Did you know email marketing for roofers is a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media marketing—nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined? That’s because over 90% of people in the USA use their emails every day.
Email marketing is a type of direct, permission-based marketing that uses personalized emails to educate your email subscriber list about your products or services in an effort to get them to convert into regular customers.
It’s a proven method for increasing customer acquisition, retention, and engagement, despite the proliferation of new marketing channels. As an essential tool to add to your marketing arsenal—regardless of what type or size of construction business you own—it’s important you know how to use it to boost sales.
This brief primer discusses why email marketing is so powerful and explains how to craft an engaging email strategy for your roofing company.
Is Email Marketing Worth the Investment for a Roofing Business?
Let’s talk numbers. After all, any marketing investment you make should have a good ROI. In order to fully engage your customers in the sales funnel, you just should use strategies such as social media marketing and search engine optimization (including SEO analysis and keyword research). Using them will allow you to stay ahead of your competitors, attracting the right audience and increasing sales.
Benefits of Email Marketing Efforts
McKinsey estimates email conversion rates to purchase are at least three times as high as social media conversion rates, with average order values estimated to be 17% higher than social media.
Email can have an ROI as high as 400%.
And if the numbers don’t convince you, there are other benefits of email marketing, such as the ability to send targeted and personalized messages to customers, nurture leads, build customer relationships, and increase brand awareness—all at a relatively low cost.
If you want all of these benefits, you should find an email marketing agency with email experts who treat every email as an opportunity to get creative and help your brand stand out. However, if you want to try your hand at email marketing, don’t think you won’t succeed. Even if you’re not an email marketing expert, you can create a really successful email campaign that delivers results.
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How to Start a Roofing Email Marketing Campaign?
So, does one just clobber some promotional material together and send off a couple of cold emails to new prospects and whichever existing client’s emails you can find? No, not exactly.
Create an Email Base
One of the primary KRAs for any email marketing consultant is list building and segmentation. However, creating an email list from scratch is not without its challenges. This is where lead capture forms come in. These forms ask website visitors to share their contact information in exchange for something of value (lead magnet), like a discount or guidebook, immediately converting them into leads.
You can find many email templates online that don’t require coding knowledge to create the perfect lead capture assets. Another method is to create email subscription opportunities on your website.
The idea behind roofing email marketing is to deliver the right content to the right recipient, so be sure to collect more than just their contact details. Demographic data, occupation, and lifestyle preference data help when it comes to the next step: target audience segmentation.
Comrade Digital Marketing Agency can help you with the above if you’re unsure how to go about it. Schedule a free consultation.
Segment Email Addresses
Email segmentation is a targeting technique whereby you divide your subscriber list into smaller groups based on a set of characteristics you choose. In order to have effective list segmentation, many clients turn to email marketing consultants who specialize in this area. These email marketing specialists often explore a wide range of topics and tools to provide the best possible email marketing services.
For example, segmentation can be based on characteristics such as buyer personas, part purchases, or geographic location.
Benefits of Segmentation
The benefit of segmentation is personalization. Sending potential customers emails they want to read leads to improved brand affinity, customer lifetime value (CLV), and brand reputation.
You can make your email campaign management easier by separating your email list based on factors such as:
- Demographics: age, gender, location, profession.
- Behavior: purchase history, and browsing patterns.
- Psychographics: interests, values, and beliefs.
Be Concise and Clear
Concise email writing ensures communication with customers is specific, thoughtful, and useful. It’s not just about trimming down the copy; it’s about finding the right words. Data suggest emails between 50 and 125 words have a response rate of about 50%. So, when in doubt, keep your emails under 200 words.
To make it easier for yourself and potential new customers, limit each email to one topic. Every email should have a specific subject line that relates to the content to help recipients quickly grasp what your email is about. And don’t forget about visual appeal. They draw customers in and persuade them to read what you have to say.
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Include Clear Call-to-Actions
Without a proper call to action (CTA), most of your roofing email marketing efforts won’t get any response. Even if you have a strong subject line and a personalized offer, your roofing leads won’t act if you don’t tell them what to do next.
Examples of a strong call-to-action include, “buy now,” “read our story,” and “find out more.” As you can see, they contain verbs and encourage people to act. Your roofing business emails will obviously have different CTAs, depending on campaign objectives.
In the USA, we tend to read from top to bottom and left to right, which creates logical places for call-to-action buttons: buttons towards the bottom before the fold, or to the right of the content outperform buttons in other placements.
Use Automated Email Software
Mailchimp, HubSpot, Constant Contact, and Active Campaign are among the best email automation tools. Unlike manual email campaigns, automated ones run in the background freeing up time for you to focus on other important roofing contractor concerns.
With automation software, you can send personalized emails to every subscriber and set up an email marketing campaign that drip-feeds a series of emails to your subscribers’ inboxes, carefully orchestrated to get them to convert.
Email marketing software makes it easy to automate requests for customer feedback, send exclusive offers to high-spending customers, and trigger re-engagement campaigns if your subscribers are waning. Most also come with built-in analytics to track lead generation and general progress. In order to get more details, many email marketing experts can guide you through the entire process of using the various pieces of software required to conduct A/B testing and gather audience information.
How Can You Improve Roofing Email Marketing Campaigns
These practical, proven email marketing ideas will take your email marketing efforts to the next level and produce a higher ROI.
Be Personal
From personalized subject lines to offers, sending more personalized emails is the easiest way to capture potential customers’ attention. A study by Harris Interactive found over 80% of people who received personalized emails from companies would likely purchase from them again.
The point of adding a personal touch to emails sent to qualified leads is to make recipients feel important and valued. When done correctly, existing and potential customers will view your business as a reputable roofing contractor and immediately become more loyal. Small changes like addressing recipients by name can have a major impact on your total revenue.
Add Visual Elements
79% of consumers scan rather than read emails. Readers respond more quickly to images and other visual elements compared to text. Therefore, images lead to better retention than text, even if users only see them for a few seconds. And the truth is before your email recipients even read your email; they’ll register what it looks like.
Experimenting with dynamic GIFs, product images, infographics, videos, and visual branding supplements your marketing messages. Sending plain text lacks visual impact. Email is another way to showcase your roofing company in the best way possible, and compelling visual content is the way to do it.
Don’t underestimate the power of visuals in digital marketing success! Dive into our article to understand how graphic design impacts your online brand identity.
Focus on What Your Customers Need
The golden rule of digital marketing and, therefore, marketing emails is to focus on your customers, not yourself. Every email campaign you create should include what sets your roofing company apart from its competitors, but importantly, address how your roofing services solve your customer’s pain points.
Too much hard selling leaves little room to build rapport with a potential customer. You want to use email marketing to foster meaningful relationships with your email subscribers. Always offer valuable insights that speak to your customers’ concerns, and then you can pivot to a subtle sales pitch.
Avoid Spam Filters
Some roofing companies’ emails go to spam due to sophisticated filtering processes, or because they practice sketchy digital marketing tactics. If you don’t want your roofing emails to end up in spam folders, you much follow the CAN-SPAM act that sets the following rules for commercial email marketing campaigns:
- Don’t use false or misleading subject lines.
- Identify the message as marketing material.
- Tell recipients how to opt-out of receiving future emails from you. Usually, an unsubscribe link will do.
- Honor opt-out requests promptly.
- Use permission-based marketing, i.e., only send roofing email marketing content to people who have opted-in.
- Lastly, make sure your email content doesn’t look like spam.
Track and Adapt
Monitoring and interpreting your roofing industry emails helps you deliver the most engaging email marketing content. Most marketing automation software provides analytics on open and click-through rates, and sometimes even details on who clicked on what link.
When you start to get a clearer picture of what potential and current customers enjoy engaging with, you can better optimize your email marketing strategies. For example, you might find one subject line performs better than another, or the positioning of your call-to-action button wasn’t in the ideal place and needs to change.
Open rate, click rate, bounce rates, conversion rate, unsubscribes, device statistics, and spam score are the most important metrics to track. However, the real challenge is understanding what the data means. For example, if a Millennial demographic is more likely to open emails on mobile devices, your email campaigns should be designed with this in mind.
Hand Over Your Email Marketing Over to the Experts
There is a simpler way to ace roofer email marketing—let an experienced email marketer take care of your email marketing strategy. Whether you’re struggling for time or need better results, we can deliver a high ROI and help you focus on things that matter.
Comrade Digital Marketing follows a flexible and results-driven approach that produces an optimal mix of engaging email content and profitable results for roofing contractors. We’re also a full-service digital marketing company, so we can assist with all your digital marketing needs. Contact us to find out how we can help your roofing company get new leads with email marketing.
