3 reasons why you’re doing email marketing wrong

I come across a couple of marketers in the construction industry now and again who are sceptical about email marketing and if it does actually work.

One even said “I don’t believe it works. We sent out one email to 30,000 contacts and we got nothing, so we stopped there”.

It does work if you’ve set the right objectives and measured it correctly, but the biggest factor in email marketing is the quality of your database.

I’ve yet to meet one construction company who believe the data held within their CRM is worthy of marketing to. Not one marketer has the slightest bit of confidence in saying that their own contacts held within their own CRM system is of quality.

Put shit in, get shit out.

When you do email marketing you’re either communicating one message to a bought in database full of cold contacts who don’t care about you or your using your CRM database which might contain 10,000 or more email addresses and again you’re sending out one message to them all.

One size doesn’t fit all. This is why email marketing doesn’t work for you.

Reason 1: Email marketing isn’t about quantity, it’s about quality.

It’s much better to send lots of emails to smaller segments of customers who have a similar interest or purchased\specified the same product (e.g, segmentation by products, seniority, size of business, repeat buying patterns). But most marketers probably don’t know exactly who did what or when. They just see email addresses. And lots of them too.

I recently conducted a customer feedback/perception survey for a new client. I asked for the most recent contacts from the last 6 months, assuming they would be be most fresh, who have done business with them and are on a maintenance service contract. So I received the database and sent out the survey.

I was surprised to see feedback such as “I’ve never purchased your products or services” and “I’m not the one you need to speak to”.

There were contacts In the database who were not customers and yet the company thought they were customers.

Do you know how many of the architects on your database actually specified your products? What about the ones who didn’t but just enquired or requested a brochure? Both would require different messages right?

Reason 2: Email marketing is about relevancy, and you’re not being relevant.

Not all of your customers will want to hear about everything you have to say. Problem is, you don’t know which customers want to know more about your products or services.

You have to take the time to learn about your customers. What do architects want to know? Contractors? Merchants? Suppliers? Partners?

You can’t send them all one message and expect them to open and click on everything.

Another point is this; is your email interrupting? Is it unwanted? Did your customers ask for it?

Reason 3: What are you using email for exactly? You have no goals.

Objectives? Goals? Aims? No?

Are you trying to increase loyalty? Are you trying to make a small segment of customers aware of products they didn’t know you manufactured (up/cross selling)? Are you inviting top 20 customers to an event? Do our know if they’d be interested? Sure?

Maybe you want to inform a small segment of customers about some new information on your website which maybe of interest to them based on the products they purchased 3 months ago. But you wouldn’t know this right?

Before you hit send; make sure you identify what the end result is or what it looks like. It might take 8-10 emails over 6 months to get the results. Not one.

Don’t knock it until you’ve done email marketing properly.

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