The blur between marketing, communication, and public relations (PR) makes it difficult for companies to strategize their email marketing activities.
✖ Many companies simply don’t have an email marketing strategy and some have a plan but it’s just not consistent. Take for example the airline below which has randomly pasted a news article within an email and sent it out to all customers. These customers exclusively receive airline promotions via email (and not something of this nature).
✖ Moreover, the news article is not contextualized – it’s just pasted there as a fact / random piece. Readers can assume that it mentions the airline. So it’s a PR thing since it refers to something newsworthy about the company.
✏️ The company might want to carefully contextualize the article in the introduction of the email (just above the article).
✄ However, one can also question whether this is indeed the right place to share this news article since it is sent via email (to ALL customers around the globe). As such, I believe that it should rather be featured on the media section of the airline’s website and not necessarily for inclusion as part of the main promotional mailing list – which may take readers by surprise (unless it’s done regularly). 💡 What do you think?