Waves of digital transformation have unlocked huge leaps in sales and marketing efficiency for manufacturers, and the latest — and perhaps most game-changing — wave is on the horizon:
- CRMs brought the ability to accurately track interactions with prospects and customers
- MAPs brought a wide array of tools to digital marketing for manufacturers.
- ABM platforms uncovered in-market buyers to sharpen revenue-driving activities.
And now, new digital marketing enhancements for manufacturers are being ushered in by fast-charging AI developments.
One of the biggest impacts is coming from generative AI and the way it can greatly improve email marketing for manufacturers.
Leveraging AI for the creation and sending of sales & marketing emails can lead to:
- Stronger relationships with buyers
- Personalized experiences at scale
- Improved efficiency across your teams
- Increased ROI of your revenue-driving activities
Let’s look first at how AI enhances your email strategies and why it can deliver transformative change (and results!) for your revenue team.
The Nuts and Bolts of AI-Powered Email for Manufacturers
Traditional email marketing requires a lot of time, manual effort, and resources, including:
- Creating multiple lists to target different audiences
- Crafting messages for your different email sends
- Updating existing campaigns as buyers move through buying stages
- Handling any incoming replies for follow-up
Manufacturers with lean marketing teams often struggle to keep up with these demands. And larger manufacturers have their own challenges: it’s really hard to scale these efforts for multiple products or services.
And regardless of team size, it’s nearly impossible to handcraft personalized messages for each current or potential customer. What often happens instead is that a handful of priority accounts get a lot of careful 1:1 attention, while the vast majority of leads receive more generic — and less effective — outreach.
AI-powered email tools boost engagement by personalizing messages for all accounts … and it does it without a ton of time and effort from your people.
Quickly Create Personalized Emails
One of the most time-consuming tasks associated with email campaigns is simply writing the emails.
Generative AI now makes it possible to spin up personalized, relevant messaging within minutes — especially if you use a tool that’s been fine-tuned for B2B selling. Instead of spending time crafting an email that speaks to a single recipient’s unique needs and characteristics, your teams can write a prompt to quickly generate a multi-email campaign that’s personalized for all buyers.
The AI Writer capability within 6sense’s Conversational Email platform is an example of how a manufacturer can quickly spin up emails using AI.
By using this tool, your teams can generate multi-email campaigns with these goals:
- Revive unresponsive contacts from accounts with previous opportunities
- Accelerate buyers who are currently moving through their purchasing journey
- Follow-up with attendees from an event
- Generate demand within an account by sending personalized content
- And more
These templates within the AI Writer feature will have your teams creating emails quickly — and they can tinker with prompts to include specific resources, CTAs, and offers for different audiences.
The Benefits for Manufacturers: If you have limited resources to devote to crafting engaging emails, AI Writer acts like an expert copywriter that delivers highly relevant and personalized messaging for all your audiences — within minutes.
Move Accounts Through the Buying Journey with AI
Buyers are constantly shifting through different stages of the buying journey. Without AI, your teams would be responsible for constantly updating campaigns as accounts move through the funnel.
A conversational email platform like 6sense gives manufacturers the power to create dynamic email workflows — automated email sends based on a buyer’s previous engagement, buying stage, or interest in specific products.
This feature comes in handy for situations like event or webinar follow-up — times when you will have a lot of leads to follow-up with, but requires a lot of time to do so. AI can remove the manual effort involved while smartly qualifying your event leads, and surfacing the hot accounts to your sellers.
Example
The fictitious company ACME is a manufacturer of industrial nuts, bolts, and screws. The target audiences are different for each product. To reach these different audiences across the multiple products, ACME’s team creates three separate email cadences within AI Writer and then loads each into the workflow builder.
Within each workflow they dictate what should happen when a recipient…
- Responds
- Clicks a link but doesn’t respond
- Doesn’t engage at all
Finally, they assign the specific seller for each product to the workflow for when it’s time for a person to engage with the buyer.
The Benefits for Manufacturers: Whether you sell many or few products, your buyers are constantly moving through different stages. AI-powered email tools automatically target audiences based on their real-time activities and dynamically update your email campaigns to ensure your messaging is always on-target.
Reduce Workloads and Increase Engagement with Automated Follow-up
With only so many hours in the day, it can be hard to keep up with inbound leads and responses to outbound emails — especially because sellers spend 72% of their time not selling. If these requests come from accounts that aren’t necessarily at the top of the priority list, they’re less likely to be worked.
A conversational email tool can help lighten the load — and increase engagement in lower-priority accounts — by enlisting an AI assistant that engaged with the buyers and accounts your team isn’t currently prioritizing.
This AI assistant can send relevant content, respond to inbound leads, follow up with event attendees (or those who registered but didn’t attend), schedule meetings, and hand off a buyer to the appropriate seller.
Example
ACME receives a lot of inbound requests for more information about their products from their website. These leads are routed to sellers based on account assignments, and those assignments are based on the priority of accounts. A lead comes in from an account that doesn’t have a seller assigned.
Instead of falling to the wayside, ACME’s AI assistant from a conversational email tool hops in to respond to the request. The AI assistant delivers relevant content, and after a few replies, schedules a meeting with the appropriate sales rep after qualifying the buyer.
The Benefits for Manufacturers: An AI assistant can free your sellers to only focus on their prioritized accounts while it handles qualifying other inbound leads. Think of it as “found money” — accounts that might not have been worked previously suddenly enter your pipeline and lead to revenue.
Custom Truck One, a 6sense customer, saved 738 hours and generated $6+ million in opportunities with the help of Conversational Email.
Conclusion
Manufacturers can realize many benefits from AI-powered email tools. A conversational email platform can boost a B2B manufacturing marketing strategy by crafting personalized emails in minutes, creating dynamic email workflows that react to buyer behavior, and qualifying inbound leads to find additional revenue opportunities.
