Is the tale being told by your existing digital marketing initiatives complete? Is it clarity or vision that they bring? Is your content marketing plan explicit about your campaigns?

These are difficult questions to address. For many digital marketers, establishing a full, complete, and integrated campaign may often turn out to be fragmented, ambiguous, and superficial.

Here are five strategies to leverage email in your next digital marketing campaign to help you cross the finish line.

Ensure consistency in design across channels

Along with message, standardizing the style of your content is maybe the most crucial aspect of a digital marketing strategy. It is critical to have a thorough vision for the campaign.

People will read your material on desktop, mobile, email, social media, and your website. These combinations provide a broad range of experiences, all of which must be consistent. Losing consistency may reduce the effectiveness of your promotion.

Do you want to see an example of how this is done? Schoolhouse launched a content marketing campaign in honor of its founder. The design is consistent throughout their website, email, and social media.

Create a unified message

Your campaigns, like design, must have a consistent message. “Consistent messages are more likely to become memorable,” says SaaS entrepreneur Myk Pono. Consistency improves message effectiveness, which is why advertising works — it repeatedly repeats a simple message.”

In the Schoolhouse example above, they focus their communication on their announcement: “Schoolhouse turns 15.” This message is very clear when you look at this digital marketing campaign across multiple platforms. They grow dependent on the channel after centering the message.

Schoolhouse employs consistent language, such as the phrase “celebrate everything that brought us here.” When appropriate, they weave consistent messages like these into their various channels, which are fully realized in the final content piece.

Email can be used to introduce a story

Email can be used as an introduction to the story of your content or product.

You can provide a snippet of your digital campaign messaging that highlights the most appealing points. This will entice your customers to click through, where they can find more context and take the action you’ve requested.

The email below from Trello is a great example. They launched a content marketing campaign centered on new Trello templates, with the following snippet: “Wondering how others are using Trello? Check out this brand new Trello template gallery for any project.”

Trello uses their copy to tell a story, which prompts the reader to answer a question.

Email can be used to tell a story

Another email storytelling tactic is to give it all away (or almost all of it) in a single email. When most people open an email, they don’t expect to see the entire story. Typically, there is a lot of scrolling, very little clicking, and even less reading. Changing the pace with some hearty text, on the other hand, can pique the reader’s interest in the piece.

While you shouldn’t give away the entire story in a single email, you can certainly give away a few paragraphs. Here’s an example of using InDesign to tell almost the entire story.

In email, emphasize unique and interactive content marketing media

What is meant by “unique” may vary depending on your content marketing strategy or industry, but unique remains distinct from plain text. Videos, quizzes, games, polls, and GIFs are a few examples of unique content.

You can entice viewers by posting these elements in emails when using an interactive piece as part of a larger digital marketing campaign. Because interactive content can increase click-through rates by up to 26%, it’s a good idea to use this type of media to entice readers to click through to a more comprehensive view of your campaign.

Conclusion

Email can be a powerful tool in ensuring the success of your next digital marketing campaign. You can use email as a bridge for your subscribers to experience the story your campaign is telling by bringing a consistent design and messaging to your content marketing campaign.