Far from being dead, email is still a highly effective marketing tactic – especially in the built environment. Despite everyone shouting about social, there’s an equal – if not stronger – case to be made for email, even in 2016.
Contrary to what you might have heard, email is not dead. This claim is so commonly made that there’s even a website - emailisnotdead.com – dedicated to debunking this myth.
One telling stat from this website is that email is almost 40x better at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter.
While there’s no denying that social media marketing has seen tremendous growth in recent years, email is still arguably the more popular choice.
With claims that email marketing can provide ROI of 4300%, it seems email is still very much alive and kicking.
What's more, the architecture and construction industries are particularly responsive to email marketing:
So, how can you use email to grow your construction business?
Segment
With email often being associated with spam, it's imperative that your content is relevant and helpful.
Say, for example, you supply building management systems to both the data centre and social housing markets. What are the chances that a data centre operator is going to be interested in products specific to social housing and vice versa?
Segmenting your contact list by interests will avoid content mismatches like this and stop readers hitting 'unsubscribe'.
Personalise
According to this MarketingSherpa report, including a name in the subject line increased open rates by as much as 41.8% in some industries.
This research, based on analysis of billions of emails, shows significant variation across different industries.
Though there's no breakdown for the built environment specifically, the average of 29.3% across all industries suggests marketers in this industry can enjoy a quick win by personalising their email subject lines.
One other quick personalisation hack is to change the email address you send from to a personal one. This research from Hubspot compared open rate and click through rate when the sender's name was 'Hubspot' and when it was 'Maggie Georgieva, Hubspot'.
The results of this A/B test were:
- Open rate (+8.06% when personalised)
- company: 6.57%
- personal: 7.10%
- Click through rate (+31.50% when personalised)
- company: 0.73%
- personal: 0.96%
Avoid spam triggers
Free, help, deal, win, trial, special offer, order now...
Avoid words like these if you don't want to end up in your recipient's spam folder.
Though spam filters are more sophisticated than simple subject line keyword checkers, this is still a factor. Overusing words like these is also likely to put your human audience off too.
You can find a comprehensive list of spam trigger words here.
Automate
In the built environment and construction industries, the goal of email shouldn't be to directly sell your product or service.
Instead, emails should focus on nurturing leads and keeping your brand fresh in prospects' minds.
Marketing automation software allows you to keep on top of this without wasting hours and hours personally tracking individual prospects. By creating workflows, you can automatically send personalised emails in response to triggers.
Visitor downloads your ebook on the range of options for improving energy efficiency in social housing? Add them to the 'awareness' stage workflow. The next step might be to send an email in a week's time with a blog post more suited to the consideration stage, perhaps explaining the benefits of solar PV panels.
Obviously, this example is overly simplified. Automated workflows can be as detailed as you like. The purpose, though, should be to nurture leads through the buyer's journey, make the sale and encourage repeat orders. When done well, you'll be achieving all this without having to lift a finger.
So, if you'd like to find out more about automated email, lead nurturing and inbound marketing for the built environment and construction sectors, download your copy of Building Sales Leads with Inbound Marketing to gain the competitive edge.