• by Dan Swartz , Op-Ed Contributor, September 8, 2015

In a cross-channel marketing world, it’s easy to pay a lot of attention to the shiny new objects. Indeed, nowadays things like cross-channel attribution, programmatic and more data than we know what to do with demand our focus. As a result, we tend to overlook a tried-and-true component in the cross-channel arsenal: email.

Granted, most brands have strong, established and sophisticated email programs. But because they’re often very effective and are humming along independently, it’s only natural that we take them for granted.

There’s a huge opportunity to make your email efforts and data an even more effective play. All it requires is that you stop looking at email in a silo or as something that’s only focused on sales or retention. It’s time to dust them off, buff them up and make them an integral part of a new shiny engine that drives your brand. It’s too important to be ignored and what follows are some thoughts on ways email can make your cross-channel efforts really shine.

Email data as a core component of your first-party data strategy. Marketers often think of purchase data, social data, website data and other data points as their core first-party data. But does email data play a hero’s role in your first-party data strategy? Email data can be leveraged for lookalike modeling, custom social targeting (as I’ll touch on in a second) and retargeting efforts. Many media agencies overlook and don’t collaborate on any first-party data because it isn’t readily available to them. But in a cross-channel marketing world, these conversations need to be happening in order to fully leverage the valuable asset you have in your email database.

Email to activate social and other channels. Often, email efforts are solely focused on driving e-commerce, as it’s a very effective channel for engaging past customers and directly driving purchases. But email can also play a role in activating other channels in meaningful ways. Use your email database to activate new initiatives, drive social engagement and even act as a retargeting mechanism. For example, you can load your email address data directly into Facebook and create a custom audience. This custom database can then be used to specifically target that audience with ads at scale in the Facebook platform. Additionally, email should be brought into the mix at campaign kickoffs, and leveraged as a first step towards activating other channels.

Email activity to better inform other channels. Email activity can tell us a lot about audiences, like offers that they respond best to, words that catch their attention (think subject lines and the insight gained from best-performing subjects), as well as device preferences and locations. But email activity data is often utilized only to optimize email efforts. Leveraging the wide range of email analytics available in a context of cross-channel marketing can contribute to a lot of insightful thinking and uncover a lot of opportunities outside of the email channel. Use your email analytics to better refine your marketing mix attribution models, to drive better display and native creative and to identify opportunities to better connect in other channels. Take the time to review your best performing email creative and identify opportunities to carry that learning into other creative. This exercise can also help to ensure you’re creating a seamless story and content integration between email, web, mobile, social and display.

Creating an environment of collaboration. None of this happens without some discussion and collaboration, though. When was the last time you had a strategic conversation with the people who manage your brand’s email efforts? One of the most important steps in leveraging your email efforts in a cross-channel world is to create an environment of collaboration. As I mentioned earlier, email marketing efforts are often siloed in organizations because they have been established, are doing well and typically don’t mix at other with other media-related efforts. Invite those email folks over and collaborate on a shared calendar, discuss what data they have and how to leverage it in meaningful ways. Maybe even grab a drink and talk about big “what if” opportunities with email acting as the shiny object for a change.