In today's competitive marketplace, consumers are empowered to drive a hard bargain. Your audience knows how to get the best price, so it's easy to get scared into thinking that a shrewd discount strategy is the only tactic that delivers results.

That is not the case. An attractive offer might make the perfect incentive to join your mailing list, but an email marketing strategy that's consistently offer-led can be damaging to your business.

Discount-driven campaigns do little to promote your story. They can devalue your brand, and they confuse the customer experience. Plus, continually bombarding your contacts with campaigns that spout terms such as "sale" and "bargain" increases the risk of your emails' being marked as spam.

The key to maintaining customer interest is resonance, according to the Forrester Brand Experience Playbook. A brand that resonates with customers is one that not merely provides the product, service, and experience they anticipate, but—even more important—also enriches customer experience by providing value-driven engagement opportunities.

And the proof's in the ROI: A good content-focused marketing strategy drives six times higher conversion rates!

Here are five content-led campaigns to help you cement a lasting relationship with your customers.

1. User-Generated Content (UGC) Campaigns

Rebuild trust, recruit brand advocates, and get time back by adding UGC to your email marketing strategy.

A good review is worth its weight in gold. Although trust in brand messages has fallen in recent years, the influence of consumer recommendations has skyrocketed: Most online consumers prefer to be informed about what others have said about products and services—and therefore read consumer reviews regularly.

If you've wowed customers with your product or service, use their feedback as testimonials to influence your entire contact list. A UGC-based campaign allows you to push your most impressive reviews straight to the inbox, promoting a third-party, impartial view.

You can achieve that by adding a dynamic content block in an email template to pull in live review content directly from your site. Customer feedback from review sites such as Trustpilot and Feefo can be integrated into your campaign with ease for added credibility. And, if you're feeling inspired, use UGC to construct the basis of your campaign creative and let the 5-star reviews speak for you! Check out how global skincare brand Elemis did just that:

2. How-To Advice Campaigns

Providing your contacts with useful and informative content is a great way to showcase your business's expertise.

Prospective and returning customers actively use content to inform their decision-making process: 47% of B2B buyers viewed three to five pieces of relevant content before engaging with a sales representative, according to a report from Demand Gen. Creating advice-based campaigns to deploy to your lists at appropriate stages can have a huge effect on your conversion rates.

Brands that resonate strongly with customers provide user-focused content to drive engagement. Think about what a customer might want to know about your product or service, and design an advice campaign based around your answers.

Great British Chefs uses its "Weekly Menu" campaigns to advise on food preparation. The emails feature guides, recipes, and blog posts to get taste buds tingling. And with the company logo displayed clearly and consistently in every campaign, readers can easily remember which brand serves up this mouth-watering content.

3. Competition Campaigns

Want to generate new, quality leads and re-engage customers at the same time? No problem.

An attractive, time-restricted competition campaign has the power to generate hot new leads. Constructing a thorough and relevant entry form will give you good-quality data to send to your sales department. Plus, you can increase your audience and entice an entirely new fan base with an initiative strong enough to get shared across social media. It might even go viral.

A competition that gets good traction promotes brand awareness, online conversation, customer loyalty, and market presence. And when it's all over, your key campaign metrics provide a rich source of data to inform your future strategy.

Check out this competition creative from luxury clothing and accessories brand Aquascutum. An interactive game hides behind the gorgeous email illustration, and those who complete it and provide their data are automatically entered into a drawing to win their favorite bag. With one initiative, the company has re-engaged existing customers, increased brand awareness, and generated new leads. Plus, it's captured data on its customers' style preferences. Genius!

Key ROI metrics from Aquascutum's competition include the following:

• 6% average email CTR
• 100% increase over average link clicks
• 100% increase over average open rates
• 50% increase over average views and forwards

4. Multichannel Engagement Campaigns

Email is your digital key, and you can use it to unlock a healthy ROI from your social media efforts.

A campaign that showcases your brand's multichannel opportunities will promote cross-channel communication and nurture that single customer view. Give your contacts the chance to get socially acquainted with your business, and watch your brand ambassadors multiply. Plus, collate the data from multichannel engagement campaigns to get deeper insight into lifestyle and behavior. That all leads to better targeting.

An engaged community with multiple touchpoints will do the work for you. Customers who feel valued and nurtured by companies are more than happy to build brand and salience in order to get a better ROI for themselves. The inbox is the perfect environment for your brand communities to thrive!

This email from British fashion brand Jack Wills is beautifully designed and chockablock with channels. It gives customers five unmissable opportunities to connect, and we love the persuasive copy creative!

5. Re-Engagement Campaigns

Looking for a win-back strategy that works? Reinstate valued members of your community by rolling out an irresistible re-engagement campaign.

Customers who have become dissatisfied with your email marketing want you to take a proactive approach to regaining their trust. Even your most loyal engagers will be bombarded with attractive alternatives, so get ahead of the competition by designing a campaign to collect customers' preferences. That email should be sent out to contacts who qualify as unengaged. Use the results to re-engage customers with better-informed emails and more precisely targeted CTAs.

Check out this simple, effective, and on-brand re-engagement email from Dormify. The US dorm decor brand used its design expertise to create a seriously clickable campaign.

Make It Resonate!

An attractive incentive provides great leverage for obtaining email signups and acquiring crucial consumer data. Customers have come to expect discounts in return for their data: Offers remain the top reason for filling out an online form and subscribing to a mailing list. But generic, batch-and-blast offer campaigns can dilute and devalue your company's message. It's easy to lose connections when the line of communication is poor.

To retain interest, you need to nurture long-term brand resonance. That is where adding value drives the best ROI. Content-led campaigns that are helpful, personal, and relevant can help you foster a lasting attachment between business and customer.