4 Proven Ways to Get Email Responses from Water Utilities
Email Campaigns That Work In The Municipal Water Market
Water utilities and municipalities are incredibly difficult customers to engage. They are bombarded with dozens of companies doing generic campaigns. Typically, they don’t appreciate receiving a cold call from a vendor. At WatrHub, we have seen successes and failures from 70+ sales teams in the municipal water industry and are happy to share some of the best practices on generating qualified leads and successes from email campaigns in the municipal water market.
1. Your content should be very specific and tailored to the recipient.
Operators and Public Works Directors will be able to tell if you have sent out a mass email to everyone on your list. Even if you change a few words around, they will know if the email was truly targeted at them or not. But, this doesn’t mean you have to create a separate template for every email you create. Introduce yourself so that the recipient knows who you are from the very beginning and an idea of why you are emailing them. Then, you should add details of how you discovered them and why they would find it beneficial to continue reading your email. By doing this, your reader will know that this is a personalized email and not a mass message you sent out, which in turn will increase your chances of receiving a positive response.
2. Craft your message around the utility’s pain point rather than your own water technology.
You also want to focus your email on your target and how they can be helped. You don’t want to focus too much on your water technology because this will cause the utility to be disengaged and unmotivated to read an email (as it only focuses on something they have probably never even heard of before). To make your email more engaging, you can reference some of the utility’s pain points that you found from a WatrHub Precision Targeting Report. It’s important to focus more on the recipient. For example, you can introduce what you believe is their pain point and then ask if they are the right person to be contacting. This will increase the chances of them replying if they aren’t the right person and they may even direct you to the exact contact you want to speak to. Additionally, you can also remove this person off you list which will save you time and get you closer to your right prospect.
3. Include a success story or specific stats which prove past achievements.
You want to leave your reader curious and interested in learning more about your water technology. To do this, your email should be short and shouldn’t give away all your exciting details. You can include specific details such as data and stats, but don’t reveal everything. If you choose to focus on a success story, include no more than two sentences so when you do book a meeting with your prospective client, you are able to elaborate and go into more detail then. Alternatively, you can also create drip campaigns where there are 2–3 stages so that you can easily break up and plan the amount of information you want to include in each email. In each email of your campaign, you still want to follow the same format but use different information to further engage the reader. Additionally, you can also add a few images and some color.
4. Close off with a call-to-action so that the email is actionable.
The last thing you definitely want to include which is the most important part of your email is your call-to-action. The whole point of your email is to gain them as a water/wastewater utility so you must ask for something they can act on. Otherwise, your efforts will be wasted since the reader will be confused on why you emailed them in the first place — or they will interested but will likely not bother emailing you back. Your product or service will be pushed to the back of their mind as the utility is most likely inundated by dozens of vendors reaching out with very generic pitches. If you simply ask for 10 minutes of their time, they can easily respond back to you with a date/time you proposed. Propose specific dates (at least 2 diff days) and diff times (include time zone) to avoid too many back and forth emails if they are unavailable during the limited times you propose. It is also easier for them to say no to a 30 minute meeting than it is for a quick 10 minute intro.
By following these tips and best practices, you will have a higher response rate than if you were to create long drawn out emails that nobody wants to read. These steps have been created after several different attempts of our own email campaigns. These tips are derived from best practices that we’ve discovered here at WatrHub and after watching 70+ sales & marketing teams in the industry run their own sales and marketing campaigns. These steps will help you generate more meetings and will also help you concisely get your message across — giving you the response you desire.
Here’s an email sample — remember to keep the subject short and casual (not necessary to capitalize every word) and try to use the reader’s name or company name to get their attention.
