narratives into your email campaigns. Highlighting UGC not only enhances your brand’s credibility but also engages potential customers who see real-world use and satisfaction. It also provides a great opportunity for you to improve the cost-effectiveness of your social influencer and UGC-related campaigns by extending them into other channels like email, connecting the dots between brand and response activity.

Personalisation goes beyond just adding a recipient’s name to an email. It involves tailoring the entire email experience to the individual. Consider the other data points that are in your CRM and ensure that you’re leveraging them for greater personalisation. Furthermore, consider working with providers who can either enrich your data or bring their own data to play that will make that personalisation experience even better for existing and outbound prospect messaging. By combining useful data points with smart personalisation design elements within your creative, you can really bring your emails to life. This approach not only increases engagement but also makes your brand more memorable, fostering greater awareness and affinity .

Ok, this one’s a little bit of a cheat, but many brands have great email data that can be smartly segmented and used for building lookalikes in platforms like Meta or on programmatic media channels. This is a great opportunity to extend the best of your current audiences into new prospect audiences for your branding efforts. If done smartly, you can truly tie your email activity from existing customers into prospecting activity on other channels. Ensure you spend the time and effort aligning your brand and messaging across all channels. Too often, we see brands think about email design as an afterthought and almost sit separate from all their other channel communication efforts. What a missed opportunity to make email part of those efforts.

Redefining email as a brand-awareness channel rather than just a retention tool requires a shift in mindset. By integrating these strategies, you can ensure that your brand not only reaches but also resonates with the right audience, elevating your brand to new heights.