Email Marketing for Industrial Brands - Industrial Ideas

The importance of email marketing for industrial brands

Email marketing represents a highly potent method for maintaining a prominent presence in the minds of your target audience – provided it is executed correctly. Unfortunately, many industrial companies lack clarity on the content that should be included in their email marketing campaigns and communications.

How do you ensure that your email marketing is relevant and truly connects with your target audience?

Here are three key principles we follow to generate successful email marketing communications and campaigns for our clients:

1. Set your objectives and email marketing strategy

Think about your key objectives and metrics.

For industrial brands, this may mean aiming for open rates of 20%+ and click-through rates of 15%+.

How do you then nurture this engagement?

What next steps could you employ to generate further interest from your database?

You will need to better understand who your target audience is and what their business challenges and needs are.

Here are some questions to ask:

Who is my audience and what matters to them? 

The answer to this question can vary by the piece of content being created. Your audience can be mass market or niche, national, or state/region driven – depending on your objectives.

Their challenges may be anything from unskilled resources, quality management, and safety to production delays to escalating inventory and transport costs. You need to understand these challenges and propose how you can help.

What is the intent of my content?

Ask yourself why you are creating this content. Is it to inform? To influence? To engage? To challenge? To problem solve?

What do I want to see as the next step for prospects or customers who read my content?

Every piece of B2B marketing content should have a call to action. The objective is to keep them interested and engaged.

2. Create your marketing content

You’ve thought through your objectives and strategy and identified your target audience. Next, you want to develop your marketing content in a unique and compelling way.

• Plan and schedule your email marketing communications and campaigns. Use automation to ensure you follow a methodical flow of content.
• When creating new content, make sure you can get the most reach for your efforts by pushing the content out in different ways to different audiences.
• You can re-purpose content to different segments and tailor messaging as required. 
• A content calendar/timeline can serve as a guide and ensure that your content is aligned with your objectives.
• Deliver your email marketing and test to improve along the way. Use A/B tests and keep track of your results.
• How will you execute? Are you relying on in-house resources, or are you working with a trusted industrial marketing agency? This will help maintain the quality of your email marketing and ensure you deliver.

3. Return On Investment

How do you measure your performance? Consider metrics based on:

• Interest and Engagement: Open and click-through rates. Your target audience involvement and interest levels will be gauged by their actions of clicking, downloading your fact sheets, brochures, and/or white papers, and any comments they may leave on your contact page.
• Demand: Enquiries / Quotations on your products and services. Manufacturers need to be proactive and call some of these prospects/customers to follow up on their interests. This can also be easily outsourced to generate sales-qualified leads for your manufacturing business.

Email Marketing is an essential component of today’s industrial marketing toolkit. Adding these principles to your marketing will ensure you consistently deliver fresh email messages to receive a high return on investment.

If you’d like some help with your approach to industrial marketing, let’s chat.

Other Reading: 8 Email Newsletter Best Practices

Related Reading: Download Your Email Marketing Guide

EMAIL MARKETING GUIDE

Learn how to develop winning email marketing communications. We share our secrets to help you craft compelling email marketing content every time. With your Email Marketing Guide, you’ll have access to our proven approach in developing and executing email marketing communications that will strike a chord with your audience.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Zafiris is an industrial marketer and founder of Industrial Ideas. Having built his experience in B2B marketing from the ground up, Peter understands what it takes to succeed with your marketing strategy. All client projects are personally managed by Peter to help industrials like you get the return on investment you deserve. Peter and team, work hard to become an extension of your business, to help you get the most out of your marketing efforts. Get your free 30-minute marketing consultation to learn more.