With the rapid rate of change in technology across security and other industries, new types of digital, mobile and virtual products and solutions are emerging every day. Individuals making purchase decisions today have the challenging job of sifting through dozens of brands and products in order to determine what is right for their needs. For them, the most valuable resource is information to help them make the best choice.
To this end, purchasers are doing their homework like never before, researching providers and products before making contact with any company. A recent study from LRG Marketing Communications shows this to be true for the physical security industry as well. This opens a new opportunity for the vendor who can ease the struggle by delivering valuable, useful information to their prospective customers that truly helps them in their decision-making process.
Like most of us today, your prospects are being bombarded with marketing emails, now a standard part of most providers’ marketing tool sets. There are probably many days when your inbox is flooded with dozens if not hundreds of emails, and you’re not alone. Our data supports this as well; 64 percent of those surveyed said they receive emails every day from physical security providers.
For most email campaigns, the typical metrics include opens, click-throughs, bounce rate and the dreaded opt-outs. However, none of these metrics really answers the question of why a person opens, reads and potentially responds in some way to your marketing email.
To explore that question and provide insight on email trends and habits in the security industry, our email marketing study surveyed more than 300 security professionals to learn what works – and what doesn’t – for marketers in the security space.
The good news is that it is definitely possible to reach your prospects and make an impact that will help lead, ultimately, to making a sale. However, it is not as simple as putting your product information into an email and hitting send. There is both an art and a science to email marketing, and knowing the right strategies and tactics will go a long way towards meeting your goals in building awareness, driving leads, increasing website traffic and more.
How can you create an effective marketing email? In a nutshell, it comes down to three things.
1. Deliver Value.
Put yourself in the shoes of your prospective customer, the one who is spending time researching providers and products on the journey to making a purchase decision. As we know, in the current environment of rapid change, he or she has dozens if not more differing types of products or solutions to consider, and many brands offering them. If you can help with that struggle by providing useful information, that’s value right there and the reward for doing so is great. Forty-eight percent of those who responded said more informational content would increase the likelihood of their buying that company’s product or solution.
Examples include a whitepaper, a data study or simply a blog post with a thoughtful point of view on an industry topic, as long as it’s well-executed and is truly informative.
Value comes in many forms, and it can be in the eye of the beholder. Not every email has to include a long-form piece of content, but in order to have value to the recipient it should be in some way useful to their business.
2. Make it Convenient.
More and more of your industry peers are reading their email primarily on a mobile phone or tablet. If your marketing email is not optimized for mobile, it will be difficult if not impossible for them to read. And don’t expect anyone to save your carefully-designed message so that they can go back and read it later on their desktop – not when it’s so easy to tap that little garbage can icon.
You generally get one chance to make an impact with a marketing email, and failing to optimize for mobile seriously damages that chance.
3. Be Relevant.
Your email may be full of well-written information and designed to open perfectly on a mobile phone, but the recipient will still head for the delete button if it’s not pertinent to their needs and business interests at that moment.
The content you provide in a marketing email needs to be relevant to the person receiving it; otherwise you risk a higher likelihood of their unsubscribing from your list. In fact, 54 percent of those we surveyed said they will unsubscribe if they don’t see the relevance of the email to their business. Achieving this requires careful list management and the creation of custom-tailored content for each audience.
Your marketing email recipient is too busy to spend time reading something in order to figure out if it might be of interest. Grab them quickly, give them something that makes their life easier, and you’ll see the kind of results you want from your email marketing program.
