Top Email Marketing Tips for the Manufacturing Industry

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways for manufacturers to reach out to their customers and prospects to drive sales, increase brand awareness, and build relationships with their target audience and prospective clients.

Learn how your business can stay top-of-mind with email marketing for manufacturers.

Email Marketing for Manufacturers: Is It Needed?

Email marketing is a type of direct marketing that involves sending emails to prospective or current customers.

This type of digital communication has many benefits for manufacturing businesses. First off, email marketing for manufacturing companies can help you create a direct line of communication with your target audience. This can help your business build rapport and establish a relationship with prospective and current customers.

You can tailor your messaging to adhere to the needs of your specific audience. By implementing a tactful strategy, your campaign will resonate with your audience more, and in turn, drive engagement and leads.

There are countless benefits to email marketing for manufacturing companies. Crafting thoughtful and strategic messaging via emails can be one of the most valuable assets in your manufacturing marketing plan.

How to Market a Manufacturing Company Using Email

1. Know Your Audience

Email marketing for manufacturing companies can be very beneficial. But it's imperative that you understand your target audience and their needs to show them you're right for the job.

Here are some tips to identify your audience to segment your email list:

• Research your potential audience: Find out what makes your audience tick with demographic and psychographic insights to make your campaigns as effective as possible.
• Create buyer personas: Crafting an idea of your business’s ideal customer can help you effectively identify who to send your emails to.
• Check website and social media analytics: Understanding who your business’s website and social media accounts are attracting can provide context to who you should target for new business.

Once you identify and get to know your audience, your manufacturing business can tailor your email campaigns to each segment. Every customer is different and presents a unique set of challenges they are looking to solve. By showing you understand their business, they are more likely to engage with your emails.

Here are some ways you can tailor your campaigns to different business segments:

• Demographics: Divide your email list based on your target audience’s demographics such as industry, geographical location, and business size to ensure your distribution remains relevant to your audience.
• Buyer stage: Divide your email marketing for manufacturing businesses by their stage in the sales process. For example, divide by existing customers, new prospects, and old customers so you can base your messaging around the likelihood of conversion.
• Behavior: No one likes getting emails they don’t want to read. You can segment your target audience based on how they have interacted with your content in the past to gauge their interest.

2. Craft Compelling Subject Lines

With so many emails coming into your customers’ mailboxes, you have to make a good impression and say something that will catch their attention immediately so that they click 'open'. Crafting an eye-catching subject line can do just that.

Here are some tips to consider when crafting your compelling subject line in email campaigns:

• Highlight a promotion: Creating urgency and calling out a special or timely promotion can entice your audience to engage and convert quickly.
• Personalize the subject line: Highlighting someone’s name, job, or skills in the subject line can make your routine campaign seem more personable and targeted.
• Get to the point: Keep your subject line short and sweet to ensure your message is noticed and resonates with your target audience.

Here are some examples of effective and powerful subject lines for your manufacturing industry email campaigns:

• New Product Alert: Introducing Our Latest Innovation
• Limited Time Offer: 24 Hours Left to Save!
• Hey Michelle, Here’s How Our Products Can Streamline Your Operations
• Check Out Our Top-Selling Products of the Year

Implementing these tips can have a profound impact on your manufacturing email marketing campaign’s overall engagement.

3. Focus on Relevant Content

The content in your manufacturing marketing emails must be relevant to your audience’s needs and interests. Some people in the manufacturing industry receive hundreds of emails a day. You want to make sure your content is engaging and relevant to your target audience’s needs.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when creating content that resonates with your audience and encourages them to interact:

• Provide a solution: Be upfront with which challenge your services are solving for your target audience. By addressing the initial challenge, you can establish credibility and drive inquiries.
• Add calls-to-action (CTAs): Encourage your audience to take action by using clear CTAs throughout your emails, whether they be in the subject line or body copy. CTAs can engage your audience and drive them to contact your business, visit your website, and more.
• Personalize the messaging: Much like subject lines, tailoring the body content of your email can remind your audience that you understand who they are and how you can help them achieve their goals.
• Incorporate visuals: Keep your audience’s attention by breaking up big walls of text with different types of visual content such as images, videos, and GIFs.

In this day in age, we all digest various types of content. When crafting your manufacturing marketing campaigns, it is important to be mindful of which types of content will resonate with your audience the most. 

Some examples of different types of content to highlight in your email marketing for the manufacturing industry are:

• Case studies
• Industry news
• Testimonials
• Videos
• Webinars
• Podcasts

There are endless possibilities for the type of content you can use in your email campaigns. But being mindful of your audience and ensuring you are tailoring your messaging to their needs should stay top of mind.

4. Optimize for Mobile Devices

It can be difficult for some recipients to read and navigate emails on their phones. When an email doesn’t load or is unresponsive and slow, recipients may delete the email or not engage with the content sent. Plus, your business risks losing a significant portion of your target audience.

To avoid a situation like this, here are some tips to optimize your emails for mobile devices:

• Use a mobile-friendly layout: Create a responsive design that can adjust to fit the screen size of the mobile device on which your recipient is viewing the email.
• Use large fonts: Enhance your email campaign’s mobile-friendliness by using 16-pixel font size for easy readability.
• Be mindful of attachment size: Using large images, videos, or files can make the page speed on mobile slow down and may deter people from continuing to read.
• Keep subject lines short: Mobile devices only show 25-30 characters in a subject line, so be mindful of how long your subject line is when optimizing for mobile.

5. Make It Easy to Unsubscribe

No one wants emails they aren’t interested in flooding their inbox. Because of this, it’s important that you give your audience the option to unsubscribe from your email campaign.

By providing an opt-out link in your emails, subscribers have the option to adjust their preferences and unsubscribe if your content is no longer relevant to them. This can improve email engagement rates and create a positive user experience.

Here are some tips on how to include an opt-out link in your emails:

• Make the opt-out link easy to find and avoid using tiny text
• Send a confirmation after a subscriber opts out
• Use a one-click opt-out to make the process easy for subscribers

6. Measure and Improve

It’s important for your business to always track email campaign metrics to understand how your emails are being delivered and engaged with. By tracking the success of your email campaigns, you can make improvements based on your results and, in turn, drive more business.

Here are some key metrics to track for manufacturing industry email campaigns:

• Bounce rate
• Clickthrough rate
• Conversion rate
• List growth rate
• Open rate
• Unsubscribe rate
• Sharing/forwarding rate

All these metrics can seem overwhelming to track, but thankfully, you don’t have to do it alone.

Working with a manufacturing marketing agency that can track these key metrics can be helpful in ensuring all your email campaign efforts are not being wasted. A marketing agency has the guidance and expertise to create an impactful email campaign and analyze KPIs to help your business thrive.

Kick-Start Your Manufacturing Marketing Strategy

Email marketing for manufacturing businesses can be incredibly useful in generating business, creating a line of communication, and building a relationship with your customers. Implementing the helpful tips covered above can ensure your organization is using email in the best way possible.

When creating your manufacturing email marketing strategy, remember to understand your audience, include valuable content, optimize for mobile devices, improve user experience, and track your metrics to improve future campaigns.

Need help with your manufacturing email marketing campaign? The LAIRE team has over a decade of experience with B2B manufacturing marketing and can help you create compelling email campaigns to drive your business.

Ready to take the next step? Download our Manufacturing Marketing Checklist to learn more.