Alan Gayle is a sales and marketing consultant specialising in the construction industry and working in the stone sector for more than a decade. In this column he offers advice on how to make an impact in the market. This month Alan considers email marketing.
Following last month’s look at social media, this month I’m staying with online marketing, (or digital marketing, as it’s commonly known) to cover email marketing.
In the marketing world, digital marketing covers more or less anything that is intended to be viewed on a screen. That includes websites, search engine optimisation (SEO), pay per click (PPC) advertising, social media, online PR, course email marketing and a host of others.
There are a lot of benefits to email marketing. Two of the most obvious are the relatively low cost and the accurate feedback data (known as analytics) to tell you how well… or badly… the campaign performed.
There are also a few disadvantages. The main one is the huge growth in this activity in recent years and the consequent ‘email fatigue’ most of us experience.
If you’re thinking about using email marketing for the first time, be aware that it has been proven to be more effective when the sender of the email is already known to the recipient. So, before you spend hundreds of pounds buying lists of email addresses, use it on dormant customers that haven’t been in touch for a while or existing customers to encourage them to buy more.
The two most common ways of using email marketing in the building industry are newsletters and promotions.
Of course, newsletters are promotional as well, but when I say promotions, I’m referring to specific, sales-driven promotions such as launching a new product or service, a special offer, or listing old stock at knock-down prices.
Promotional emails are more likely to be one-off campaigns with a strong sales message, whereas newsletters are more frequent and typically have a softer sales message, often mixing case studies and company achievements in with news and topical comment that will interest your regular readers.
Your first objective – and your biggest challenge – is to get your email opened by as many recipients as possible. You may think it’s a masterpiece but email fatigue is our enemy, so you need to have an interesting subject line to achieve the highest open rate possible.
The next thing is to keep the content relevant and interesting. If you sell to several different types of customer and you have a large database, divide your database into categories. For example, a company like Ardex could sell to main contractors, subcontractors, merchants and (albeit indirectly) architects. These are four distinct groups with different interests and priorities. Keep in mind that what interests a merchant (product shelf life, volume discounts, availability, etc.) probably won’t excite an architect.
That’s it for now. But I shall conclude email marketing next month by answering the following questions: How often should you send out your newsletter? What’s the best time of day to send it? How long should it be? Can it be read on mobile phones? What do I do with all this data after the campaign?
Here are a few KeyNOTES to remember on the elements covered so far:
1. Set your objectives. Use SMART goals: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound
2. Your objectives should determine the content and style of your emails
3. Have an interesting subject line that will make your email stand out
4. Your content must engage the target audience of your database. Keep AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) in mind when you plan each campaign
5. Segment your database into customer types. Content must interest the recipient, not the sender
6. It is more effective when the sender is known to the receiver, so target existing customers.