Email marketing best practices for manufacturing

Most use cases of email marketing you stumble across daily center around the B2C space. B2B players, such as the manufacturing industry, can’t play by these rules. B2B email marketing is a whole different ball game altogether. Wonder how they can make the most of email? Read on to find out!

Make the perfect first impression

We all know the adage: You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

How you welcome new customers goes a long way toward shaping their association with you. Typically, new subscribers look forward to receiving welcome emails. As a result, new account and sign-up emails register higher open rates than other types of emails. Therefore, ensuring that your welcome email strikes all the right notes is of utmost importance. If you craft the first message to a new client correctly, you could very well be paving the path to unwavering customer loyalty and sky-high conversion rates.

So, what makes a winning welcome email? Let’s take a look.

• Craft a catchy subject line. An enticing subject line will nudge your readers to open your welcome email in the first place. 
• Make sure your welcome email has a special offer. It could be free shipping, a discount, or a promo code. Trust us, there’s no better way of expressing your gratitude. 
• Make it customer-centric. This is where multiple brands lose the plot. Many businesses make their welcome emails overly promotional to impress their subscribers right from the get-go. Remember, the welcome email is all about the customer. It should thank them for signing up and explain what they can expect from you in the coming days. If you want to highlight the salient points of your product or service, talk about the various ways they can positively impact their users’ lives.
• Give your readers something to do. During the welcome email phase, a particular subscriber’s curiosity or interest regarding your brand is at its peak. Please make the most of it by offering them relevant activities such as inviting them to read your blog, nudging them to check you out on social media, requesting them to safelist you, and the like.

Take a look at this welcome email by Acorn Manufacturing. It clearly lets the readers know what they will be able to do after signing in to their account. 

Pay attention to your copy

In most cases, B2B communication is often too formal for its own good. Maintaining professionalism is paramount in B2B emails, but that doesn’t mean you have to sound robotic. Go ahead and make your email copy conversational and engaging; nobody will put you on trial for it.

Here are a few pointers you can consider to ensure that your copy comes up trumps.

• Keep it crisp and to the point. With our attention spans dwindling with every passing day, you truly stand to gain more by keeping your copy as concise as possible. Besides, emails with brief copies are easier to optimize for mobile audiences too. 
• The structure is critical. If you have to use long copy, structure your content effectively using headings, subheadings, and bullet points rather than presenting chunky paragraphs to your audience.
• Add in some emotion. Pepper your copy with sensory and power words to elicit an emotional response from your readers.
• Embrace personalization. In this age of email overload, a targeted message is your best shot at grabbing your reader’s attention. However, to do so, you must first segment your contact list into different pockets based on other parameters like age, gender, buying patterns, preferences, and the like. Doing so will clarify the unique needs and pain points of each section of your target audience.

Don’t be shy to follow up

The decision-making process in B2B and manufacturing circles is longer when compared to B2C. This is because the power rests not with a single individual but with an entire team. Hence, you must follow up to increase your chances of getting a reply. 

Here are a few tips and tricks to remember while writing a follow-up email.

• Be clear about your objective. What do you seek to gather from your follow-up email? Do you want to ask for new information? Gather feedback? Or get a status update? Whatever the case, ensure it reflects clearly across your follow-up email.
• Provide context right at the beginning of your email. The best way to go about this is to highlight something pivotal from your previous exchanges.
• Be persistent. No matter how long it takes for your client to write back, don’t cut ties with them.

The right message, at the right time

Even the most meticulously designed email campaigns will fail to bear fruit if they don’t deliver their message at the right time. To ace your email timing, take stock of the following factors.

• Identify your audience demographics.
• Determine the ideal email frequency for your target audience.
• Alter your sending times as per seasonal changes.

Wrapping it all up

Creating an email campaign for the manufacturing industry can be a touch tricky, but we hope that the best practices shared above have given you the clarity you were looking for!

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Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free responsive HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.