Freya Oxton-Grant
Email is the traditional digital marketing format, and it’s still extremely effective. If your email is good enough, you get a decent chance to put yourself in front of your ideal customer and get them to hear your message.
Email marketing is one of the key components of marketing automation and can really be a game changer for your construction business’ marketing.
Especially in an industry where your target customer can range from an architect to contractor, segmenting your email campaigns and having them being run automatically, can improve your productivity fourfold.
Segmenting your email campaigns is shown to achieve a much higher open rate, because people recognise the email is relevant and interesting for them to open and read.
Automated Email Marketing
Its increasingly important, in a highly competitive and dynamic construction market, to nurture your sales leads.
Automated trigger emails, when someone interacts or downloads something from your website, can send out useful advice and information to make sure your company stays top of mind and provides answers to every question that a customer has- before someone else answers them.
If you personalise and humanise these follow up emails, people will understand that your company is reactive and supportive, even if the reply did seem so fast it must have been a robot who sent it.
Embedding forms onto your site will also help you with your lead nurturing, making sure those hand-raisers are responded to immediately, even out of office hours. They will also then become one of your contacts for delivering future email campaigns.
Getting A Bit More Advanced
When building an email, using personalisation means the email sender will automatically input key information direct from your CRM to your email, and make it tailored to their company, job role, age, gender and anything else you know about them.
Marketing automation also has the most incredible aspect to it that it will automatically and simultaneously test and analyse your email performance and improve it over the duration of a campaign.
Split (or A/B) testing runs your email with different formats to a ‘test group’ and whichever performs better (think open and click through rate) it will promote to the rest of your contact database.
This automation allows you to truly explore and update your email campaigns with the best content, design, timing, subject line or preview text etc.
Using Marketing Automation
The majority of marketing automation software includes this wide scope of email marketing capabilities and the beauty of it is, is that it seamlessly integrates it with the rest of your marketing automation system and provides you with an end to end package.
Email marketing tools only manage the email campaign, but marketing automation software gathers data about the before and after of that email, tracking the recipient across your website and seeing how they interact with your company.
Marcus Sheridan, content marketing guru and thought-leader, states that there is a magic number of touchpoints that a prospect needs to interact with before they (sub-consciously) trust your business, and (consciously) convert.
For his own company, Marcus realised that potential customers who viewed 30 pages on his website of content (blogs, product information, videos etc) had an 80% closing rate, compared to his average rate of 15%.
Using your integrated CRM and marketing automation system, you can make sure your prospects hit this number by delivering them emails with key content pieces relevant to their product interest and let them consume this over a period of time.
We believe this will drastically improve your rate of conversion, especially in the construction industry where leads can get lost in project life cyles that can go on for years.
Conclusion
Email marketing automation eliminates small and time-consuming tasks for you, but it also has a massive impact on your ability to effectively nurture and convert your sales leads.
You can use this software to create relevant, personalised and timely email campaigns and trigger emails to deliver a truly great email experience to your existing as well as potential customers.
Want to learn more about marketing automation for your building products or construction business? Read our BEGINNER'S GUIDE to Marketing Automation for Construction Companies.
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.