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Email Marketing: What Manufacturers Are Missing

by MGB2B

In today’s fast-paced business world, it’s important to avoid email marketing mistakes. Email marketing is more than just a way to blast out new products and company news to your prospects; it is your company’s way of driving leads to your site and further along in your sales funnel.

For manufacturers, email marketing is a must, but it requires solid strategy, attention to detail, and good timing in order to be effective. Recently, IBM did a study on email marketing and its effectiveness for eighteen major industries, manufacturing among them. They focused on important benchmarks like unique open rates, bounce rates, and click-through rates. And the results might surprise you.

What’s Working for Manufacturers:

• Prospects Are Opening Your Emails. On the whole, the manufacturing industry has an average unique open rate of 25.9%. That’s higher than the Travel, Entertainment, Financial Services, and Retail Industries, just to name a few.
• Prospects Are Clicking Through to Your Site. If you’re like the majority of manufacturing companies, you have a unique CTR of around 3.5%. Again, this a solid showing, about smack in the middle of where other industries rank. That means you have good content that is relevant to whatever subject lines you’ve used.

What Manufacturers Need to Fix:

• The Bounce. Hard bounce rates for Manufacturers are higher than any other industry (1.59%). Manufacturing was the only industry with a bounce rate above one percent. It more than quadrupled industries like Retail (%0.285) and Real Estate (%0.315). A hard bounce rate is the percentage of emails that are sent which get rejected and are never received. This can be due to a typo, nonexistent email, updated email, etc. The number typically increases as time goes by if the errors aren’t fixed.

The study suggests that infrequency might be the root of the problem, and it very well may be a large part of the problem. So it’s a good idea to look at increasing the frequency of your emails. But there are a few other ways to lower your bounce rate:

1. Keep Your Lists Updated: It is as important to update your lists as it is to send out emails. The longer you wait to update your list, the more changes need to be made. One way to avoid this altogether is to double opt-in your lists. This will ensure that your list is made up of quality leads who are interested in what you are selling.
2. A Good Lead is the Best Lead: Leads are good. Good leads are great. It is important to make sure when searching for manufacturing leads that they are reliable and accurate. Purchasing a list of one thousand leads with three hundred errors and outdated prospects will hurt more in the long run than a list of five hundred top-notch leads. Quantity is important, but quality is even more important. It will be more cost-effective to enter only quality leads (preferably sorted into segments) than it will to buy a mass list and opt-out the bad ones.
3. When You See Bounces…BOUNCE: As soon as a bounce comes across your desk, get rid of it. This is the most crucial part in lowering the hard bounce rate. If you send out ten thousand emails and your bounce rate is one percent, that’s 100 leads you need to delete. This lowers your bounce rate and increases your unique open and click-to-open rates, driving them into the sales funnel, where you can nurture them and eventually convert them into customers.