We’ve all seen far too many crappy marketing and business development emails. The bulk of them end up in the “delete” box — and most often we associate the word “spam” with them.
Quite often,?supposedly well-crafted emails also go bad. This RainToday.com posting: Don’t Send Prospecting Emails Like This One shows how to get it wrong.
I’ll let you go to the source link for the entire email, but the killer sentence in this one occurs in the second paragraph:
Would you happen to know who in your organization would be responsible for diagnosing and solving productivity issues related to your Website, and Internet & Mobile Marketing ? specifically, customers not able to find you on the Internet (unless they know the company name to search for), low traffic volume, or small leads to customers conversion ratio?
Of course, beyond its convoluted length, this email shows (a) the person had no connection with the person to whom he was addressing the email and (b) didn’t bother to do any research to make sure the email had specific relevance to the business to whom it was sent.
And that brings me to the key, vital, and 100 per cent certain rule for email marketing for AEC business development.
- It has to be one-on-one.
- It has to be specific to the person to whom it is addressed.
- And it has to be founded on individual, thoughtful, and careful research.
- If you score on all three grounds, you’ll be okay, and effective.
Clearly, this form of email marketing cannot (and shouldn’t) be handled in any sort of mass volume. If you can send out more than a few of these a day, you would need some really good research support because it takes tie to build the depth and energy to make the email effective.
Of course, another route to go will be to generate some really helpful and useful content and post/publicize it, inviting inbound inquiries to your eletter or white paper. But if you wish to be proactive with your research, think how you can customize and individualize?the message on your outbound (and response) communications.
In most cases, the effort is worth the time. Remember, most AEC practitioners are not selling $10 consumer items — the average order size is in the thousand or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
If you’ve sent — or received — any particularly good, or bad, emails, please forward the sample to me. I enjoy viewing dismal failures — and great achievements.
