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Do you use email?
Of course you do.
Email has become the bread and butter of business communication…but more than that, it’s now foundational for marketers. It’s one of the very first things that companies do when they transition into digital tactics.
However, that being said, just because manufacturers use industrial email campaigns does not mean they all know how to do it well.
If you’re struggling to get decent results from your company newsletters, here are ten tips on how to improve each email’s performance!
1. USE INTERACTIVE CONTENT
“Interactive content,” means blogs, videos polls…anything that inspires your audience to take action.
That being said, don’t send out a twenty-minute survey every week. Just give them something to see or click on: a reason to visit your website. We at IndustrialSage highly recommend using video in your industrial email campaigns. Big surprise there.
Giving your audience a button to click or a reason to respond will help you measure their level of interest.
If you just send them a few paragraphs about your company or new product, they may not take the initiative to reach out if they’re curious for more. Make it easy for them.
2. USE THE WORD “VIDEO” IN YOUR SUBJECT LINE
If you are sending a video, say so in the subject line!! People love videos! They provide maximum information while requiring minimum effort from the viewer.
If you want more audience engagement with your newsletters, this little tease can produce incredible results. Studies show that including the word “Video” in email subject lines boosts open-rates by 19% and click-throughs by 65%!
It all comes back to making life as easy for your leads as possible.
3. WRITE AN ENGAGING SUBJECT LINE
Even if you’re not sending a video in your industrial email campaigns, you should try to make your message compelling.
Sending an email called “Our June Newsletter” is not interesting to anybody.
Write something valuable, like the selling point of a new case study or customer testimonial. Try “Did You Know Our Sensors Are Helping Bring Clean Water to Underdeveloped Countries?” or
“How We Helped One Company Generate $5 Million In Revenue In Two Weeks!”
Now that’s compelling!
4. SEND A LINKED THUMBNAIL, NOT A VIDEO FILE
We keep harping on this, but that’s because it’s a big issue. Do send videos to your email subscribers…but don’t send the actual video file itself.
For one thing, video files are huge. And big files trigger a lot of red flags for email providers, so your message might get blocked or sent straight to spam.
High-quality video files are massive. If you try sending a smaller file to your audience, the quality will be dirt-poor. Either way, there’s still a gamble that your email may never arrive. If you do this enough times, your entire company could get blacklisted.
So how do you send a video in your industrial email campaigns? You send a picture instead –preferably one with a play button– and attach a link to the image. It’s really hard to resist play buttons. That way, when people click on your picture, they’re whisked away to where your high-quality video lives on the internet.
5. LINK TO YOUR WEBSITE, NOT YOUTUBE OR VIMEO
This is yet another point we won’t budge on. Do we have a YouTube channel? Yes, we do. But, if you follow our show at all, you know that it is not the place where we send our audience.
Video hosting sites have their own agenda; they don’t want your viewers to leave. They may post your competitor’s videos right next to yours because they’re ‘relevant.’
Don’t send your viewers from your perfectly on-brand email newsletter to the land of distracting cats and ASMR cooking shows. They may not find you interesting enough to return from the detour.
6. EMBED THE VIDEO ON YOUR WEBSITE
So what do you do with your videos, then? Where can you post them that will not distract your audience? Your own website, of course.
All video hosting platforms have embed options so you can host them on your own blog or webpage.
The video may still include ads, which is a whole other problem for another time…but at least now your viewers are in your domain. They only see “distractions” all about you, and your company.
7. USE A CLEAN EMAIL LIST
A lot of people buy email lists. Don’t do that. For one thing, it’s a very lowbrow and spammy practice that GDPR is cracking down on in Europe. It’s only a matter of time before that hits the states, too.
Second of all, a lot of email lists, whether bought or legitimately required, are old. And old email addresses are more likely to bounce.
You may have a list of newsletter subscribers dating all the way back to 1999! Good for you…but how many of those AOL and Juno emails are still active, do you think?
If your company sends out an email newsletter and 13% of your recipients bounce, you run the risk of getting flagged. Your messages will automatically get marked as junk, or they’ll be blocked altogether.
8. USE EMAIL SEGMENTATION
Don’t send the same blanket message to everybody in your contacts list– especially if you serve multiple verticals. If your parts can be implemented within aerospace and within healthcare, for example…send two different emails to those two different groups.
It’s better to tag your contacts and separate them within your CRM. Distributors, past clients, potential buyers, all segmented by industry– each wants to hear from you, but for very different reasons.
Don’t try to stay vague enough to apply to every industry. There is no ‘silver bullet’ message that can apply to everybody everywhere. Marketing is about using a sniper rifle; not scattered buckshot.
9. MINIMAL TEXT, MAXIMUM VISUALS
If you want to send your subscribers a lot of information and details, great! Write it in a blog article.
Do not send a small novel in your email. There’s no guarantee that everyone – or anyone – will read all of it. And even if they do…you may never know!
It all comes back to making life easy on your clients. “A picture’s worth a thousand words” and all that. Trust your audience’s intelligence to understand a condensed version of your message.
Got a new product? Send a picture of it; two sentences about it; and a button to learn more or watch a video. Boom. Less is more.
10. MAKE YOUR EMAILS MOBILE-FRIENDLY
Email usage on mobile phones has surpassed desktop usage. Desktop may be slightly higher in the B2B world, but it won’t stay that way.
Since mobile usage is higher among younger generations, and those individuals are fast-filling the workforce, that number is only going to continue to rise.
Your email had better look as good on a tiny screen as it does on a big screen.
Don’t use a minuscule type size, or pictures with so much detail that phone users have to zoom to see portions clearly. Emails that display incorrectly on mobile may be deleted within three seconds.
These techniques are tried-and-true. A/B test them for yourself.
Measure out your average bounce rate, open rate, and click through rate in your emails. Then, implement one of these changes at a time and see what happens. We can guarantee you’ll like the results.
Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!
If there’s a particular topic that you’d like for us to talk about, or if you have a particular a challenge that you’d like us to take a crack at, send us an email. We’d be happy to answer them for you – and if your topic gets picked for a future episode, you’ll win a free IndustrialSage t-shirt!
Sponsored by Optimum Productions
Author: Rica
Since the inception of IndustrialSage back in 2017, Rica has been one of the driving forces building IndustrialSage. As Marketing Manager, she's dedicated to producing amazing content on the site. There's little she loves more than storytelling: helping to explain new ideas in order to aid others in solving their problems. Fortunately, that's what IndustrialSage is all about.
