Email marketing continues to be one of the top tactics used by marketers to stay connected with customers and build relationships with new ones. According to Campaign Monitor, email marketing has the highest return on investment for small businesses.
While there are a number of factors that go into a high-performing email, what’s key is a good email prospect list.
Here are basic steps manufacturers and industrials can follow to build an effective prospect list for email marketing campaigns.
Attract With A Compelling Offer
There are a few ways you can build your email list, but the basic components of building your contact list organically involve:
- A Form
- CTAs (Calls to action)
- Landing pages
- Content marketing offers
At a minimum, you can have a simple opt-in form on your website for people to sign up for your company updates, but the best online lead generation efforts contain most, if not all, of these components.
Opt-in forms give buyers, engineers, and procurement managers who visit your website a way to indicate that they want to receive your emails. If your site is built on WordPress or HubSpot, these forms can be easily added to your site. If you aren’t on these platforms, you may be able to use forms from your email service provider.
But you’ll need to give people a reason to fill out those forms. Offering helpful and informative content — eBooks, guides, whitepapers, videos, etc. — in exchange for their contact information is the best way to entice people to want to hear from you.
A landing page is a specialized page that contains information about one of those offers, and a form to download that offer. CTAs work to encourage people to either navigate to that landing page or complete the form. It’s either text, an image, or a button.
See effective CTA examples in our 32 Industrial Lead Generation Tips, Tricks, and Ideas
Compile A List Of People You've Been In Contact With
For most manufacturers and industrial companies just starting with digital marketing, their prospect list begins with a spreadsheet of their biggest customers, including the happiest ones and the most loyal. Make sure you have their first and last names and all their updated email addresses associated with the customer. Your current customers are likely to do business with you again, so regular email communications with them keep you top of mind.
Build on that list with website visitors who have provided their contact information to you and any social media connections you’ve had meaningful interactions with.
Read More: Manufacturer's Step By Step Guide To Converting Anonymous Traffic To Leads
Salespeople spend 17% of their time prospecting and researching leads.
Leverage Your Social Media Channels
According to HubSpot, salespeople spend a significant amount of their time tackling administrative work — 17% prospecting/researching leads and another 17% on data entry. But there are a few online tools for prospecting and insights to assist. LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides advanced lead and company search capabilities and recommends the most relevant B2B prospects for you.
With social selling, you can leverage your professional online brand to connect with buyers through social media interactions. But the key difference between social selling and traditional selling is that you are nurturing your relationship with a buyer through comments and other engaging social media posts — instead of hard closing tactics. Be helpful and provide quality content that points back to your website.
Thomas offers a free in-market buyer report that lets manufacturers and industrials know which companies are searching for the products and services they offer.
Don't Purchase An Email List
Purchasing email lists is not an ideal way to grow your business. The people on those lists may not even exist, and those who do will have no idea who you are. As a result, they will be much less likely to engage with your emails and way more likely to mark your content as spam.
Even if you mix purchased contacts with legitimate contacts, your overall email reputation may suffer because those contacts do not expect communication from you. This may cause your emails to get flagged and placed into junk folders.
Read More: The 7 Types Of Marketing Emails You Should Be Sending And Why
Instead, spend some time to review your current website traffic to identify audiences in key industries interested in your company. Create buyer personas to give you a clearer idea of who your buyers are and what they’re looking for in a specific product, service, and partner. This will help you brainstorm content and determine how to focus your marketing efforts.
Creating quality content is an ongoing task. Keep the inspiration going by using Google Search Console and Google Trends for more content ideas. These are free tools that give you insight into buyer needs and help you understand the popularity of a search term over time.
Learn More: Creating More Industrial Marketing Content Ideas After Your First Campaign
Turn Your Prospect Lists Into Customers
We'll make sure you're getting your email prospect list to continue to grow. How? Adding new email marketing campaigns with fresh content and offers keeps your email contacts engaged and helps increase your referrals. Degreed engineers support our email marketing experts to translate your complex industrial services and products into content that drives your potential customers down the marketing funnel and into a sale. Contact us for a free digital health check to see how you can turn your prospects into customers.
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