Category: B2B E-Mail Marketing

How to Make Industrial Email Marketing Work for You
Industrial email marketing may not get the same attention and love as it used to because of social media. However, don’t abandon it because it is still highly effective when targeting engineers and technical professionals.

I’m not suggesting that you ignore social media in favor of email marketing, especially if you are trying to engage with younger engineers, those that are 35 years or younger. The two can coexist very nicely as part of your industrial content marketing strategy.

What do manufacturers use for industrial content marketing?

Email newsletter is the most popular content format used by manufacturers in the past 12 months. That comes from the research report, Manufacturing Content Marketing—Insights For 2021 published by the Content Marketing Institute. There is a good reason for its popularity.

“Of all the content types they use, manufacturing marketers said videos (pre-produced) (21%), virtual events/webinars/online courses (19%), and email newsletters (13%) produced the best overall content marketing results for their organization in the last 12 months.”

Engaging with engineers with industrial email marketing

Engineers are hungry for good information that is technically accurate and relevant to their work-related challenges. However, challenges still remain in reaching and engaging with them. This is a discerning audience who’ll ignore your emails if you don’t win their trust with good content.

Here are the findings from the report, “2021 State of Marketing to Engineers” published by GlobalSpec and TREW Marketing.

Industrial email marketing is not a one-way street

Industrial email marketing is not just for pushing out content to your audience. It is just as effective when it comes to your audience contacting your sales team.

You are probably already aware of the fact that most industrial buyers prefer to remain anonymous almost 70% through their buying journey. Reaching them is not an easy task when they don’t want to talk to your sales team.

When they are ready to engage, over half the engineers prefer to use email over any other form of communication. That’s another finding from GlobalSpec’s report.

Email list hygiene and growth

The quality of your email list has a huge impact on the success of your email marketing campaigns. It is a fact that in-house lists outperform other sources of lists. Over the years, you’ve probably collected emails from various sources—newsletter sign-ups, trade shows, networking, and existing prospects and customers.

People get promoted at companies and/or move to other jobs. You need to regularly check the hygiene of your email list. Do a “merge-purge” of your list to keep it current.

One common problem I’ve come across with industrial companies is the size of their lists. They tend to be small and/or stale. Needless to say, growing your list with new subscribers should be one of your goals of industrial content marketing.

Engineers are more willing to give up their contact information in exchange for what they consider valuable information. What can you offer engineers to persuade them to fill out your registration form? This chart from the GlobalSpec report will answer that question for you.

Lead nurturing is an important component of industrial email marketing, especially in long and complex sales cycles that are typical in industrial sales. This is a topic unto itself for another post or two. I have published a few posts on lead nurturing that you’ll find here. You can also find plenty of good information from HubSpot and other Marketing Automation companies.

Finding the right industry partner for email marketing

You don’t have to go it alone. Consider using e-newsletters from reputable industry portals and publications. Many of them publish several niche newsletters that can fit your exact needs.

There are several advantages to this strategy.
- Reach new markets and expand to a global reach while sending targeted emails
- Immediate access to a captive audience of engineers and industrial buyers
- You don’t have to worry about SPAM and GDPR compliance; they are responsible for that
- Easier to measure ROI of email marketing with in-depth reports
- Some may even include the creation of HTML campaigns; all you have to do is provide the content
The only caveat is that you don’t own those contacts until someone visits your site after receiving your email and signs up for a content download or some other call to action.

If you think all you need to do is blast out emails promoting your products/services, think again. The old-fashioned “batch and blast” industrial email marketing just won’t work, especially if you are considering renting an email list.

This post should provide a good overview of how you can use industrial email marketing to work more effectively for generating high-quality leads.
March 3, 2021
Industrial Lead Generation – MQL vs SQL
Industrial lead generation is an important, if not the #1 goal of industrial marketers. Sure, there are other objectives of manufacturing content marketing as can be seen in this chart from the Manufacturing Content Marketing 2020 research report published by the Content Marketing Institute.

Even though “Generate demand/leads” is at #4, generating high quality leads is closely related to the top three goals.

Industrial lead generation is complicated

Your Sales team and more importantly, upper management want Marketing to generate leads that turn into RFQs/RFPs and sales opportunities.

Here’s where things begin to get complicated and start to fall apart. Not all leads are created equal, especially in long sales cycles with many stakeholders involved as is typical in industrial sales.

No, this post is not about quantity vs quality of leads.

MQL and SQL definitions

I’ll approach the definitions from the perspective of industrial content marketing since most manufacturing marketers are using this inbound marketing strategy to successfully generate leads these days.

A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is someone who has shown some interest in your content and may even be willing to give up their basic contact information in exchange for gaining access to more valuable content. These are top of the funnel (ToFU) leads.

A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is someone who has shown an interest in your product or service and not just in consuming your content. These prospects are further along in their buying journey. These are middle of the funnel (MoFU) leads who may be ready to have a conversation with your sales team.

The biggest mistake made by Marketing is that they tend to hand off MQLs to Sales to qualify and close. Marketing’s job doesn’t end with generating MQLs. There is a lot more work to be done.

It is critical to understand the differences between a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) and a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). Otherwise, you’ll reinforce the biggest complaint that I’ve heard from Sales, “Marketing generates crappy leads.”

Converting MQLs into SQLs

So how do you turn MQLs into SQLs? The conversion doesn’t happen in one magical step, it’s a process that begins long before you start a content marketing program for lead generation.

Let me back up a bit first.

Salespeople have been using the BANT (Budget, Authority, Needs, and Timing/Timeframe) method for qualifying leads successfully for a long time. It is an efficient system without wasting time on prospects who don’t have the budget and/or the authority to make a buying decision.

However, that strategy is not as effective today when industrial buyers prefer to remain invisible or anonymous for a large part of their buying journey.

Let me give you an example to illustrate this point.

Let’s say you are a manufacturer of industrial components, your part must be “designed in” by a Design Engineer before the Purchasing Department can issue a PO or send out a request for RFQ/RFP. The Design Engineer is the specifier who has no buying authority, but you are not going to get to the RFQ stage unless s/he specifies your part first. Such a lead wouldn’t fit into the neat definitions of BANT. (For more on this, see BANT May Not Work in Qualifying Leads for Industrial Sales).

How SAL brings together Sales and Marketing

Actually, there is one critical step between MQL and SQL. I refer to it as SAL – Sales Accepted Leads (There are other acronyms for the same thing). SAL bridges the gap between MQLs and SQLs.

You can find many articles online about Sales and Marketing alignment. I’ll stick with the approach of using manufacturing content marketing.

SAL is a three-letter word that is the key step in achieving Sales and Marketing alignment. How you ask? It would take up thousands of words to describe the entire process. Here are key talking points.
- The two have to work together to come up with a unified definition of a qualified lead
- Sales agrees to take follow-up action on these leads
- Sales provides feedback to Marketing to refine these definitions and scores over time
- This makes for a closed-loop lead generation system
- Without SAL, Sales and Marketing will continue to point fingers at each other when things don’t go right
Refer to my post, SAL is the Glue that Binds Sales and Marketing in Lead Generation for additional details.

BTW, I had published that post back in 2010 and it is still the second most popular posts among the 300+ posts that I have published here. Shows you the lasting power of industrial blogging.

Email automation for nurturing MQLs into SQLs

As I’ve mentioned earlier, the conversion is a process and not something you can accomplish in one fell swoop. Once again Sales and Marketing have to work in tandem to come up with a uniform definition of a qualified lead and scoring criteria.

Industrial email marketing continues to be the most effective way to nurture engineers and technical professionals by feeding them relevant content that will move them forward in their purchase decision in a logical manner. Content must address the challenges faced by various stakeholders at different stages of their buying journey.

Note, I’m not referring to email blasts or as it is commonly known as “batch and blast.” You need to carefully segment your list, create supporting content assets for lead nurturing, send out personalized emails and measure the results. That’s the only way you’ll convert MQLs into real SQLs.

Some call it “drip” marketing whereas others refer to it as email automation. You’ll need some form of marketing technology to make this process efficient and effective. To learn more about industrial email marketing, refer to article “Why Email Marketing for Manufacturers is the Cornerstone of Industrial Marketing.”

This post should give you a good understanding of MQLs vs SQLs and their respective roles in industrial lead generation.
September 17, 2020
Why Email Marketing for Manufacturers is the Cornerstone of Industrial Marketing
Email marketing for manufacturers continues to perform well, but there are some serious challenges to overcome. It is a mixed bag of good and bad news. Keep reading for all the details based on research conducted by highly respected and independent third-party sources Reading Time: 4 minutes

Email marketing for manufacturers continues to be very effective for reaching engineers and technical professionals. Year after year, manufacturers have successfully used email marketing despite all the talk about social media. There are good reasons for it being a core component of a good industrial marketing strategy.

According to Thomas ™ For Industry (ThomasNet), “Email is the single most important channel for industrial marketers in terms of ROI.”

Here are some more mind-boggling statistics on B2B and industrial email marketing.
- Email generates $38 for every $1 spent, which is an astounding 3,800% ROI (DMA)
- 82% of manufacturing marketers use email to distribute content (CMI)
- 96% of engineers will at least consider an email in front of them (Engineering.com)
- Nearly 50% of engineers subscribe to two to three e-newsletters (IEEE/GlobalSpec)
- 83% of B2B companies use e-newsletters as part of their content marketing program (HubSpot)
With those kinds of numbers, you can be assured that email marketing for manufacturers is as relevant as ever.

Manufacturers use email for lead nurturing and content distribution

If you are a manufacturer of complex engineered systems, you deal with long sales cycles that involve multiple touchpoints with a variety of stakeholders. Nurturing leads is critical to your success for converting top of the funnel leads into sales opportunities. Similarly, email is a very popular method for content distribution.

Combine videos with email marketing

81% of manufacturing marketers use videos in their content marketing. This is followed closely by email newsletters at 74% (Source: Manufacturing Content Marketing 2020). Why not combine the two for a powerful 1-2 punch?

The 2019 Smart Marketing for Engineers® survey reported that 88% of engineers found Product demo/how-to videos to be Somewhat to Very Valuable when doing their research. The interesting part about this statistic is that there are differences among countries and age groups.

Engineers in South America and India/Asia/Russia place more value on case studies than their peers in the U.S. and Canada. Engineers under 35 and between 46-55 are more likely to value product demo/how to videos. It is important for manufacturers to win the mindshare of younger engineers as they take on more decision-making roles.

Email marketing for manufacturers is an integral part of the mix

Email marketing is an integral part of industrial content marketing. That doesn’t mean you have to rely on it 100% of the time. In the past, I’ve written about how manufacturers use a combination of push and pull strategies in industrial marketing.

My thoughts were based on the annual survey, Trends in Industrial Marketing conducted by IEEE GlobalSpec.
- 81% of industrial marketers use both push/outbound (email, tradeshows) and pull/inbound (corporate websites, online catalogs) marketing initiatives
- 60% of the companies use email marketing to in-house lists
Challenges remain in email marketing for manufacturers

Stats are great but take those numbers with a healthy grain of salt. Plenty of challenges remain for manufacturers to overcome to get their emails opened and actually engage with engineers and industrial buyers.

The old ways of “batch and blast” don’t work well and 100% promotional or salesy emails won’t cut it either.

Junk email filtering has become much more sophisticated over the years, so getting your emails into the inboxes is a huge problem. It is a known fact that open and click rates from emails have been declining over the years.

Average email campaign stats in 2019 for the manufacturing industry according to MailChimp are as follows:
- Average Open Rate: 19.82% compared to 21.33% for all industries
- Average Click Rate: 2.18% compared to 2.62% for all industries
How do engineers interact with email newsletters when they receive them? The chart below is from the same report, 2019 Smart Marketing for Engineers® report.

NOTE: These numbers are based only on e-newsletters that engineers have subscribed to and trust.

Based on my own experiences working with industrial companies, I can say email marketing for manufacturers does work, but it isn’t easy and there are some serious challenges to overcome if you want to get results.
December 4, 2019
The Importance of Industrial Email Marketing for Targeting Engineers

Industrial email marketing is and should be an important component of your content marketing strategy when targeting engineers and technical professionals. I’m sure you’ve heard or read about email marketing being replaced by social media.

Industrial email marketing continues to be very effective in promoting content, nurturing leads and building thought leadership. I say that based on my personal experience working every day with manufacturers, distributors and engineering companies. It most certainly isn’t dead! The often-used quote by Mark Twain applies here, “The report of my death was an exaggeration” or if you prefer the more popular misquote, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

(more…)

April 22, 2019
Making Email the Foundation of Industrial Content Marketing

You may think email marketing is dead or passé with all the talk about social media. However, that is far from the reality that I see every day, working with manufacturers and engineering companies, especially when it comes to industrial content marketing.

Engineers and industrial professionals do read emails, provided you’ve earned their trust with valuable content and can get through their spam filters. According to the research report “How Engineers Find Information 2018” published by engineering.com, 95% of engineers will consider an email in their inbox.

You can read about this in my earlier post, Industrial Email Marketing for Engaging Engineers and Technical Professionals.

Email should be an important component of industrial content marketing

Given the above findings, it makes a lot of sense in making email marketing a key component of your overall industrial content marketing strategy. My opinion is corroborated by independent research findings.

(more…)

September 13, 2018
Industrial Email Marketing for Engaging Engineers and Technical Professionals

Do you think industrial email marketing is dead? It would be easy to jump to that conclusion given the declining click rates and the difficulties in getting past the sophisticated email spam-filtering methods. Engineers and technical professionals know how to opt out and have much higher expectations from vendor emails.

Think twice though before you discard the tried-and-tested industrial email marketing strategies. Sure, the old way of “batch and blast” is no longer effective and email marketing is facing challenges, but it is not dead by any means. I can say that based on my own experience working with manufacturing and engineering companies on a daily basis.

(more…)

June 19, 2018
Industrial Email Marketing for Manufacturers, Distributors and Engineering Companies
Industrial email marketing is alive and well in 2017 despite what you may have heard or read to the contrary. To quote Mark Twain with a slight modification, “The reports of my its death have been greatly exaggerated.”

Here are some stats from the 2016 State of Marketing Report from Salesforce.com.
- 80 percent of marketers agree email is core to their business
- 79 percent of marketers say email generates ROI, a 48 percent year-over-year (YoY) increase
- 64 percent have also integrated their email marketing activity with their overall marketing strategy
Some marketing gurus have even said that social media has killed email marketing. I disagree.

Let me put that in the context of industrial email marketing for engaging with engineers and technical professionals. In my experience with industrial content marketing, both email marketing and social media can coexist happily and deliver a powerful one-two punch.

Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it. Let me try to convince you by presenting stats and facts from various research studies/surveys about industrial marketing.

(more…)
May 22, 2017
Industrial Email Marketing for Targeting Engineers in Long and Complex Sales Cycles

Industrial email marketing doesn’t get as much respect as it deserves. I’ve read articles where people have claimed that email marketing is dead thanks to social media. That is simply not true when it comes to industrial marketing.

Let’s say you are a provider of engineering services and you sell to the Medical Device industry. Typically, sales cycles are 12 to 18 months or longer and there are many stakeholders involved from engineering, manufacturing, R&D, compliance and management. Many of these stakeholders do not interact directly with your website or content. Email marketing is probably the only way you’ll reach some of these invisible decision makers. How, you ask?

By using email marketing to deliver “champion content” directly into the Inbox of your primary contact who is probably a young engineer tasked with doing the research in finding an engineering solution. Sure, you can post the same content on your website and pray that your target audience will find it. Why not make it easier for your internal evangelist to forward your message and sell your solution internally?

(more…)

November 8, 2016
Email Marketing for Manufacturers and Industrial Companies

Email marketing often gets a bad rap because most people are fed up with the deluge of promotional emails they receive every day.

That is the same reaction I got from a client who is an industrial distributor when I spoke to him about email marketing. He considered marketing emails to be nothing more than “junk” and wanted nothing to do with them.

Unfortunately, the reality is that many industrial companies are still stuck in the one off batch and blast mode of email marketing. That strategy may be effective for retailers and B2C marketing who are primarily selling “impulse purchases” but not likely to work very well in industrial marketing where we are talking about “considered purchases.” Most of these purchases are complex products with long sales cycles; multiple decision makers and influencers are involved; they are usually expensive and involve a much higher risk if a wrong decision is made.

Of course there are exceptions such as selling replacements parts and industrial consumables where a promotional email may hit someone’s Inbox just at the right time to trigger an immediate sale.

(more…)

May 15, 2015
Make Industrial Email Marketing Mobile Responsive

Email marketing continues to be a workhorse for manufacturers and industrial companies. The reason is simple – it produces results! Take a look at my earlier post, “Industrial Email Marketing is NOT Dead.”

Over the years, I’ve seen the content in industrial emails improve considerably. Email content has graduated from purely promotional to more educational. Yes, there is still a sales message but the calls to action now drive readers to more in-depth content on web pages and/or a blog.

A powerful tool in any industrial marketer’s arsenal is today’s Marketing Automation technology because it allows you to add dynamic content quickly and easily. You can slice and dice your email marketing content to tailor it to very specific segments within your mailing lists. This adds a whole new dimension to personalized email marketing that goes beyond just using someone’s first name.

(more…)

October 22, 2013