Learn How Payge H. Kerman Is Revolutionizing Conventional Digital Marketing Strategies

Wink Digital is an innovative marketing agency located in Portland, Oregon. Wink Digital has helped dozens of brands and individuals achieve their digital campaigns through tailored strategies proven to be successful time and time again.

After noticing the incredible run Wink Digital has had over the last few months, I decided to reach out to Payge H. Kerman, president of Wink Digital, for an interview regarding the firm and how she and her team members have brought the visions of their clients to life; Let’s have a look at what she had to say;

Tell us about Wink Digital. 

Wink Digital is a full-scale marketing agency. As data-driven creatives, we implement visual and emotive methods of connecting consumers to brands. These methods yield high volumes of sales for our clients and enhance brand trust. Wink Digital creates comprehensive solutions that utilize custom brand & web designs, sophisticated business technologies, and optimized marketing strategies to offer a blueprint for growth that drives results. A majority of our work comes from web design, web development, and marketing strategy projects, but each collaboration is unique, calling for different sets of skills. We value our commitment to executing our clients’ objectives for optimal success. 

What makes you different from other marketing agencies?

We emphasize autonomy in our technology choices. While we love our long-term relationships with our clients, we also want to empower them to utilize their marketing assets. For us, this means developing custom CMS’s for all of our clients’ websites (read: custom-coded websites that get converted into drag-and-drop editors for our clients), creating reusable templates and style guides, and building sustainable advertising and marketing campaigns that allow for autonomy.

We are also an agency that focuses on the holistic wellness of the brand. When we work with clients, we examine their brands, in full, before moving forward with any plan– we emphasize the importance of brand assets and campaigns working symbiotically instead of singularly.

We heard that you are a master in email flows. Could you tell us a bit more about how onboarding emails work? 

Onboarding emails are a series of emails a customer receives that can dictate their commitment to your brand and the longevity of their customer lifecycle. Onboarding emails are usually structured as a way to welcome customers to the brand’s intended journey for them – whether that be information about a course or product, deeper learning about the history and meaning of the brand, a special offer, or otherwise. These emails are often seen as a brand’s first opportunity, away from the customer’s entrance point (i.e., the website or Instagram account), to intimately connect with its audience and develop deeper relationships with their habits. Onboarding emails not only tell a great deal about the brand to the customer, but they are also fundamental to understand the brand’s customers and their behaviors. 

Could you tell us what makes a good onboarding email?

There are a lot of elements that create strong onboarding emails, but here is a couple of the easy do’s to make sure your campaign is successful:

DO target customers based on their preferences and interactions. If you can, ask your subscribers what kind of content they want to see. Some options include: “General marketing updates,” “Promotional offers and savings,” “Seasonal updates,” and more. Another option is to begin your onboarding emails with information about the customer. Ask your users who they are. Based on how that role fits into your brand positioning, deliver them unique content. 

i.e., For a wedding planner, if the subscriber indicates that they are a “Couple”, delivering them inspirational content, other vendor information, and resources on saving money would serve the subscriber. However, if the subscriber indicated that they were a “Couple” and they were given resources on how to make more money as a wedding planner, the user may lose a sense of brand connection and disengage. 

The content served to users in their onboarding emails is critical in determining their lifecycle.

DO capture the user’s first names and use merge fields to address your subscribers personally. This little effort can create a long-term connection and payoff.

What are some of your personal favorite services that you offer at Wink?

I continue to be enthusiastic about the websites we design. Because every brand is so unique and each company has different technical requirements, our team has worked on hundreds of different websites with various technologies. Because we so strongly believe that each brand is unique, we design and develop everything from scratch (without themes and templates)– this allows us to give our clients a distinctive look, deliver their customers a seamless user experience and ensures that their website is truly theirs. 

Additionally, when we work with eCommerce brands, we enjoy commercial photo shoots because we are creative in communicating a product’s messaging. Doing commercial (product) photography for collections also allows us to create consistency and cohesion across different channels.