Tips on Building a Subscribed Audience for Your Manufacturing Company
Behind every successful manufacturing company is a well-executed marketing strategy built around a specific target market in mind. Aided by technology, marketing has flourished, especially during the transition to the digital space and social media marketing, SEO, content marketing, and many more.
And yet, among these techniques, email marketing remains to be a crowd favorite, especially for industrial companies. Check out these tips on building a subscribed audience for your manufacturing company.
Some might think that email is a dying marketing channel, but its reach and return on investment (ROI) say otherwise. It is estimated that email marketing has an ROI of 4400%.
In 2020, the number of email users worldwide amounted to 4 billion and was expected to grow to 4.6 billion by 2025. These numbers just prove how email marketing is still relevant and efficient for any company out there, regardless of which space they are in.
What is an Email List?
To begin email marketing, you need a specialized list of names and email addresses of potential customers who could be interested in receiving updates, promotions, and newsletters from your company. This is what is called an “email list” or “mailing list.”
You can build your email list using email marketing software to collect data from your website visitors. From there, you can schedule campaigns, send bulk emails, share your content, track the performance of your campaigns, and many more.
How Do You Build an Email List?
There are several ways to get started with your email list, but all of them start by knowing your audience.
Analyze Your Data and Segment Your Audience
Create a persona of your target customers in mind and figure out the best way to reach and convince them.
Aim to always cater your content to the preferences and actions of your clients. Segmented emails generate 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails. You can create a separate list for existing clients and another for new leads. This way, you can track how they interact with your emails, including knowing if they opened it or clicked the links in the email.
Analyzing your email list data can help you make adjustments in terms of content and even writing the subject line of your emails. You can also opt to produce relatable content for each segment, which will help you increase engagement.
Keep your customers intrigued by partnering with the agency who specializes in helping industrial companies quickly increase their leads and revenue.
Optimize Your Website
One of the advantages of having a website is that it contains many opportunities for your potential customers to subscribe to your email list.
For one, you can integrate your website with an email marketing service that can collect a list of prospects for you. And using the same platform and data will enable you to conveniently launch your email marketing series with ease. It will also help you to:
- Effectively automate and schedule emails
- Segment your list so you can send more relevant content and more efficiently push your audience down the funnel
- Track and monitor your response and open rates
Make Use of Opt-in Forms
You can set up perfectly timed surveys or pop-up forms that can appear for visitors to subscribe to your email newsletters. What is amazing about opt-in forms is that you can instantly get a list of prospects who are genuinely interested in your business.
Compared to other site visitors, they are more likely to make a purchase or become repeat customers. With this method, you’ll be able to focus more on leads that have higher chances of converting.
How to Create Subscription Forms?
Note that the content, placement, and timing of subscription forms are crucial. More than 70% of people leaving your site will never return, and without a subscription to your list, how can you convince them to be interested in your business?
Make your forms noticeable, accessible, and, most of all, enticing. All good websites have a call-to-action button on every landing page. This allows customers to easily subscribe no matter what page of your website they are on. Images that slide in or pop up on all your landing pages are also a great way to catch their attention.
You might wonder why a pop-up form should be enticing but remember that most transactions are technical in the manufacturing space. Adding an attractive pop-up on your site can help you make an impression.
Besides, not all the information about your products and services can be made available on your site, so it would help you have another avenue for prospects to learn more about your business and product offerings.
Moreover, some potential customers might be interested in the various products or services you offer, but they could just wait for a little more push in the right direction. Here, you can offer lead magnets such as free technical guides, brochures or you can also share promos or give out discounts for bulk orders.
How to Manage and Maintain Your Email List?
An email campaign method is like directly communicating with your potential clients, so it is effective. However, to ROI on your email marketing strategy, you should also know how to maintain and manage your list. A long list of subscribers is no good if most don’t even open your newsletters, or worse, send them to spam or the trash folder.
Email marketing contributes to its high engagement with prospects which leads to consistently building loyal relationships with potential customers.
Regularly Clean Your Email List
Emails bounce. Some people could have changed their addresses, misspelled a few things, or moved jobs. But the more important reason you need to clean your list from time is that high bounce rates can hurt your sender’s reputation, and you can be tagged as spam.
If that happens, your messages would instantly drop to the spam folder, which no company would want to happen.
To clean your email list, make sure to:
- Remove duplicates.
- Check for typos.
- Update contact details.
- Remove invalid email addresses.
- Use email verification and list cleaning software to validate your email list.
Don’t Flood Your Subscribers
You might have a ton of overflowing content, but be careful not to go overboard with sending too many emails. According to studies, one of the main reasons people unsubscribe to newsletters is an excessive influx of emails.
You can avoid this by narrowing down your audience into segments. For instance, you can create separate email campaigns for each service that you offer. From the moment prospects sign up on your opt-in form, ask them which particular product or service they are interested in. This will trigger which email series would be sent to which audience.
Keep Subscribers Engaged and Re-engage Old Contacts
Inactive subscribers are something that happens even to the best of marketing campaigns. Their inactivity isn’t an immediate sign that they want to unsubscribe, but it could be that they need a break from your updates, or they might’ve forgotten you.
Send a re-engagement email to leads who have not opened or clicked your emails for the past six months. You can arrange a separate targeted email content for re-engaging inactive users or prompt them to take action with a small incentive. Keep in mind that re-engaging old contacts are cheaper than finding new ones.
Final Thoughts
In contrast to the direct-to-consumer space, email marketing in the manufacturing industry isn’t run by emotionally charged ads. Here, email marketing is about always ensuring quality over quantity.
Nonetheless, email campaigns certainly are an affordable and efficient marketing tactic for manufacturers and industrial companies as long as you are providing valuable information to your subscribers and sharing relevant and practical content.
As the leader in industrial marketing, MFG Tribe has been helping Industrial companies from $2 million – $3 billion dominate their competition with the most aggressive marketing tactics that work in today’s competitive environment for over five years. Our strategy adjusts based on what’s most effective for YOUR company, and we only work with industrial companies. If you’re looking to set up your marketing efforts with the Industrial Marketing leader, schedule a discovery call today.