The nature of digital is changing, and this has been evident first and foremost in advertising. In advertising, you notice that people are no longer just selling a product … they’re telling a story. That approach has trickled down into content, social media and even within the hashtag of a given campaign. The best approaches to marketing are those that integrate every effort under the campaign model. So, what is the campaign model?

The campaign model isn’t about the one-off piece of content like most newsletters end up being. It’s about a long-term strategy to communicate a goal. Whether that goal is to drive sales or deepen engagement and customer loyalty, a email marketing strategy that takes the campaign approach will be far more effective than any other strategy that stands alone.

Campaign-driven newsletters don’t need to be complicated. A standard email campaign will be a link in a chain. The various parts that make up that chain could include perhaps an initial email, a follow-up, additional information, and so on. Campaign-driven newsletters could also take the form of a drip campaign.

A drip campaign is a series of emails received by the subscriber over time. It’s a perfect strategy for those businesses and organizations that are looking to communicate a lot of information with a client or member, but who don’t want to burden them with too much info at once. Keeping needs and capacity in mind, a drip campaign will over digestible pieces of broken up content over time – perhaps one a week to even one a day if needed. Typically, it might be a good idea to have these emails spaced about by a day or two so that a subscriber might receive one on a Tuesday and another on a Thursday.

These types of segmented campaigns work best when they’re enveloped as part of a sales cycle, which means that each link in the chain will be customized to the stage of the relationship the subscriber is in. This is really where campaigns separate between the routine set of emails a business might push out, versus email marketing campaigns that are driven by a content marketing strategy.

Information streams of that do (and should) vary based on where the client is also an email campaign strategy that should be carried over to social driven campaigns. Here, the idea is that you utilize social channels to drive people to email marketing content. This works best with long pieces of content rather than promotional items or quick stunted content. When you’ve got great lengthier content to share, you can pull a pivotal issue from your copy and pose that as a trigger question that evokes a strong response or opinion.

When all else fails, you can always ask a question that gets people curious. In order to satisfy that curiosity, they would need to click on your resourceful link. This way, you’re successfully utilizing social media as bait that’s driving people to your standalone email campaign URL. It also sets the social share apart from the other instance when you’re directly sharing the campaign URL. As any social media marketer knows, you want to post key shares multiple times. Typically, you would stagger the same share across a span of weeks or months. However, depending on the rate at which you’re posting content on social, you can get creative about how you’re sharing. In this case, rather than just recycling a post, you can change the graphic and post copy. Now, you have a brand new post and are likely drawing in clickers that may not have been otherwise interested in the original self-serving social share.

When it comes to email marketing campaigns, you can take either the drip campaign route or the social route. Either way, remember that people have signed up for a reason. Now your job is to nurture those connections with targeted marketing.