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What Email Content Should You Be Using?

Email distribution is a crucial touchpoint with your customers and one of the best ways to increase their purchase frequency. When done correctly, emails keep your brand, products, and services top of mind for your customers and encourage them to buy from you. At Winsby, our emails double or triple the number of times that our clients’ customers buy.

If you want to produce these types of results, then you need to include the right types of email content in your messaging. To help you out, here are some examples of what you should include to boost your purchase frequency.

Examples of email content

One of the most important things to remember for email distribution, across all industries, is to touch on everything your company does. Many businesses will focus solely on new products or services, but that really isn’t the best way to go about it. Talking about new things is great, but it’s also critical to talk about popular existing products, as well as all the support services that your company offers. We also recommend including some type of tip or best practices in your email content, so that you can establish yourself as the go-to expert in your field. Every email should at least mention every category of the things that you do.

For example, here is what we include in the email content for our equipment dealer clients:

  • Feature on new equipment
  • Feature on a service or parts
  • Feature on used or rental equipment
  • Feature on a best practices or tip

The email content highlights something new or that the dealer wants to push, but it also touches on the other main parts of their business.

How to present email content

How the content looks and feels in your emails comes down to the copy and the design. If your email distribution strategy is going to be effective at increasing sales and purchase frequency, then your messaging has to be professional. Copy needs to be simple, short, and engaging. No one has time to read more than a couple of sentences, which gives you precious little time to get your point across effectively. It needs to be free of spelling errors and avoid overly technical language.

Once the copy is completed, checked, and re-checked, you need a designer to give it a professional look. You should use high quality, high resolution photos, consistent colors that match your branding, and font types of sizes that are easy to read. Once the design is finished, the email should be programmed so it’s responsive and looks good on all devices.

Don’t forget about calls to action (CTAs)

The last primary element of email content are the CTAs. You want to connect your messaging about products and services with an easy way for customers to actually order or schedule them. The calls to action should be concise and easy to understand. It should be clear where the link will lead the reader when they click on it and take them to a relevant page.

Want help with your email content to increase sales and purchase frequency? Contact Winsby Today!

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Make Email Distribution More Effective by Increasing Your Open Rates—Here’s How

You spend a lot of time on email distribution. You have to think of what to talk about, write the copy, create a professional design, program the email, figure out who to send it to, and schedule it. After all that hard work, the worst thing to happen is that not enough people actually open it up to read it. We put together some strategies to help increase your email opens and make them more effective at accomplishing their overall goal: increasing your sales.

Keep your email distribution list fresh

One of the most fundamental ways to boost your email opens is by focusing on your list. The sad truth is that up to about 30% of your email distribution list goes bad each and every year. That means that about a third of the people on your list are either no longer receiving your emails, or that they are no longer the correct person at the company to be receiving them.

The reason for this is that people switch positions, move to new companies, or just stop engaging with and responding with your email campaigns. The best way to keep your email distribution list current is to regularly review it and doublecheck the contact information. You should call any company on the list that doesn’t have an email on file or who has stopped engaging with your messages. Talk to them, determine what email address you should be sending to, and ask them if they have any immediate needs.

Work on your timing

A huge part of increasing email opens for your campaigns is to constantly test and perfect when you send them out. Timing can have a huge effect on whether or not your subscribers open your emails, so think carefully about what time and day you send your emails out. The best specific timing will vary based on your specific industry and audience, so in the beginning we recommend sending out on different days and times and then looking back at the open rate data to see when is best.

Perfect your subject lines

When it comes to email opens and how effective your email distribution ultimately is, few things are more important than your subject lines. Similar to testing when to send out your emails, you also have to test different types of subject lines. Key is to entice curiosity by giving them a piece of a bigger picture, offering something that will save them money or in some way benefit them, and speaking in the language that your target audience speaks in.

Avoid things like all caps, exclamation points, and even numbers, as these will often cause your emails to be kicked to a promotions folder at best and spam folder at worst.

Build trust

Once people start opening your emails, you want them to keep opening them. That means you should avoid being misleading in your subject lines and make sure you’re always offering value. Talk about things that will help your readers accomplish a goal of theirs or make their lives easier. Your copy and design also need to be concise, sharp looking, and professional – to keep people opening them in the future.

If you have any questions about email distribution or improving email opens, talk to our team today!

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Distribution

What Is an Email Distribution List?

An email distribution list, or mailing list, is a collection of email addresses that you have permission to send marketing emails to. They allow you to distribute mass messages to everyone in the list without having to add each email address individually. For example, if you’re an equipment dealer, you may have an email distribution list for clients who handle material handling projects. You can send out messages to all of them at once, showcasing your material handling related products and services.

Let’s take a look at what is an email distribution list and how to build one effectively.

What is an email distribution list used for?

Your list is the cornerstone of your email marketing strategy. You can spend all the money and time in the world crafting the “perfect” email design and messaging, but if you’re not sending it to the right people, then all that work was for nothing. An email distribution list is used for regularly communicating with both your customers and your prospects, showing what you offer and encouraging them to purchase or to purchase again. Your list is a sales tool.

The right list combined with professional, high quality emails becomes a powerhouse for your marketing and sales operations. For example, the clients that Winsby sends emails for see an average return on investment of about 4,300%, and customers on their email distribution list purchase two to three times more often than customers who aren’t on it.

How to create a list

Just adding individual email addresses in your email’s “To” section doesn’t constitute an email distribution list. Neither does having a list of addresses in a Word document and copy and pasting them into the “To” section.

A true email distribution list is created and housed in an email marketing platform like Constant Contact or Mailchimp. The way you add contacts to it is by having them opt in and agree to receive marketing emails from you. After you get started creating an account in a platform and adding contacts to it, here are several methods you can use:

  • Call through your customer list, find out who the decision maker is at their company, and ask for their email address.
  • If you sell products online, ask for customer emails and provide in an opt in check box for receiving marketing materials as part of the checkout process.
  • Add a popup to your website that asks people to provide their information to be added to a marketing email distribution list.
Make your email distribution list more effective

There are several ways to improve your list as a sales and marketing tool. First, take advantage of segmenting to tailor your emails to specific groups and make your messaging more effective. For example, if you have different subsets of customers that do different types of work, then separate or segment those groups within your larger list to send messaging relevant to those subsets.

The other primary method for strengthening your email distribution list is to continually add new contacts to it. With our clients, we find that as much as 30% of their email lists need to be updated every year. To replace those contacts, regularly call through your customer list to verify you have the right email address, and add new contacts by calling similar companies to ones you already work with. The more often you freshen your list, the more effective it will be!

If you have any questions about building and maintaining an email distribution list for your business, contact Winsby today!

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Email

The Importance of Segmenting Your Email Distribution List

Email distribution is one of the most powerful marketing tools that companies have at their disposal. For example, our clients’ customers who receive the emails we send for them purchase much more often than their customers who aren’t receiving the emails—two to three times more often. Plus, according to an ongoing survey we conduct where we ask customers of a B2B company what their preferred method of receiving marketing messages is, 75% of their customers report that email is their preferred channel for marketing.

Emails are incredibly effective, but they will only work if you’re sending them to the correct people using the right messaging. That’s where list segmentation is important. Segmentation means dividing your email distribution list and separating your recipients into groups based on specific criteria.

In this article, we’re going to look at the benefits of dividing your list and sending specific messaging to your different groups.

How to segment your email distribution list

How you separate your list will depend on the industry that you’re in and the differences and similarities between different parts of your customer base. For example, heavy equipment dealers may have customers that primarily work in road building and other customers that primarily work in demolition. If there isn’t much crossover between those two groups, then it could be to their benefit to send emails about road building equipment, parts, and best practices to one group, and demolition centered topics to the other.

By tailoring your messaging to specific groups and making it less generic, you will be better able to encourage sales and present yourself as the expert in the given industry.

Benefits of email distribution list segmentation

There are many advantages to dividing your email distribution list. Here are the primary ones that matter most for your marketing:

  • Boost open rates—Email marketing is a battle to get recipients to open, read, and act on your messages. The more relevant your email subject lines and content, the more likely your emails will be read and clicked on.
  • Increase clicks—After opening your email, people are more likely to interact with it if the topics are useful to them. For example, if you have a sale or service that is relevant to their business. The best way to make it relevant to them is to tailor the messaging to their specific type of company.
  • Make more sales—The closer we are to a goal, the more our motivations and efforts increase—in consumer psychology, it’s known as the gradient goal effect. Once your targeted marketing emails bring the right people to your site, the more likely they are to make a purchase, schedule a consultation with you, or take some other action.
  • Greater email marketing ROI—By tailoring your content to match specific interests, each email becomes a targeted pitch, leading to more effective spend and a stronger financial return for every message sent.
  • Reduce the number of people who unsubscribe—It’s important to be growing your email distribution list constantly. Sending out too many irrelevant emails could encourage people to unsubscribe from you for the sake of decreasing noise in their inbox.
  • Avoid being labeled as spam—Even if someone doesn’t personally unsubscribe from your emails, their inbox may flag your attempts as spam if they are considered irrelevant or if the recipient never interacts with them. Email distribution list segmentation helps increase deliverability and engagement.

At Winsby, we send highly effective emails on your behalf that significantly increase the purchase frequency of your customers. We handle the entire process, from crafting copy, designing, and programming, to segmenting your list and providing performance reports for each email.

If you have any questions about list segmentation or about building your email distribution list in general, contact our team today!

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Man looking at computer, confused why marketing emails aren't working

Why Aren’t Your Marketing Emails Working?

If email distribution is not at the front and center of your marketing strategy, then it should be. It has the potential to deliver a massive return on investment, turn prospects into customers, and encourage current customers to purchase more and more often from you. It is a relatively inexpensive tool that can pay off with extremely high returns on investment. If you are already consistently sending out marketing emails, but you aren’t seeing the results you want or think you should be seeing, then you may not be using this tool to its full effect.

Email distribution should be helping you generate sales and increase your revenue. If it isn’t, then one of the reasons below may be why.

Your email distribution list is out of date

One of the most important email basics that you need to know is that your list is just as important as the emails themselves. Yes, your emails need to look great. Yes, you need clear, engaging, and compelling messaging. But you also need to be sending that messaging to the right people. If you’re not, then all that work you put into email distribution is pretty much for nothing.

For our clients, we find that about 30% of a list goes bad every year. You might still see that you have X number of email addresses in your database, but without proper maintenance and additions, around 30% of those addresses may no longer be useful to you. People get fired and change jobs, departments get reshuffled, emails change, and more, so a lot a of your emails are either no longer being viewed, or the wrong people are looking at them.

Your emails aren’t being opened

Another one of the key email basics is that if people aren’t opening your emails, then they aren’t going to help you generate any sales. Once you get your email distribution list under control and are consistently adding the right kinds of contacts to it, then you have to think about how to convince those contacts to take a minute to open your message. For marketing emails, that comes down to the subject line.

The first step is to make it past the spam filters for the email providers. To avoid having the emails stopped by the filters, try not to use words like “sale”, “free”, or “deal”. Plus, you shouldn’t use all caps or exclamation points. These words and symbols will often automatically trigger your email to end up in the recipient’s spam folder.

What you want to do is give the reader a little taste of the value they will receive if they open your email. Subject lines that ask a question or indicate there is helpful information inside will have much higher open rates. Adding urgency can also help you stand out, so don’t be afraid to mention limited time offers. You can also tease a tip or advice that will be in the message, so the recipient doesn’t automatically think you are just trying to sell to them.

It’s important to not mislead the reader or oversell what they will get by looking at your message. Doing so can lead to unsubscribes and angry customers.

Your marketing emails don’t look professional

Although it is relatively easy to create an email nowadays using various services or platforms, it is not that easy to make them look professional and to create compelling messaging. The simple fact is that it is pretty obvious when an email was put together by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. And if your messaging doesn’t look, sound, and feel professional, then people most likely won’t be receptive to whatever offers it contains. Worse yet, they may not take your brand seriously after receiving an unprofessional email. The stakes are high.

You’ve invested time and money into developing your email distribution list, and you have people who want to receive your emails and will likely be receptive to their messaging. So invest a little more by having your marketing emails professionally developed. Your ROI will be more than worth it.

You’re only sending out promotional emails

Crucial among the email basics is to vary the content that you send out. Many companies will make the mistake of only sending out promotional messaging to their email distribution list. You should definitely be directly highlighting your products and services in your emails, but you should also be sharing industry best practices, advice, news, new developments, and interesting information about your company. Provide value independent of your products and services, and prospects will begin to trust you and your brand. That way, when they are ready to purchase something, they will think of you.

Email marketing analytics

If you’re making any of the mistakes we listed, then fix the mistake and start doing things differently. But as you move forward and try to improve your list, subject lines, and messaging, measure how effective your changes are by looking at email metrics. Look at open rates and click through rates, but also look at more important numbers like purchase frequency and revenue growth.

Although those numbers might not seem like email marketing analytics, if you’re doing emails the right way, then customers should be purchasing more from you, and your revenue should be increasing. For example, at Winsby, our clients’ customers who we send emails to purchase two to three times more often than those customers who don’t receive the emails. There should be a clear and traceable growth in your revenue if you are doing email distribution the right way. The only way you’ll know for sure is by looking at the email metrics and tracking customers’ purchases related to your email list.

If you have any questions about email distribution, or you want to start sending out highly effective emails right now and avoid the learning curve, contact the Winsby team today. We back up everything we do by sharing the email marketing analytics with you after each message, so you know it’s working!

Categories

CUSTOMER RETENTION
CUSTOMER SATISFACTION SURVEYS
EMAIL MARKETING
EQUIPMENT DEALER MARKETING
KEY METRICS
Key Metrics Reports
LEAD GENERATION
LIST EXPANSION
MARKET RESEARCH
MARKETING FOR MANUFACTURERS
MARKETING STRATEGY
ONLINE PRESENCE
REPUTATION MANAGEMENT
SEO
SOCIAL MEDIA
WEBSITES