Find More Business Through Email Marketing
It’s seems like nowadays, if you’re in commercial contracting, you have more work than you can manage. We won’t go over the actual reasons why this is going on in our economy, we’ll save that for another day. Nonetheless, it’s a wild time to be in the construction industry. I don’t know if this expansion period will persist, I believe however, it’s important NOW for all contractors to start developing sales activities that work. Then if a downturn does happen, you will have already deployed strategies to maintain your businesses bottom-line.
Our first recommendation for small and mid-sized contractors is to properly run a robust email campaign. There are good and bad ways of doing this, as we’ll discuss. So, we are all familiar with sending out cold-call emails (we’ll call this: Non-Value-Add Sales Campaigns) in hopes you get a positive response from your prospects. And if you’re like me, most of those emails were uninteresting and self-serving to your own company. In other words, there was nothing useful for your prospect to grab a hold of. These emails typically go right to spam or will be deleted before they’re read. Then there are value add email sales campaigns, we’ll call them just that (Value Add Email Sales Campaigns). This is where you write about a topic that your prospects may find interesting. For example, since Connex works with a lot of property managers, we’d write something like this: “Top 5 Ways to Improve Your tenant Relationships.”
We decided to look at the success rate of both types of these campaigns to see if there really was any difference. Over the course of 2 weeks, we measured data from a Non-Value-Add Sales Campaign, and data from a Value-Add Email Sales Campaigns.
Here’s what we found. The open rate for the Value-Add Content versus the Non-Value Content was 8% and 6%, respectively. Not a significant difference I agree, but still, something to note. Where the huge surprise and benefit to the Value-Add Sales Campaigns came through, was the length of time the prospects spent on our website. Using Google Analytics, we were able to measure the contacts who were sent the Value Add Sale Campaigns, as they visited our site for over 6 minutes! Versus the 30 seconds for those who were sent the Non-Value-Added literature. This is not a huge surprise. It seems logical that creating interesting content would perform better. What did surprise me, though, was how much more interested the prospects became in our company’s offerings. This test seemed to show that your prospects are looking for guidance, and content driven campaigns can help with that.