Rich Newsome
Getting positive email results firstly requires you to look at your email list. A new email marketing campaign won’t be effective if you haven’t built a list of recipients to get your messages, or you haven’t grown the existing list you currently have.
By creating an audience with an email list, you will have the opportunity to nurture and develop your prospects in a way that keeps them interested and engaged with your content.
After all, they’ve signed up for your emails. This means that they’ve expressed that first level of interest and are seeking your help for a solution. This makes selling what you’re offering a lot easier down the line.
Capturing Email Addresses Takes Effort
You may have noticed, but it’s not easy to capture email addresses, particularly from architects who receive hundreds of emails on a weekly basis.
Getting your prospects signed up to your email list takes trust-building and effort. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to this process.
However, there are many different list-building strategies out there.
In this blog, we’ll aim to cover our two favourite tips that we suggest to our clients. We actively use these techniques for our email marketing efforts for our clients.
Tip #1: Capture Email Addresses With A Free Opt-In Offer
One of the best ways to capture email addresses is to give away something for free. If a visitor to your site is presented with the option of downloading a free eBook or whitepaper based on the content cluster that you’ve been blogging about, you’re much more likely to capture an email address.
These freebies aren’t just limited to eBooks and whitepapers, however. Why not give away a free sample of your product in exchange for an email address?
When considering free opt-in offers, always aim to deliver something useful to your audience. If you can do that, then they’ll happily trade you their email address in return.
Tip #2: Make It Easy For Prospects To Subscribe To Your List
Many building products websites hide their ‘subscribe’ boxes right down at the bottom of their homepage. We recommend that if you’re trying to grow your email list, prioritise placing multiple opportunities for people to give you their email address throughout the page.
At this stage, you’ll want to pay close attention to your most visited pages and make sure you place email forms on those pages. Do you have access to this data?
Insynth’s monthly reporting process allows you to see your best-performing pages and blog posts, which directly influence our marketing efforts.
Buying Email Lists
So you’ve tried the techniques above and you’re just not seeing the results that you were hoping for. You decide that your only option is to purchase an email list. Wrong. We recommend that you avoid buying an email list. We’ll cover some reasons for this below.
If your list building efforts have been unsuccessful so far, you need to look at whether your freebies are useful to your prospects. It might mean that you re-think your free opt-in offer.
Let’s explore some of the reasons why buying email lists is a bad idea.
Reason #1 You Won’t Gain Trust
Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How do you feel when you receive an email from a company that you’ve never heard of? Most of us react in the same way; we wonder how the business got our information what why they’re bothering us.
These types of emails are nothing more than spam and it doesn’t align with the inbound methodology that we’re trying hard to promote within the building products and construction industry.
Reason #2: You’re Putting Your Deliverability And Reputation At Risk
Purchased lists have a reputation for containing old and inactive email addresses. When this happens, you’re more likely to receive hard bounces and error messages. If this happens frequently, you’ll start raising red flags to your email service provider.
A new list all of a sudden-coupled with an increased number of people marking your messages as spam-might not be good news for your account status.
Worst case scenario: you’ll be blocked from being able to send any emails in the future.
Reason #3: You Don’t Know Them
How do you know that these new recipients are inside your target demographic? Was this list also sold to your closest competitors? We can’t answer these questions for certain, but we know that buying lists are just not worth it.
What Is CAN-SPAM Compliance?
CAN-SPAM stands for: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing. This act gives the recipient the right to stop a business contacting them via email. Violating this act can result in a hefty fine, so keep these rules in mind:
Rule #1: Include A Visible Unsubscribe Link
Make it as easy as possible for users to unsubscribe from your emails. It may sound counter-intuitive, but is there any point in keeping someone on your list that doesn’t want to be there?
If you make it too difficult for people to unsubscribe; if people have to jump through several hoops, you’re increasing the chances of people hitting the dreaded spam link.
Rule #2: Physical Location In Signature
Always aim to include your company’s address in your emails. It’s a good way to show transparency in your brand and proves to your email service provider that you’re a credible, accountable sender.
Conclusion
Building your email list within the building products and construction industry isn’t an easy task, but always aim to grow your list as organically as possible. As with organic traffic, an organic list of contacts will be sustainable for your future growth as a business.
When it comes to acquiring those contacts, its so important to provide your visitors with content that is valuable. A secure content strategy is the key to obtaining top-quality contacts throughout the buyer’s journey.
Insynth can help you to establish a secure content strategy and structured email marketing campaign so that you can gain more organic leads for your building products and construction company. For more information, get in touch with one of our experts today.
About Insynth
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.