How Email Marketing Can Help Build Your Client Base

As remote work and video-only conferencing ramps back up, your outbound marketing efforts need to ramp up too. In a recent Architect Magazine article, Evelyn Lee lays out a plan for using an effective but often-overlooked medium: email. 

Email? Isn’t that outdated? What about social media? Or a website redesign?

While using social media and keeping a strong web presence are important, here are some reasons why email marketing is still relevant.

Email newsletters offer more control than social media

One problem with any social media channel is that the platform —Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.—controls the medium. To ensure your posts are seen by potential clients, you need to keep up with the platforms’ ever-changing algorithms and “pay to play” with advertisements. With an email newsletter, the only changes that impact the effectiveness of this tool to engage its audience are made by you.

Email marketing has higher engagement and conversion rates

Unlike social media, which is often oversaturated with too many different things, email marketing is more focused. When someone does open one of your emails, they are more likely to be interested in what you or your firm has to say. This is especially true of B2B (business-to-business) services. 

According to HubSpot, 86% of business professionals prefer to use email over social media when communicating for business purposes. And in a Campaign Monitor study, they found that Email Marketing has a 3% average conversion rate, while Social Media Marketing averages around 0.5%.

Email offers powerful personalization opportunities

Having your recipients’ respective first names appear in the intro of an email is not a new trick, but segmenting email lists is a lesser-known tool used by savvy marketers. 

For instance, if your firm is serving different industry verticals—K-12, universities, civic—you can send the latest case study for your firm’s newly completed, ground-up high school to only those interested in your K-12 vertical or even in only your high school projects.

This type of hyper-focus can be much better for your business than all your social media followers seeing everything you broadcast all the time.

Email marketing is cost-effective

According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing (across all industries) brings in an average of $40 for every $1 spent. Best of all, starting an email marketing newsletter is easy, and plenty of email service providers have “free-mium” offerings to help you start your newsletter at no cost.

Final thoughts

According to Lee, “Generally speaking, architects are not good at outbound marketing. For the most part, we are either reactive to requests for proposals or highly reliant on repeat work from clients and their referrals.” Email marketing is one of the easiest outbound marketing tools that firms can roll out—and it doesn’t require daily, or even weekly, updates.

You may already be spending money on social media advertisements – which is good if it’s bringing your website traffic – but social media needs to be the start of a conversation with potential clients. 

While increasing web traffic is important, understanding who your audience is so you can actually convert them into a potential client is better. How do you figure out who is visiting your website and convert them to clients? After they arrive on your website from a social media ad, ask them to join your newly created newsletter to continue the conversation.

Have you tried email marketing? Let us know your thoughts on social media! 

Source: architectmagazine.com