You need to communicate directly with your current label customers. And you need to drive a pipeline of leads from prospects. And, oh yeah, it needs to be done consistently, quickly and in a cost-effective manner.
We know the drill, because we live it every day with all our clients. And nowhere is it more relevant than in the labels and packaging market where your converter customers (or brands, if you’re a converter) are way too busy doing everything from buying materials to checking quality on press to making sales calls to opening everything in their inbox.
So what’s the solution?
Email marketing is one obvious answer because it can drive leads and increase revenue for label and packaging businesses large or small. Most importantly, email marketing allows you to reach a wide and willing audience while also keeping costs relatively low, leading to positive revenues.
Sounds great, but that’s of course only when it’s done right. Get past the idea of it being “free”— effective email marketing requires substantial knowledge about your customer, targeted language and excellent visuals in order to be effective. Otherwise, your email marketing becomes just part of the noise from the 267 Billion (yep that’s Billion with a B!) business and consumer emails sent every day. (Source: Radicati Group)
In 2017, average results for Email Campaigns across industries were:
Open Rate: 24.79% (Source: Smart Insights) |
A few notes on these stats. This open rate is an average across all industries – typically we’ve seen about 22% in our industry. And this rate improves if the recipients are customers or have subscribed to receive your eblasts.
You may not be familiar with click to open rate (CTOR) which essentially measures the effectiveness of the content of your email. It is calculated by the number of unique clicks divided by the number of unique opens.
Interesting stats – but how do you make sure your email marketing is measuring up? Here are our seven top tips for a successful email campaign. (We tried to keep it to five – but there’s just too much helpful information to share!)
- Have something worth talking about
Your customers and prospects are just like you – bombarded daily with emails. They want to be educated – not just sold to. And that’s what compels them to open and click. So make sure your eblasts have a mix of new products, new applications – something they can learn from. A link to a case study or a white paper or a “how-to” video for example. - Send it from a person – and at the right day/time
64% of subscribers open an email based on who it’s from (Source: The State of B2B Email Marketing report-SuperOffice) so you want to be sure to personalize the email as it increases your open and click through rates. (Don’t send from infobox@labelcompany.com.) Tuesday is the best day of the week to send emails – and if you send two emails a week, send the second one on Thursday. And the best times are at 10 a.m. and then from 8 p.m. to midnight. (Source: Coschedule Research) - Send a reminder and a second touch
Our clients have seen the best open rates when we send out a reminder a few days after the first one to anyone who didn’t open the email. And we always send out a second touch with slightly modified copy to folks who opened but didn’t take the next step to click through. These four touchpoints really make a difference. - Include transactional emails in your marketing mix.
Transactional emails (or “triggered” emails) include any email that is triggered by a user’s interaction with your website (think of a purchase receipt). Transactional emails could be a welcome email, someone ordering a sample, visiting your tradeshow booth, or could be a “win-back” email to targeted buyers who haven’t been active in a while. And they matter—because they have 8x more opens and generate substantially greater revenue than regular bulk emails. - Linking to your website: If you build it they will come.
A strong email should always be linked to a strong webpage – it’s not a stand alone proposition. Think about what you want your recipients to see, learn and do next. And it’s always a great idea to create a separate landing page with Google analytics. - Make sure your subject line breaks through the noise
Face it, there’s a lot of competition out there. We could write an entire blog on subject line recommendations (maybe we will!) They range from delivering one clear message; using words like “important, “urgent”; asking a compelling question; including a number (5 reasons to xxx); keeping it short; being obvious and avoiding suspicious-looking subject lines; and, lastly, avoiding SPAM filter triggers. - Now that you made it past the headline – K.I.S.S.
In this case, this stands for keep it (your copy) short & succinct! Don’t wrap up everything and the kitchen sink and try to use your emails to showcase your entire product line. And be sure you’re including compelling visuals and if possible, link to a video. Video can lead to open rate increases of 19% and increase click-through rates by more than 50%! (Source: Campaign Monitor)
Seven great tips – so why would we share all these great secrets? We know that many of you may need a little help making email marketing part of your 2019 marketing plans. You’re really good at developing and producing great products for our industry—but you may just not have the time to put into this tool. We would love to help out. We’ve been doing it for years, and frankly, our clients tell us we’re good at it!
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