Creating a Unique Mix of Strategies that Builds on What Your Company Does Best
“The money is in the list…” — Proverb of online business
Let’s take an in-depth look at the data and trends that will help us to answer those essential questions. We’ll consider examples of best-practices in direct response by matching the various model options to your particular business. And, perhaps, our efforts will help you to solve your most pressing challenges with respect to building an email list through various marketing strategies.
Email marketing data and trends: There’re no signs of slowing down in 2018 and beyond
Although marketing trends, techniques, and tactics come and go, direct response email marketing is showing remarkable staying power. There’s something about the delivery of messaging and content via email that strikes a chord with our worldwide consumer culture.
Here are some recent data and statistics from various reputable sources that provide a state-of-the-strategy update on the power of email marketing:
Constant Contact, the Massachusetts-based online marketing company reveals that:
- There are 205 billion emails sent every day — a number that will jump to 246 billion per day by the year 2019
- For every $1 your building products business spends on email marketing, you can expect an average return on investment (ROI) of $38
- Quoting a Forrester survey, customers are twice as likely to sign up for your email list than they are to access your business on Facebook
- According to Constant Contact customers, 61 percent admit that they enjoy receiving weekly promotional emails — and 38 percent which they received them even more frequently
Web Presence Solutions — a digital marketing agency for small businesses and entrepreneurs — offers the following statistics:
- There will be a total of 244.5 million email users in the US by the end-of-year 2017 — and a staggering 254.7 million by 2020
- Segmented email marketing campaigns have a 14.32 percent higher open rate than non-segmented campaigns
- 54 percent of all emails are opened on a mobile device, 30 percent on Webmail, and 16 percent on desktop
Based on these findings, email marketing is still a smart bet for building products companies looking to retain current customers, acquire new prospects, increase the average dollar per sale, decrease the time between repeat sales, and increase the frequency of sales over time.
Email list-building strategies: Assessing possible tactics based on setup, maintenance, and potential payoff
There are a wide array of marketing campaigns that you can use to help build your company’s email list. Some require a large upfront investment of knowledge, money, or time. Others require an ongoing investment of time to keep up and running properly. However, you simply won’t be able to use them all — for various reasons.
For example, depending on the experience level of your marketing department, some campaigns are rather difficult to get started and build to scale — which is a problem with setup. Or, if you’re a small operation, some projects require the type of ongoing attention and care that you just can’t afford with respect to time — which is an issue with maintenance.
The marketing strategies that you use to build your email list varey in success on a ratio of investment versus potential, such as:
Content marketing. This includes writing blog posts, articles, white papers, product reviews, videos, etc. Content marketing is effective, but requires a combination of knowledge and resources to write and publish on a daily basis — plus an investment of time to draw an audience to respond to your efforts,
Social media marketing. Posting on the major social networks with frequency. This is a popular technique that can pay huge dividends. However, as is with creating content, it requires effort and patience over time to turn ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’ into dollars and cents.
Search engine optimization. This is more of a behind-the-scenes tactic that improves the attraction of your website for search engines and readers. This requires specific knowledge of best-practices — so much so that some building products companies outsource this to experts.
Contests and giveaways. Done right, these tactics can build an email list quickly and give a boost to your brand. However, this tends to draw a type of prospect that is looking for something for free and not completely open to making a purchase.
Paid search listings. Pay-per-click campaigns are widely known for their speed and effectiveness — as long as they’re backed by a substantial budget and operated by a keyword-experienced operator who knows what he or she is doing.
Co-marketing and partnerships. This is a creative tactic that features the cooperation of two business with like-minded prospects. Done right, this can add scores of new email list signups to both partners at very little additional cost.
This list of six strategies really just breaks the surface of the potential activities that your building products business can use to grow your email list. A basic online search will reveal an exhaustive selection of potential campaigns in about ten minutes — time that will be well-spent when you sit down to create your business’ strategy.
Again, many building products and materials businesses find that finding a combination of the above scenarios — as opposed to just choosing one or two — offers the best chances for a high rate of return with a sensible investment of human and fiscal resources.
Creating an email list-building strategy: What might success look like in your particular organization?
Take out the results of your online research into list-building strategies that you did a few paragraphs ago. Now, we’ll create a few lists based on your specific business that can help to shape the direction of our efforts with respect to what’s possible compared to what’s feasible.
1. The talent composition of your marketing department
Hopefully, your marketing department has a few specialists that can write, design, research, communicate, etc. If so, delegate pieces of each project as follows:
Writers. Create content marketing pieces (blog posts, articles, white papers); write copy to publicize contests/giveaways; write emails to send to like-minded businesses to encourage co-marketing partnerships; write landing pages to drive traffic to a newsletter sign-up form; perform SEO enhancements to the primary website, landing pages, and content; conduct social media marketing activities
Designers. Create landing pages to drive traffic to a newsletter sign-up form; create images for social media marketing posts and to accompany content marketing pieces across the Web (believe us when we say that this is a full-time job!)
Researchers. Create prospect personas that the department can use to customize marketing campaigns and create meaningful content that will encourage email signups across the Web; find like-minded businesses that might be interested in co-marketing partnerships to drive email signups across the Web; learn PPC best-practices that lead to profitable campaigns
Communicators. Establish, monitor, and respond to social media campaigns across the Web; find and participate in industry forums where customers gather to encourage email signups across the Web; interact with past and current customers to discover more about their experience with your business, translating those findings into actionable steps to increase email signups across the Web
2. The value of your direct marketing budget
This might seem like an obvious consideration. However, how you spend your marketing budget has a great deal of influence on how quickly you can build your email list — and how quickly you can recoup your investment.
Pay-per-click (PPC). This is the list-building technique that requires an immediate investment of capital. Make sure whoever handles your PPC campaigns knows what they’re doing at a high level. PPC is akin to gambling if you’re not sure the cost of important keywords or your conversion rate (i.e. the number of times a paid click leads to an actual sale).
Outsourcing. For building materials businesses without a formal marketing department, many of the elements required to build a responsive email list will come from outside help. Consider businesses with a track record of success in building email lists — now is not the time to give an unknown a shot at the title.
Contests/giveaways. Instead of offering cash prizes as rewards in exchange for an email address, consider opportunities to build your brand. Personalized promotional products make great investments. Your brand placed on a high-value item (think airline luggage, computer cases, attractive clothing, etc.) can build up some interest in your contest while extending the reach of your brand past the initial prospect touchpoint.
3. The viability of your prospect funnel and calls-to-action (CTA)
This is perhaps the most critical element of your list-building strategy. Without a strong prospect funnel and compelling CTA, all of the investments you make into operations go wasted on a list that is no bigger than when you started. Here is what you need to consider.
Your prospect funnel. We’re talking about an attractive lead and swift movement to progress prospects from knowledge of your offer to the exchange of an email.
They have to be attracted to your offer from the beginning and then be carried along to the CTA with no opportunities to slip through the cracks. One stage builds onto the next in a seamless, sensible order.
Your call-to-action (CTA). Once it’s time to ask for that email, your prospect should be given one choice — and one choice only. Cluttering your funnel with extraneous links only serves to confuse them.
As you might have gathered, email list-building strategies can have a lot of working parts. And even these smaller portions can be enhanced to maximize their effectiveness. That’s why many building products businesses save a great deal of time and effort — and maximize campaign effectiveness — by relying on the expertise of a third party for assistance.
Nobody has the knowledge and resources to help you to grow your email list like Team Kleber. We’ll work with your team to create a custom mix of list-building strategies that will add contacts to your database by the thousands — saving you both valuable time and serious money in the process.
