First of all, let’s get one things straight: email marketing is not dead. While it may seem that social media is starting to take over, email marketing still reigns king because of how effective it is.
Considering email marketing for your engineering firm? Here are a few stats you should let sink in from a recent Salesforce study:
- 44% of respondents made at least one purchase based on a promotional email
- 72% of B2B buyers are most likely to share useful content via email
- For every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average return on email marketing investment
Obviously, this is something that your engineering firm needs to pay attention to. Taking advantage of this is a huge opportunity. Email marketing could be the channel that brings you that next big client.
This is great, but how do you get your engineering firm a part of these profits?
Here are a few tips:
Build Your List
As with any marketing, starting out is always the most difficult part. In email marketing, the best place to start is to begin building a list. There are many different ways to do this, but start by featuring call-to-actions on your website, offering content in return for emails, and pulling together all those prospects that you’ve lost in the past. This is not, however, a once-and-done endeavor. It is important to constantly work on growing your list. As time goes on, some email recipients will inevitably unsubscribe, so you need a channel that is refilling this list.
We may be email marketers in Frederick, MD, but we’ve been around the block. We can tell you this: email marketing is a numbers game. The bigger list and the more consistent your emailing is, the more likely you will catch the right prospects, at the right time, with the right offer. When the going gets tough, remember that next clients could be just around the next corner!
Give Something Away
The best content is free content (at least as far as your potential customers are concerned). The way you keep subscribers interested and get them to work with you is to give them content and offers that they find interesting. Don’t send your list emails about the latest fashion tips just because it is something you may find interesting. They don’t care. Send them engineering-related content that they will share with their friends and find interesting, educational, or even controversial.
When is the Right Time for Your Engineering Firm?
Great, so now you have a good email list, and you have some great content to give to them. Now you have to decide when to send it. There are some general principles and recommended email send times to keep in mind, but each company will vary (although pretty much everyone should avoid 3 am).
Start out with generally accepted times, then vary them a bit to figure out which times work for you. Different times of the week/day have different results for open and click-through rates, so do your own research.
If you build a good list, give good content away, and send it at optimal times, you will be off to a good start. Email marketing with your engineering firm is like any other marketing tactic – it takes time to build up. Put together a plan, stay consistent, and do plenty of testing. It does take time and expertise to make the most of email lists, so partner with experts like New North and let us work with you to get the most out of this valuable channel. As an email marketing company in Frederick, Maryland, we’ve used email marketing services to grow our clients businesses around the country. Get in touch with us to start today.
“Email has an ability many channels don’t: creating valuable, personal touches – at scale.”
~ David Newman
