Rich Newsome
If you attended our webinar a couple of weeks back, you’ll have learnt that email marketing is more crucial than ever during these unprecedented times, and the data-which we will be sharing-certainly backs this up.
We’ve seen some great results from companies within building products and construction who have used this as an opportunity to focus on two key areas:
- Growing their contacts database and;
- Reaching out to their current database
The purpose of this blog is to give you some useful tips and tricks (that are backed up by data) to ensure that you stay on top of your email marketing game during Covid-19.
Read on to find out more…
Growing Your Database is Crucial
Your contact database is one of your biggest assets when it comes to the success of your email marketing campaigns. With that in mind, you want to ensure two things:
- Your database is clean
- Your database is healthy
Top tip: We would recommend that you have your sales team spend time updating your system and adding new contacts.
Make your sign-up form as clear as possible
However, now is also a good time to think about growing your database. The easiest way to do this would be to make your ‘sign up’ form as clear as possible on your website.
update your contacts page
With your teams working from home, we’re sure that you’ve updated your contacts page to reflect your out of office setup. We recommend that you also go back through your website and ensure that you have plenty of opportunities to capture website visitor’s details, too.
provide free content offers
The best way to do this would be with free content offers, an opportunity to take part in some CPD, or any other incentive that might capture your architect or specifier’s attention. By gating this content with a landing page and form, you are providing a great opportunity to capture important contact information from your prospects.
email marketing statistics during covid-19
During our webinar last week, we shared some crucial statistics taken from American company, Worldata, which analysed over 100 million emails over an eleven-day period last month. Interestingly, they found that whilst inbox activity was up 27%, email volume was down 20%.
What does this mean?
It means that fewer emails are being sent, yet people are checking their emails more.
If we dig a little deeper into this, it wouldn’t be foolish to assume that:
- People are in panic mode
- Companies have ceased operations
- Companies are ploughing all their time and effort into other activities (such as social media)
But most importantly…
- Businesses are neglecting email marketing
What is driving an increase in open rates?
Without a doubt, your subject line is probably the most crucial factor in determining whether someone will read your email or not; that’s why it’s highly important to get it right.
The experts at Worldata have recently updated their statistics and have given some interesting information on the best performing words within subject lines.
Looking at the B2B data, you’ll notice that all of these words address the current situation we find ourselves in (note the references about remote working).
You’ll also notice that the best performing words are the ones that appear to talk to the recipient on a personal level (note the use of the words ‘you’ and ‘your’).
How many of these words could be relevant to your product offering?
Do you have capacity to offer ‘virtual’ CPD sessions?
Do you have any ‘free’ eBooks/guides to offer?
Understanding how to communicate with your prospects (what they don’t care about and what do they care about?)
If you take anything from the above data, you’ll realise that people care about what you can do for them at this moment in time. What can you do to make their lives easier?
- It may be free content or;
- It may be a virtual CPD session.
What people don’t care about right now is how great your product is. Any attempt at product-centric, self-promotion will fall flat during this current climate.
I’d go as far as to suggest that product-centric content is never the best way to reach out to your prospects, but that’s another story…
Types of email you could be sending:
With inbox activity up 27%, here are some tips on the types of emails you could be sending. You’ll notice that I have tried to tie this in with the data regarding to subject lines above.
Educational (free content)
Do an audit on the downloadable guides you currently have. You may have eBooks or whitepapers that’ll help your prospects with their future specifications.
Avoid sending out product brochures, however. Such content may not resonate well with your audience during this time, so closely consider the value that your content will bring.
Last week, one of our clients sent out a free guide to their contact database. In only five days, it has received a staggering 168 downloads. If ever there was a time to love email marketing, now would be it!
How to guides (cleaning guides)
If you’re going to talk about your products, we would suggest that you focus on the things that are relevant right now. Cleanliness and hygiene are hot topics and they’ll be the areas that organisations will be more acutely aware of, moving forward.
With that in mind, a subtle nod to the cleaning efficacy of your products might be a good strategy to implement into your email message.
Newsletters
Newsletters are a great way to keep your contacts up to date with the latest goings on in your organisation. A reference to how you’re adapting to this remote working approach, or what you’re doing to keep the wheels turning are all great messages to send out in a newsletter.
CPDs
Whilst it may seem this way at the moment, the world shouldn’t have to stop. Let people know that your CPDs are still going ahead, just in a virtual format.
Need any support on the best virtual tools to use? Read last week’s blog here.
Updated Contact Details
Of course, if you haven’t done so already, let your contacts know that you and your team is still reachable. Provide alternative contact details such as email, phone, LinkedIn handles and Zoom meeting links to ensure that your prospects can stay connected with your team.
Why ‘Personal’ Style emails are better
No one wants to talk to a computer, and this is of particular importance right now. Working from home can be exhausting, particularly if you’re confined to the same four walls on a daily basis.
Right now, people are craving that human interaction, and that’s why it’s so important to incorporate this into your email marketing campaign.
However, this isn’t easy-particularly when you’re sending out one email to a large number of contacts. You have to closely consider a message that will resonate with many people at the same time. Using personalisation tokens such as [first name] in an email is your first step to achieving genuine human interaction.
Personalisation tokens like these are available from many different email software providers and are a great way to address someone by their personal attributes.
Of course, you can go one step further and send out different emails to segments of your contacts. Email segmentation is the strategic art of grouping your contacts based on similar attributes, such as job role or geographical location.
By segmenting your emails, you can tweak your message slightly to achieve an even more personal experience.
A segmented email campaign is only achievable through a clean and organised database though, so dust off your marigolds and consider a spring clean during this downtime!
Why email software is essential
An email software provider that links with your CRM is an essential tool if you want to deliver successful email marketing campaigns. HubSpot’s free software allows you to:
- Build attractive emails (without being a web designer)
- Connect easily to your database (allowing for segmentation and personalisation)
- Create emails and schedule emails (to reach out to people at appropriate points of the day)
How much is too much?
Many people we speak to worry that bombarding people with 'marketing emails' may come across as spammy and annoying.
My advice for anyone who is worried that their emails may come across spammy and annoying is,
“Don’t make them spammy and annoying”
Keep them relevant. Keep them simple. Keep them personal.
If we look to the data above, we can comfortably say that people want your emails, so don’t worry about what’s considered “too much”.
Focus on quality.
Nurturing your leads
With high-quality email software, you can activate the splendours of email automation. In other words, you can send out appropriately-timed, automated responses when a lead completes a certain action.
A carefully planned nurture campaign will move prospects through the buyers journey to be come a specifier or customer.
We often refer to these campaigns as 'drip campaigns' and here's what they look like:
- Email one: Hi, hope you're well; here's a brief overview of what we do...
- Email two: We noticed that...Here is a case study from a recent project we were involved in..
- Email three: We like you. Here's a free piece of content
- Email four: Have you had chance to check out our latest product?
The above is a very basic example, but hopefully, you get the picture. The intention with a drip campaign is to 'drip-feed' bits of information about yourselves in a non-salesy way. With this approach, you should always aim to relate your message back to the customer, though. What is their pain? What can you help them with?
Last week, I wrote an article on some of the best books you could be reading during this 'downtime'. One of the books I wrote about was 'Storybrand' by Donald Miller. If ever you wanted more clarification on how to construct your business' message, this is the book to read.
As previously mentioned, tools like HubSpot will greatly help you with your email activities (particularly automation). Don't hesitate to ask us for assistance with implementation.
Third-Party Emails
For those of you wanting to reach out to even more architects, specifiers and other professionals across the sector, now is a great time to invest in some solus e-shots.
They’re great for start ups who want to get their message out to a wider audience, or for companies looking to increase brand awareness.
Companies such as Building Talk, ADF and Barbour Product Search are all running solus campaigns at the moment. Trusted brands like these will have a fully GDPR-compliant database of architects, specifiers and other decision makers within built projects.
We do recommend, however, that before making this investment, you factor in your landing page conversion rate to calculate expected cost per lead. To do this you should ask for two key pieces of data from said companies:
- Open rates of their last e-shot and;
- Click-through rates of their last e-shot
With this data, you’ll be able to form an estimate on how much each potential lead is worth, based on the investment that you may be making.
For example, if a solus e-shot costs £1,100 and is sent out to an audience of 7, 659 professionals with a click-through rate of 10%, you can estimate the cost-per-lead when you divide these figures between the average conversion rate of your landing page.
If the company’s open rates and click through rates are poor, you may be spending a lot of money for very little in return.
Of course, the success of landing page lead conversion may be down to the quality of your landing page. So, if an architect clicks through to your specific landing page, is your content offering valuable enough to make them want to go ahead and download?
Conclusion
I hope that this blog has inspired you to accelerate your building products brand’s email marketing efforts during this unusual and challenging time.
If you need any more help or support on this vital marketing strategy, don’t hesitate to get in touch with one of the experts here at Insynth.
Remember: keep your emails personal, relevant and informative.
And don’t forget to track the performance of your emails. How you use this data will determine the success of all future campaigns.
If you’ve tried any of the strategies above, we’d love to hear from you.
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.