While marketers have shifted budgets to other channels, including social and display, email marketing for construction companies still continues to generate more leads and customers. For instance, MailMunch posits you can reach between 40-45% open rates, which social media doesn’t guarantee.
Unlike other print and broadcasting channels, an email campaign gives you a direct communication line with your customers. It’s more personal and effective at generating leads, sustaining customer relationships, and building brand awareness. It also has an ROI of 4400%!
Email marketing can make your business better than it’s ever been before, regardless of whether you’re an independent contractor, small business, B2B vendor, or large enterprise. In this article, we discuss the benefits of email marketing for construction companies and offer valuable suggestions to improve your email marketing campaigns.
The Importance of Email Marketing Campaigns for a Construction Company
Writer Drake Baer contends email is ubiquitous, inviting, and meritocratic, so it’s no surprise that 80% of businesses use it to generate leads. Yet, behind statistics and profits, construction email marketing has other benefits, such as:
- Maintaining connections with vendors and subcontractors
- Increasing brand awareness in the communities you serve
- Reaching customers in real-time with project updates
- Generating leads for future projects
- Driving new client relationships
- Measuring the results of your email marketing efforts
- Staying ahead of the competition
Plus, existing customers appreciate being kept up-to-date with your construction company’s latest products and developments. It costs five times more to acquire new customers than retain existing ones, highlighting just how valuable maintaining customer relationships via email is.
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How to Create a Construction Email Marketing Campaign: 8 Effective Solutions
Below are a few actionable tactics to help you deliver personalized messages that increase your current customers’ lifetime value and hook new leads.
1. Create an Email List
An email list is a list of names, email addresses, contact details, and sometimes demographic details of people who gave you permission via a lead capture form to send them updates and promotions from your business.
Their voluntary subscription indicates they’re extremely interested in what you have to offer, which is why these leads are more likely to convert into paying customers. As owned media, an engaged email list can become one of your construction business’s best assets.
Unlike social media, emails are immune to sudden algorithm changes and distracting advertisements. They give you complete control of your brand’s narrative and the opportunity to build relationships with people and businesses who want to hear from you.
Creating an email list is essentially building your customer base. You can’t control who follows your business on social media, but you can control email communication, ensuring your targeted messaging reaches the most relevant subscribers.
2. Use CRM Software
Many commercial construction companies use separate tools to manage their sales and marketing, yet this disconnect decreases productivity. Customer relationship management (CRM) software creates a central hub to manage leads, deliver a personalized message and track customer engagement.
Good email marketing software lets you automate basic tasks and improve workflow. You can organize contacts, automate drip campaigns and store customer data. Streamlining email marketing tasks allows you to spend more time optimizing the sales pipeline.
This is because email software offers a holistic view of your customer’s journeys. With every email sent and reviewed, you can quickly identify key trends and get an idea of what to expect from your current content funnel, while adjusting your campaigns to suit those metrics.
The email software you need to power your construction business should have a rich selection of responsive email templates and a powerful email builder. Analytics capabilities are also important, so you can track progress and stay on top of things when you are running multiple campaigns.
Explore the top marketing software tailored for construction companies in our blog post.
3. Segment Your Email Campaigns
The purpose of email segmentation is personalization. Different clients require different messages, so segmentation automatically improves your email marketing engagement rates. The more precise you are, the better your results.
Here are a few useful ways to segment your email contact list:
- Sign-up date: Offer opportunities to engage recent customers or reward loyal subscribers with special offers.
- Email activity: It’s also possible to segment existing customers that have high click-through rates (CTR). You can offer these loyal fans new opportunities and increased discounts.
- Buyer personas/interests: You can also segment existing and prospective customers based on their demographics, interests, and pain points.
If you get your email marketing segments rights, your construction clients will receive relevant emails filled with the information they want. This degree of personalization leads to more conversions, more purchases, and happier customers.
4. Encourage Further Engagement
Marketing emails are just a chain in the link of a customer’s journey. Successful emails have compelling subject lines, and clear calls to action (CTA) i.e., prompts to encourage action like making a purchase, browsing your website, or downloading free content.
A proven email formula typically starts with a compelling opening (subject line and intro), followed by social proof (reviews and statistics) and a CTA. The body of your email should describe benefits to build credibility and transform attention into interest.
This basic structure works because benefit-driven writing is customer-centric, and the social proof provides the evidence needed to convince new clients to take a chance on your construction company.
On that note, email newsletters have always been a reliable format to engage further engagement. Good marketing newsletters guarantee constant traffic to your construction website and sales. However, you want your content to go light on sales, heavy on providing value, and, as always, include a clear call to action, but don’t make it the reason for the email.
5. Write about Engaging Subjects
As Campaign Monitor so aptly says: “Good writing isn’t about using any particular magic words, but about getting your audience to understand your offering and the benefits it brings them in the simplest ways possible, as that’s what drives people to purchase.”
However, a lot of construction company marketing emails sound like sales pitches. They think about selling, selling, selling, instead of writing about what their audience is actually interested in reading. So, first, you have to know your audience!
Subjects that engage them will typically have to do with their pain points. For example, let’s say you’re a stone fabricator. Now, rather than sending clients an email advertising your products, you’d be better off sharing tips on how to maintain natural stone countertops.
Considering the cost of stone countertops, most clients want to know how to care for them properly. Even if they don’t hire you immediately, if their counters need repolishing or replacing, your company will be top of mind.
Take a moment to think about your client’s common FAQs—these are good building blocks to help you write about engaging subjects so long as they’re not too spammy and don’t sound like a sales pitch.
6. Avoid Spam Filters
No one wants to spend time crafting thoughtful emails only to land in their customers’ spam folders. Emails with subject lines containing like “URGENT!!!,” “WHILE STOCKS LAST,” and “EXCLUSIVE DEALS!” are often sent to a customer’s spam folder because they appear pushy, desperate, and outlandish.
Sending too many attachments is also a red flag for spam filters. These days most companies embed promotional information directly in their emails instead of attaching marketing flyers and pamphlets. Marketing automation software like MailChimp has many templates to assist you with unique email designs.
To avoid email spam filters, you should also keep an eye on your sender reputation and spam score. Email service providers have a lot to do with whether your email will show up in the recipient’s inboxes, typically by assessing your sender reputation.
Also called your IP reputation, sender score, or IP score, this refers to your sender IP address and is an indicator of the quality of your domain. The higher your score out of 100, the better your reputation. Your score can change at any time, depending on the quality of the email you send, the engagement you get, and the quality of your email contacts.
7. Develop Drip Campaigns
Automizy describes an email drip campaign as: “A triggered sequence of automated emails sent on a predefined schedule to targeted email subscribers to achieve a specific result.” They are effective because they’re carefully orchestrated to guide leads down the sales funnel, and they reduce admin because they’re pre-planned and automated.
When a drip email is sent to your subscribers, it comes from a queued list of pre-written emails. A typical drip campaign might contain the following sequence: Form subscription > a welcome email > follow-up email > another follow-up email, and so on.
Drip campaigns allow you to segment your target audience according to different actions (buying, downloading information, abandoning shopping carts), which makes your messages more personalized. They aren’t overly “salesly” and automatically send your customers the information they need at each stage of the buying journey.
Construction companies wouldn’t send the same emails to new prospects and existing customers. Drip email campaigns take care of this. On a basic level, they build trust, result in fewer unsubscribes, and let you keep in touch with prospects and customers with minimal effort.
Comrade Digital Marketing Agency can help you with the above if you’re unsure how to go about it. Schedule a free consultation.
8. Monitor and Improve
When it comes to email marketing for construction companies, there are two things you need to monitor and improve: Your actual email campaigns and customer satisfaction.
Track Campaigns
Without access to accurate data on how your subscriber list is engaging with your construction email marketing campaigns, you will struggle to develop the perfect email marketing strategy that grows your client base.
Most CRM software used by professional marketers comes with baked-in analytics, and if not, is compatible with third-party software or plugins. Analytics software helps you monitor key metrics, including but not limited to:
- Open rates: The percentage of subscribers who open a specific email out of your total number of subscribers.
- Spam rates: The number of people who reported your email as spam out of the total number of email marketing messages you sent.
- Bounce rates: The percentage of email addresses your campaign could not be delivered to.
- Click-through rates: The number of subscribers who have clicked on at least one link in your email marketing campaign.
Get Customer Feedback
Email offers construction companies the chance to request direct feedback from customers regarding their products and services. You can ask yours to leave reviews or send them a link to a well-thought-out survey to gauge how well your company services their needs.
A lot of email marketing software allows you to create automated emails triggered by purchases, so customers can review specific items they’ve bought.
A good feedback request tells customers what they need to do, why their feedback is valuable, and what they need to do.
Keep the following in mind when building your customer feedback templates:
- Keep it brief and to the point: Long surveys with too many questions put customers off. Ensure your readers understand what you’re asking the first time around.
- Ask goal-oriented questions: For instance, if you want to gauge what they think of a new product, don’t ask them about an old one.
- Use open-ended questions: Give readers the option to submit open-ended feedback. They might mention something you haven’t thought about.
Looking to scale or increase your revenue? Email marketing is proven to grow your business
Comrade Can Help You Create Effective Email Marketing Campaigns
Beyond school, hardly anyone is taught how to hone their email skills, let alone marketing emails. Niceties like “we hope this finds you well” sound perfunctory and disingenuous, and amateur formatting or graphics don’t produce positive responses. In summary, you always want your emails to look professional (Hello, templates!) and for them to sound like you are trying to connect with readers, not impress.
It’s a lot of work, right?
Well, that’s where Comrade Digital Marketing shines. We’ll polish your copy, design your campaigns and make your emails click-worthy. As a full-service digital marketing company with construction industry clients, we know exactly how to get your email campaigns to generate leads and sales. Contact us now to learn how!
