Email Marketing Goals

Whether your construction and engineering business style and concept is directed on a B2B basis by offering services and products to corporations or your primary marketing approach is B2C, promoting your activities to the general public, your email marketing strategy must be expertly designed to provide a steady flow of motivated clients to your website and locations. From the corporate executive wishing to design a new headquarters campus to the homeowner who wants to expand their deck, each type of client must be specially targeted through your email marketing newsletter campaign to encourage their initial and repeated business. Regulations on email marketing for construction and engineering businesses differ from those of traditional advertising. Legislation on usage for email marketing is strictly enforced in online communication. Federal law is clear on the procedures all construction and engineering business owners and managers must follow in their email marketing campaigns. Traditionally, construction and engineering businesses gathered personal information from customers through business card drop boxes, at trade shows, on locations, via sign up sheets and other methods. However, federal law dictates that information about customers cannot be entered into your email subscription list until clear permission has been obtained from the customer. The federal CAN-SPAM Act legislates and oversees email marketing in the USA, and describes clear standards of business regarding online marketing. This form of legislation is called an "opt-out" because it requires immediate and complete compliance should any subscriber request to be taken off an email subscription list. The United States federal government considers violations of CAN-SPAM an extremely serious issue, and violators are subject to severe penalties including hefty fines and even incarceration. Your construction and engineering company must have an obvious, simple and effective way for subscribers to file a claim demanding the elimination of their complete informational record from your computer systems. All email marketing newsletter campaign messages are required by law to contain a prominent unsubscription link that must be swiftly enacted by your business upon receipt. Failure to comply with unsubscription solicitation goes against federal legislation and can lead to severe legal sanctions against your construction and engineering company, as well as its executives. Whenever any construction and engineering company email marketer sends a message, be it personal or within the business arena, one of these three results will occur:

If email marketers continue to send media to addresses resulting in a hard bounce, ISPs will interpret campaigns as professional spamming practices (generally, spammers do not weed their lists of addresses, resulting in hard bounces). When an email marketer sends a missive to an address known to be unreceptive by the routing ISP - an address that Mailer Daemon has already recognized as undeliverable - you may find that your construction and engineering company develops a reputation for spamming, which can land your organization on an IP blacklist. When blacklisted, your business may be prevented from sending any email, including personal messages, business replies and of course your subscription campaign emails. Some construction and engineering business managers and owners simply visit the website of a primary competitor and copy their privacy policy. Not only does this activity create duplicate text content, an action penalized by search engine indexing functions that results in a drastic drop in your results listing position, it also creates legal liability. Your privacy policy should always be drafted specifically for your business unit by a construction and engineering business attorney who will ensure it precisely accounts for your online activities. Segmentation is an critical procedure many construction and engineering business owners ignore. Targeted list segmentation takes into account many factors about subscribers, including demographics, geography or behavior patterns in your audience subgroupings. Given the enormous range of service needs between types of clients, it is clear that meeting the individual needs of subscribers is a helpful business tool. By applying segmentation procedures and crafting your email newsletter content to those particular requirements, behaviors, geographic and demographic elements, your business will be able appeal to individual needs and propose more exact types of equipment, services, programs, procedures and products for each client. Email testing enables construction and engineering business owners and managers to tune marketing strategy to maximum effectiveness. The A/B split is one of the primary tests implemented by email marketers to determine how subscribers respond to changing a number of elements within an email. By varying just a single parameter, such as a link position or the subject line in the emails and reviewing the open and click-through rates, you can determine how customers react to the tested email elements. This information will allow you to refine your email elements and content and make the entire package as powerful as possible. Understandably, customers of construction and engineering businesses would rather not reveal personal information. This client's preference for privacy must be balanced against your need to obtain demographic data and improve your segmentation efforts. Incentives such as discounts, special offers or free consultations in exchange for demographic information necessary for email segmentation information can incentivize consumers to provide critical data. The primary methods of performance and efficiency analysis for online marketing campaigns can be arrived at through email metrics such as open and click-through rates. Any construction and engineering business manager or owner can easily understand the three types of subscribers on an email newsletter list:

Construction and engineering businesses should always use good email practices. Follow these principles to maximize the success of your campaign:

Close to 76 percent of surveyed construction and engineering business managers and owners were not aware of their click-through rate; 51 percent were unable to state the open rates of their email newsletter campaigns. Without clear knowledge of how a campaign is progressing it is impossible to obtain elevated levels of effectiveness.