Email Marketing Useful for Manufacturing

Here are some compelling statistics: According to Engineering.com, 97% of engineers pay serious attention to email marketing. Here’s what they found in 2016:

• 51% Scan subject lines for interest
• 40% Open and scan for interest
• 6% Read each one
• 3% Delete most automatically

97% of Engineers Receptive to Email Marketing

Notice that only 3% of engineers delete by default. 97% are actually very open to learning something new via email. Now, I believe in email marketing, and even I am surprised at these figures: 9 out of 10 engineers are very receptive to email marketing.

But remember, it’s not because they want to buy — it’s because they want to learn.

Readers Have Subscribed for a Reason

Any time someone tries to tell me that email marketing is dead, I’ll be thinking of this information, from the 2016 Market Research Report: How Engineers Find Information study from Engineering.com. Yes, social media may be big, but when you’ve got a qualified mailing list of people who have taken the conscious step to opt in to your email list, you’re missing some huge marketing potential if you don’t reach out to that group regularly. They signed up for a reason — they actually WANT to hear from you!

Email Content has to Serve the Customer

Craft and curate your emails with the customers’ needs in mind, not your own. Don’t think about what you want to sell: Think about what they want to know more about, and fill that need.

Remember, they expect value from your communications. They utilize spam filters, and they will not hesitate to unsubscribe if they don’t find value when they click “open.” Rented lists and “batch and blast” strategies are only going to alienate these readers. However, if you offer genuinely useful information, and keep the self-promotion to a minimum, it IS possible to earn reader trust, which is an essential step in their journey as potential customers.

Cultivate Trust to Win High-Stakes Sales

That’s a crucial strategy in any kind of marketing, but it’s even more important in industrial manufacturing. Manufacturing is a high-stakes game: the decision cycle is often long, the products are often expensive and complex or high volume; and they need to satisfy multiple decision makers and stakeholders. These aren’t impulse buys for your customers, so you’ve got to approach these relationships as conversations, not slam-dunks.

Email marketing has been a vital business development tool for us at Laser 1. We recently received a Request for Proposal with a newsletter which we had sent three months prior. Email marketing definitely works and we love having Wild Fig Marketing as our marketing provider.