Congratulations, you’ve taken the first steps to taking your manufacturing business to the next level with the use of email marketing! That’s right, email is still a thing. In fact, 71% of manufacturing marketers say that content marketing has become more important to their organization over the last year according to the Content Marketing Institute.
How the Manufacturers Can Incorporate Email into their Marketing Strategy
In an industry where each purchase can be an intense and expensive- long, drawn-out sales cycles that involve multiple stakeholders and other decision-makers- having a well-thought-out email marketing strategy to provide support is key for ensuring your sales team can make the most of your marketing efforts.
As you help people research and make buying decisions, you’ll also be building trust and showing people that they can count on you. As a result, you’ll create and maintain relationships that will help your business succeed.
For this blog, I’ve compiled a list of high-level tips you’ll need to consider when developing an email marketing plan focused on your manufacturing business.
Offer Quality Content with The Use of Dynamic Content
A 2023 Manufacturing Content Marketing Trends study states that only 32% of manufacturing marketers have a documented content marketing strategy.
Getting a solid strategy built takes work but with the help of dynamic content it can be a bit easier. This means you don’t have much time to create content from scratch every time you need to send a marketing email.
Dynamic content is a term for the fields of an email body that change based on the interests or past behavior of the recipient, dynamic content allows for an email can have custom content fields that change based on your customers’ preferences, so you don’t have to set each manually every time you’re sending an email marketing communication.
Subscriber List Hygiene
Your priority should be to gather all of those emails you’ve been collecting and make sure you receive their consent to contact them. Once you have consent, they’re yours to contact!
Here are a few best practices to implement as you’re starting off the list hygiene:
- List cleanse. Your manufacturing email list can get cluttered. You’ll want to start by running a list cleanse through any email address you haven’t sent to in the last 3-6 months. A list cleansing service, like the one we offer, will help scrub out the bad, invalid, and potential spam trap email addresses that can harm your deliverability rate, if used.
- Say ‘no’ to list purchases. You should grow your own list. Besides, you have your current customers you can start out with.
- Ask permission before marketing to your audience. The last thing you want to do is send out an email and have recipients question the origin and immediately unsubscribe, or worse, mark the email as spam.
- Put your website to work! Place an email signup on your website, or request contact information when sharing downloads, whitepapers, or scheduling a demo.
- The power of people. Think of all of the trade shows and conferences you attend each year. Use this time to get people to visit your website and sign up to receive email communication from you.
Use of Personalization
Personalization is key. At all costs, avoid sending generic emails to your contact list.
Let’s face it, your audience is not all the same, nor do you want them to be. By gathering contact information for each customer and prospect, you can tailor email content to your audience’s needs and wants.
To do so, utilize your website to help gather user information [in addition to email addresses]:
- First & Last name
- Company name
- Account number (if it’s an active customer)
- Geography information
- Devices used
- Business size
- Product(s) of interest
- Biggest need
- The list can go on and on – just make sure you’re tailoring to what is important to your business
Getting started with personalization: Using your email recipient’s name in the subject line and the body is an excellent way to start personalizing your emails.
Get to Know Your Audience
It’s important to know who you are speaking to in your campaigns. Without knowing who they are, it can be tough to sell your brand and show them you’re the solution to their challenges. Research who your audience is and take some time to build buyer persona’s that help you and your team visualize the person on the other end of your email.
This also allows you to create relevant content that fits the needs and interests of your audience. Some great examples of tailored content include industry updates, how-to content or advice, or content centered around solutions.
Segment Your Subscribers
Your audience was not created equal. More likely than not, your subscriber list has varying interests, and not to mention fall at various stages of the buyer’s journey. So why present them with just one type of content?
Your audience may be current customers and prospects that are:
- Executive/decision-makers
- Influencers
- Education seekers
- Prospects at the beginning of the funnel
- Hands-on-keyboard prospects
- Prospects close to converting
Based on each audience interest, these customers and prospects need to be segmented into different groups so you can send unique and relevant content to each.
Set It and Test It
Practice automation. In efforts to improve your lead-nurturing process and to be as efficient as you can, setting up automation for all your email marketing campaigns is essential. The emfluence Marketing Platform offers features that make the automation process easy to implement.
Testing. If you’re not testing, you’re missing the mark somewhere. Your audience’s interest and demands are always evolving, and it is your job as a marketer to stay on top of these shifts and trends and work accordingly. One great way to accomplish this is by A/B testing.
Here are just a few things to consider testing after launching an automated email campaign –
- Time of Day
- Subject lines
- Personalization
- Call-to-Action
Measuring Success
How do you know what success looks like? Well, it starts within your organization – defining KPIs and specific goals around email based on your department, and company revenue goals, for example. Then there’s the benchmarks per industry.
Twice per year, emfluence publishes a blog on Email Marketing Benchmarks, where we look at email marketing metrics compiled by all users of the emfluence Marketing Platform. These benchmarks are designed to give you a starting point for comparing your own email marketing metrics. Some of the numbers by industry we like to look at include:
- Average email marketing metrics
- Email engagement
- Most email sends
- Bounces, Unsubscribes and Complaints
- Averages for Automated, Manual, and Transactional Sends
- Averages for B2B and B2C Email Marketers
Conclusion
There are many things to consider when starting an email marketing campaign. The main goal is to be effectively with your time while presenting relevant content that attracts your audience and staying relevant by continuously testing your automated campaigns to ensure you are using the correct tactics to grow your business relationships and increasing sales.
Our team has done it all and has success providing marketing guidance for manufacturing companies. If you need extra help getting set up with a solid email marketing strategy, you can learn more about our email strategy services here.
