By now, it’s no secret that many businesses invest a lot of time cultivating their social media presence to reach their target audiences. Yet email marketing is still remarkably effective in growing your business online, especially in the form of newsletters.
According to McKinsey, email marketing works 40 times better at getting customers than Facebook and Twitter. With 91% of consumers checking their email at least once a day, email is still the go-to source for deals, information, and solutions to their problems.
When executed properly, your email marketing strategy can be your most effective tool in generating revenue for your building materials company.
Specifically, implementing a regularly scheduled newsletter in your email marketing is highly important to achieving your online business objectives. Here are seven tips to start an amazing newsletter campaign that increases engagement with your subscribers and positively improves your bottom line!
1. Highlight Company News & Announcements
Whenever your company has anything newsworthy, it should be shared with your subscribers. This helps not only spread the word about important goings-on at your company, but helps people feel connected to your brand and keeps you top-of-mind.
News and announcements can range anywhere from showcasing recent work you’ve done for a client to revealing a new location where your products are now available.
Here are some unique ideas to share that humanizes your brand and makes you relatable:
- Event calendar - Tell email recipients about upcoming events at your company (whether online or local events) or industry-related events (such as conferences and expos) so they can participate or share with their networks.
- Letter from the CEO, President, or other executive - Such correspondences make customers feel special and like they actually matter to upper management.
- Highlight employees and their successes – This helps your list get to know your team and brings authenticity to your brand. Plus, it can help boost morale amongst your employees!
- Holiday festivities – Share photos of the company cookout or Christmas party. These can help put faces to names if you largely deal with your customers or distributors via phone or email, and adds that extra bit of levity to your newsletter to endear people to your brand.
2. Promote New Blog Content
Blogging is the foundation to your inbound marketing strategy. The beauty about regularly publishing fresh, valuable blog posts is that it serves as a source to feed your subscriber list to keeping them in the know, engaged with your brand, and educated on key niche topics. It greatly builds the Know, Like, and Trust factors with your leads and positions you as an expert in your industry.
Still in the process of planning a regular blogging schedule, but not quite there? No worries. You can curate content where you gather, analyze, and share the best content pieces from credible sources within (or relevant to) your industry with your subscribers. Your email list will appreciate the resources and will look at you as their “one-stop shop” for valuable content.
3. Q&A Section
If one customer asks a question, more than likely other customers are wondering the same thing. Posting a Q&A section within your email newsletter helps address these inquiries and reduces customer support emails and calls. It also encourages new leads to ask their own questions as prospects, which bolsters communication between you and future customers.
4. Share Customer Testimonials
Customer success stories, spotlights, and testimonials are extraordinary content strategies to building trust with prospects and showing that you’re a great brand to do business with. This is especially true in the building materials industry, where sometimes seeing is believing. Your prospects want to see what your products look like in action, and your newsletter is the perfect platform to deliver.
Testimonials are even more effective when it’s user-generated content, or content created directly from your customers via video, photo, or social media posts. Establish a plan where you’re regularly collecting testimonials and user-generated content from your satisfied customers to build a vault of success stories. In addition to your email content, this material can also be used in other marketing campaigns and on your website to advance your business goals.
5. Remind List Of Your Latest Content Offer
A study revealed that prospects receive an average of 10 touches from the time they enter the top of the sales funnel until they’re a closed/won customer! Therefore, multiple touches are crucial in your email campaigns to produce results in engagement, sales conversions, and return customers.
Did you recently send out a downloadable e-guide for your product line, but didn’t receive favorable responses? Send it out again using a catchy email subject line to capture attention and improve open and click-through rates.
6. Statistics and Infographics
Sharing statistics about your company, products, or the building materials industry at large can paint a big picture about the results you generate and other important information relevant to your audience. Numbers provide concrete data that can help enhance your brand reputation.
Using infographics to convey this information is incredibly effective in making it easy for readers to digest your content. You can also leverage infographics to give instructions. In fact, people following directions with text and illustrations do 323% better than people following directions without illustrations, according to Hubspot.
7. Specials Offers, Discounts, & Giveaways
Forty-four percent of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email. Your email newsletter is an ideal outlet to promote your discounts, one-time offers, and other special giveaways to drive sales and build loyal fans.
Marketers have consistently ranked email as the single most effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention. Amplify your email tactics today by choosing 2-3 of these tips to build your building materials newsletter campaign and commit to a schedule to keep your list engaged.
