Email marketing is a great channel to sell products and services, regardless of whether you are just getting started or an established marketer who sends out marketing emails every week. Clever marketers are constantly looking for ways to build relationships and increase revenue.
Do you need to send weekly newsletters to your subscribers?
Is it better to optimize your sales and marketing channels with dedicated sends (stand-alone emails that contain one offer)?
What about email digests?
These are valid questions that marketers ask when choosing the best format for their email marketing goals. This post will discuss the various types of marketing emails you can send and their advantages and disadvantages. These facts will help you make an informed decision about which email type to use and how to do it.
1. Welcome Emails
Prospects are often unprepared to do business upon initial contact. Research shows that only 25% are ready to sell immediately and 50% of qualified but not yet ready, according to the majority which leads.
Nurturing is crucial for bringing your leads closer to the buying stage.
Emails that include a personal touch and introduce the organization are more likely to be opened and clicked-through. Once you have established a rapport, avoid introducing a product or service. Do your best to make a first impression, which will show that you are knowledgeable and experienced in your field. It will help you open the door for future contacts.
Benefits of sending welcome emails
The beginning of a business partnership:
Sending your first email to prospective prospects is the first step towards forming a relationship. If done right, it will make them feel more open to receiving future emails. Subscribers who receive a welcome email are more likely to read the next 180 days.
Boost the Metrics:
Welcoming emails have higher open and click-through rates than standard marketing emails. That is a great way to improve your email marketing metrics.
Losses of sending welcome emails
Bad first impressions:
Your welcome email is your first contact with potential buyers. If you fail to nail it, you could lose any chance of closing the deal.
2. Email Newsletters
To stay in the minds of their customers, many businesses and organizations send out email newsletters. Email newsletters are a component of most industrial email marketing programs. They are used to educate prospects and customers about your company, highlight employee profiles, showcase passion projects and provide relevant graphics.
Before we can get into the detail of creating email bulletins, define your goals. What do you want your newsletter to accomplish? Perhaps you want to build relationships with your contacts and be the first company they think of when they need a product or service within your industry. You might also want to increase your sharing to attract more people. Once you have defined your goal, consider what metrics you could use to track your progress.
Continue reading: Marketing goals vs. marketing strategy
Newsletters are great for both marketing to prospects and nurturing existing customers. They provide information about company news, events, product announcements, and feedback. This ongoing communication will allow you to retain customers and gather valuable insights. To send your emails and track metrics, make sure you use a marketing CRM such as Hubspot.
If your goal is to drive traffic, for example, to certain pages, you will need to monitor click-through rates. CTR is the ratio of the number of clicks on a link to the number of people who view it.
New Data: 2020 Industrial Marketing Benchmarks
What kind of links do they most often click?
Are you able to upsell them?
What email subject lines get the highest open rate?
Which time is best to send an email?
These questions, which are often left unanswered by a marketing CRM, are one of the biggest pitfalls those marketers and industrial sellers face.
Need a refresher course in marketing terminology?
The Essential Dictionary of Industrial Marketing Terms That You Must Know is available.
When you work on your newsletter layout or content creation, be mindful of your goals and prioritize the placement and design of calls to action.
Email newsletters and Advantages
Brand Awareness:
Newsletters, similar to newspapers, create anticipation in readers. Readers get used to receiving the newsletter, no matter how often it sends. If you are considering email newsletters, ensure you send them regularly. The newsletter will be more popular if readers are satisfied with the contents. Your email subscribers will develop a relationship with you and will be able to identify your brand and associate it positively.
Repurpose Content:
Most newsletters contain information you have already published.
Companies often provide quick summaries of the most popular blog posts and then link to the articles in their newsletter. It allows subscribers to return to the company website and encourages them to engage with more company content.
Multiple Content:
Email newsletters allow you to include multiple content types in one email. It is an option for organizations that need to communicate with a variety of stakeholders.
A newsletter contains a popular blog article, a new offer, and information about an upcoming event.
It might also include a link to a survey. You might even find a video embedded within the email.
Find out more: 5 Uncommon Methods Industrial Businesses Use Video to Increase Sales.
Email newsletters have Disadvantages
Multiple Calls-to-Action:
Newsletters with a lot of information can seem overwhelming. Your recipients will likely read a lot of blurbs and article summaries rather than focusing on one element.
Layout:
Newsletters are more difficult as compared to dedicated emails. It will take some time to decide on the best placement of images, text, alignment, and prioritization. Now A/B Testing comes in.
3. Emails to Dedicated Users
Emails designated users, also known as stand-alone emails, contain information only about one offer. You can, for example, notify your audience about a whitepaper that you published or invite them to an industry event you are holding.
You can use dedicated emails to set the context for call-to-action. They are very similar to landing pages in this way. This practice is not always efficient and can lead to unsubscribes.
There are times when all subscribers will notify. For example, a timely offer or an emergency that is unprecedented in the country. In most cases, you will want to rate your customers based on their different attitudes and interests.
Another angle: How to Stay Connected with Customers During the COVID-19 Outbreak
Benefits of dedicated emails
A Focused Call to Action:
It is a different approach than newsletters. Instead of focusing on one message, dedicated sends can drive results for only one call-to-action.
Easy to build:
Once your email template is in place, it should be simple to create dedicated sends. You will usually take the information from the landing page and make some tweaks. Then you spend the majority of your time defining the subject line.
Easy to measure:
If you only have one message and call to action in your dedicated email, you will be able to track progress. It is easy to quickly assess the email CTR, landing pages views, conversions, as well as the long-term ROI.
Disadvantages to Dedicated Emails
There is less consistency with newsletters. Marketers tend to stick to a schedule when creating newsletters. You might, for example, create a weekly newsletter that goes out Tuesday mornings. Your company may send a newsletter that summarizes information published during the week. The schedule can be less clear and may not be as consistent with dedicated emails. If you are launching a new product or service, it is possible to use dedicated emails. Your subscribers may not be aware of your schedule or expect communication from the company. There is no connection between separate emails.
Homogenous content to highlight other information, you can use the landing page to which your email links. Include other offers if you are sending an eBook Offer. See the example below.
Find out more: 32 Industrial Lead Generation CTA Tricks, Tips, and Ideas.
4. Emails to Nurture Leads
Lead nurturing is an inbound marketing tactic that focuses on understanding your needs for leads and timing. The important point is here identify your buyer personas to reach your audience effectively. Your emails will be ignored or even deleted.
Lead nurture:
Strongly connected emails have a purpose and are full of juicy content. Lead nurturing is more than an email blast.
Email promotions can be multifaceted. You can use them to promote various things such as marketing materials such as blog posts, webinars, and discounts on eBooks or service offerings.
Inform customers about the latest happenings within your company by using emails. To use an automated system to save time and reduce labor requirements by sending emails.
Create different types and formats of promotional emails depending on the stage of the marketing funnel.
It will ensure that you provide relevant content at every step of the purchasing journey.
In this way, you guide prospects through the sales process to turn them into loyal customers.
It is how you guide prospects through the sales process to help them move down the funnel to convert them into loyal customers.
Find out more: 10 Content Marketing Strategies for Manufacturers & Industrials (with Examples)
Benefits of Lead Nurturing emails
Timely:
Studies after studies have shown that email response rates decrease with age. Take advantage of the dynamic between subscriber regulation, and then you need to use a lead nurture campaign. It means that you should contact a customer immediately if they are a new prospect.
Automated:
As new leads are received, emails will be sent automatically according to your schedule. It allows for a high return on investment and a low cost of entry. While you might forget about the campaigns, the emails will do the hard work. They will help you qualify leads faster and move them up the sales funnel. You see what we mean when we say that you need a marketing CRM platform. Check out our Must-Have Digital Marketing Apps and Tools (Including Free Ones).
Targeted:
Studies have shown that targeted and segmented email communications perform better than mass emails. You can tie several emails together to one activity or conversion event with lead nurturing.
Your follow-up emails can base on what a lead did on your website. It shows that you are interested in their topic and what they may need next.
Use this information to highlight reconversion opportunities for leads in lead nurturing emails.
The disadvantages of Lead Nurturing emails
You can generate more buzz with dedicated emails to your email list than you do with concurrent. Using simultaneous forwarding and social sharing to share a new product or service can result in increased engagement.
It is especially true if your email contains links for Twitter, Linked In, and Facebook sharing. Due to lead nurture being designed to schedule fewer emails for segmented audiences; it cannot achieve the same buzz effect. While there will be some sharing, you will not see an influx of traffic or conversions on any one day. Instead, visitors and leads will continue to trickle in.
Dive Deeper: How Marketing & Sales Pros Can Build Effective Prospect Lists
Passive tracking:
Lead nurturing is automated, so marketers forget about it once they set it up. It also means that it tends to get underreported. Your lead nurture campaigns should include unique tracking tokens. Keep checking your marketing analytics frequently to assess performance and to prove ROI.
5. Promoted Emails
We have talked about marketing emails that assume that you are sending messages to your email list. Sponsorship emails with display ads can be a great way to reach new audiences and get leads. Sponsorship usually involves paying to have your copy included in a newsletter or dedicated email from another vendor.
Sponsorship email campaigns can be part of a paid media strategy that includes pay-per-click, display advertising, mobile advertising, and affiliate advertising.
You can be very specific with the description of the audience you are trying to reach in paid media.
Continue reading: Search Ads vs. Display Ads vs. Ads on Social Media
You will need to follow the vendor's instructions when designing your email copy and ad placement. If the vendor has image or size restrictions, ask them. In advance, provide both the HTML- and plain text versions.
If you are not in a business relationship, ensure that you have confidence on that point they will be a trustworthy partner and can understand your manufacturing business needs.
Benefits of Sponsorship Emails
Highly Targeted:
Sponsorship emails have the advantage of being very specific about which you are targeting. You can be very specific in identifying the characteristics of your target audience, such as their number, geographical location, interests, and challenges.
Exact ROI:
Sponsored emails require a specific investment. You know the value of your vendor's sponsorship email. To calculate your return on investment, you just need to figure out what result you get (visits and leads sales).
Knowing the exact ROI will allow you to fit it into your marketing budget and create accurate reports at the end.
There are disadvantages to sponsorship emails.
Paid:
A Promotional email is that which sent to people who haven't signed up for your listing. It means you have to pay for the content. Vendors have different payment options, and you can negotiate. You have the option to pay a flat fee or the price per thousand impressions model. Or, you can pay per lead.
Special Resources:
The management of vendor relationships and sponsorship emails requires a lot of marketing effort. You will need to understand not only their brand but also the data behind their emails. This type of email marketing is not easy to implement if your company has a small marketing department.
6. Transactional emails
Transactional emails are messages triggered by specific actions taken by your contacts and allow them to be processed. If you sign up for an industry webinar, you'll need to fill out a form first. You will then receive a transaction email (thanks) giving you the login details. Double opt-in means that email link clicks will ask people to confirm their registration.
Transactional refers to the messages that you receive from e-commerce websites. They confirm your order, give you the shipping information, and provide other details about your purchase.
Benefits of Transactional Emails
High CTR:
Transactional emails have a high rate of open and click rates. They help recipients complete an action. They open and click on these emails. You can take advantage of this dynamic by including a highly personalized call-to-action, perhaps even as a P.S. You can take advantage of that your subscriber is new and actively engaged in your email communications.
Transactional emails have their disadvantages.
It can be a barrier:
Contacts may feel discouraged from taking another action, as it makes them feel like they are jumping through hoops.
7. Retargeting Emails
If your metrics indicate that a significant portion of your subscribers has been inactive, it might be time to send a re-engagement email to re-establish contact. It's an excellent way of bringing your business back into their minds. If they respond, it's a win for both you and them.
Even if they unsubscribe, there are still some positives: Your overall email engagement rates will increase, and your email reputation among internet service providers will rise.
Benefits of Re-Engagement emails
It's cheaper to turn a loss into an opportunity: According to the active Campaign, it costs five times less to convert an inactive subscriber into a customer than acquire a new customer.
Get rid of all the junk mail. The good news is that you can clean up your email list, regardless of the outcome.
Disadvantages and Re-Engagement emails
Do not pester:
A contact may have stopped responding to your previous inquiries. It is worth sending a series of re-engagements to all contacts because we all want to win more business. However, don't pester them again if they aren't ready to partner up.
8. Emails from Brand Story
Emotional reaction is an effective tool with storytelling to communicate your message to prospects and customers. It can be easy to build a connection with users by simply entering their inbox.
Ask yourself:
Do you have a personal story to share about your brand?
Have a video of your company profile that you would like to share with the world?
This story clears in our marketing collateral and emails. We use our past to show our reputation and highlight our industry focus to prove our purpose. Our audience can see the unique story and learn more about whom we are, our work, and what we can do for them.
Even if you don't have a history of manufacturing or distribution for more than a century, every business has its own story. Start with your unique selling proposition.
9. Benefits of brand story emails
Emotional connection:
Emails that tell a story about your brand that can spark an emotional response from your subscribers can drive purchase decisions and customer loyalty.
The disadvantages of brand story emails
Do not spam:
It is difficult to determine the story behind your business' brand. So that you don't spam your prospects and customers with junk mail, every email you send must have a purpose. Don't wait until you have a complete brand story.
Learn more: Why manufacturers need brand marketing
Review your Email Requests:
The largest generation is involved in purchasing decisions for their businesses, according to the study. These buyers, aligned with the industrial purchasing cycle, don't make purchase decisions until they are 70% through the purchasing process before speaking with a supplier.
These buyers often refer to review sites, such as Glassdoor, G2Crowd, and Google Reviews, when researching companies based upon past customer reviews. These reviews can help you build trust and boost your search engine rankings.
Ask your most satisfied customers for reviews. If you have the budget, it doesn't hurt if you offer an incentive such as a chance at winning a gift certificate.
Benefits of reviewing request emails
Credibility:
Reviews sites are a great place to start when researching the companies they want to work for you. A few positive reviews could be all that is needed to convince a buyer to choose your company over another supplier.
Search Engine Optimization:
Many review sites have exceptional domain authority levels. Including links back to your website will only increase your site's authority. Reviews can help you create unique and keyword-rich content about your company and improve your search engine rankings.
The disadvantages of reviewing request emails
Negative Reviews:
It is a problem. Instead of asking for positive feedback, a customer may respond with a negative review. These emails are smart to segment your email list to customers who are satisfied with the partnership you have.
Email Marketing Nurtures Leads To Customers
Use these emails to experiment with your email marketing strategy and diversify your content. How are your email campaigns performing? Check out how your open rates, click-through rates, and industry average in our 2020 Industrial Marketing Benchmarks article. Or contact our team for a complimentary Digital Health Check of your online presence.
We will score your efforts and show you how you stack up against other companies. We can help you convert those prospects into customers. As manufacturing and industrial experts, we also have degreed engineers on staff who transform your material into engaging content that attracts buyers.
