In this article:
The power of BIMobject email campaigns
Your chance to connect
With a user base of 3+ million AECs, BIMobject is the world's largest platform for professionals browsing and downloading BIM-related content. Email Campaigns allow brands on BIMobject to capitalize on the indication of interest entailed by a product download or brand follow by sending a customized campaign with any message they want to communicate to their audience.
Best-in-class results
BIMobject email campaigns don't just look good on paper, but they also deliver results in practice. With thousands of campaigns sent, BIMobject email campaigns have an open rate that is 58% higher than the industry average.*
Setting up and running an email campaign
To create and run an email campaign you need to be on a Premium plan. Then, simply go to Promote within the Business Application, then click New promotion > Email Campaign.
Step 1: defining your target audience
The first thing you need to do is decide if you want to re-target your current audience (sending a campaign to users who have already downloaded your products or followed your brand), or if you want to target users outside of your audience (users who have never downloaded your products or followed your brand). A healthy marketing strategy will include a good mix of both of these activities, but we've outlined some of the basic reasons for doing each below:
| Primary motivation | Strategy |
Re-target current audience | Build and nurture lasting relationships with users interested in your products | Send regularly as a means of staying top-of-mind for interested users |
Target new users | Grow your audience by capturing new users who have yet to find you on BIMobject | Use to complement existing reach strategies, such as product or collection promotions |
Re-target your current audience
If you want to target users who already downloaded your products or followed your brand, select 'Captured audience'. If you have already saved some target audiences on BIMobject, these will now show up as selectable options in the first step of your campaign creation. Simply select one of the cards from the list and click 'Next' to proceed.
If you would instead prefer to define a new target audience, simply click 'Create new' and filter your audience list.
Once you're ready, save the newly defined audience list and select it before proceeding to the next step.
❗ Please note that users who have unsubscribed from this type of communication will automatically be excluded from the sendout.
Target users outside of your audience
If you want to target downloaders on BIMobject who never downloaded your products or followed your brand, select 'Undiscovered audience'. This will load a module that allows you to define a target audience based on four criteria: the time since last download, geographical regions of interest, relevant occupations and product categories or subcategories from which users must have downloaded. You must make a selection from every single one of these filters before your target audience is deemed defined.
If it seems confusing, just remember that you're populating the following sentence:
"I want to target [Occupations] in [Regions] on BIMobject who downloaded objects from [Product category / subcategory] within the last [Time], who have not already downloaded my products, or followed my brand"
Once you've made selections from every filter, click the 'Calculate' button. This will start a calculation to tell you the size of your defined target audience. Each user targeted will cost 2 credits, and you can always see how many credits you have available in the widget on the left. If you want to launch a campaign that is larger than the number of available credits, you can always purchase additional credits.
If you're happy with the result and want to use this audience for your campaign, simply click "Use this audience". This will select the audience and bring you to the campaign builder. If you would instead like to fine-tune your filtering, just go ahead and re-select any of the choices you've made. Just remember that you must click 'Calculate' followed by 'Use this audience' whenever you make any changes to your audience. Otherwise your previous audience will stay selected.
❗ Please note that users who have unsubscribed from this type of communication will automatically be excluded from the sendout.
Step 2: building your campaign
When you enter the Content step, you will see an email template populated with dummy text on the right, and text fields to specify the campaign's subject line and internal campaign name on the left:
The template is composed of elements (image elements, text elements, header elements etc.) that can be formatted using the menu in the top-left corner of the template. The available formatting options will change depending on what element you've currently selected. For example, selecting an image element will show an image upload option whereas selecting a text element will not:
Adding and removing elements
To add any element to the template, simply click the "+" button in the top-left corner. This will open a menu of available elements. Clicking any of these elements will add it below the element you've currently selected:
To delete any element, simply select it in the template and click the trash icon that appears on the left side of the selected element:
Reordering elements
If you add an element in the wrong place, or simply want to move things around, simply select the element you want to move, then click and hold the reordering icon on the left of the selected icon, and drag it to your desired position:
Uploading an image
To upload an image, you need to add an image element using the "+" icon (or just use the pre-populated image element from the initial template). Simply select the element and click the image icon located both to the left of the selected element and in the top-left menu. From there, click the upload button and select your image - then wait until the upload has finished:
Recommended file size
We recommend that you upload images no larger than 10MB.
Recommended dimensions
As long as you use high resolution images, our email editing tool will automatically scale the dimensions of your uploaded images to fit the width of the campaign. If you want to manually scale down an uploaded image you can do so by decreasing the width in the image settings.
Supported file formats
We support JPG, JPEG and PNG images. WebP and GIF files are not supported, and you currently cannot upload videos.
Adding links
One of the most important aspects to any email campaign is to direct recipients to destinations that are relevant to the message you're sending. It's possible to add links in three different ways:
Embed a link within any text
Add a link to a button
Add a link to an image
For each of these options, you need to select the text or element where you'd like to add the link, and utilize the "Settings" or "Link" menu in the top-left of the email editor:
❗ When adding links, always make sure to use full links including "https://", to avoid links breaking.
Step 3: sending a test email
When you're happy with an email template or simply want to verify that what you've been building will look okay in your recipients' inbox, you can send test emails for free to yourself or your other colleagues within the BIMobject platform:
❗ Please note that if you cannot find one of your colleagues in the list, you will need to invite them to your brand before sending a test email to them.
Step 4: launching your campaign
Once you've verified that your campaign looks good by sending a test email and feel ready to launch it, just go to the bottom-right of the page and click "Proceed to launch". This will open a confirmation dialog where you can confirm once more that you're sending to the right audience, and that you have enough credits to launch. If you don't have enough credits to launch, you can either purchase more credits or filter your audience further until it fits within your available credits.
Once you've confirmed that everything looks okay, simply confirm by clicking "Launch". This will launch the campaign to your selected audience.
*Compared to benchmarks in Architecture & Construction, presented by Mailchimp (2019)