If you’re a construction company and email marketing isn’t part of your toolbelt, it’s time to start! Email marketing is cost-effective, boasts an impressive ROI, and nurtures your customers and potential customers.
Learn the ins and outs of email marketing in this guide designed for construction companies. We’ll share best practices for email marketing to your audience, examples of emails from construction companies, and suggested email templates.
Construction companies are mainly small businesses. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, 81.6 percent of construction companies employ fewer than ten people. Smaller companies often have fewer resources and a limited budget to spend on marketing, making low-cost marketing options important.
Compared to traditional marketing methods like print advertising or television commercials, email marketing offers a more affordable way to reach a large audience.
Email marketing has one of the highest ROI among marketing channels $36-$45 per dollar spent, so you know the money you spend in email marketing will be worth the investment.
Construction companies are talking to a lot of different people—clients, subcontractors, partners, etc. Email marketing allows construction companies to segment their audience based on various criteria so that your partner can receive different communications than your clients. This enables you to send highly targeted messages that resonate with specific customer segments.
Email marketing can be a powerful tool for generating leads. By providing valuable content, building relationships, and offering incentives, construction companies can attract potential customers and encourage them to inquire about their services.
Maintaining relationships with existing customers is just as important (if not more important) as fostering relationships with new contacts. By sending regular updates, providing valuable resources, and offering exclusive deals, construction companies can keep their brand top of mind and encourage repeat business.
Before you can send marketing emails, you need a list of your customers and potential customers.
Signup form: Try adding a signup form to your website to sign up for marketing communications. As part of your contact form, you could also add a check box to receive marketing emails. This way anyone who requests information about your services can opt into your marketing emails.
Opt-ins: To avoid having your email sent to spam, it’s best practice to have your contacts opt into your email marketing program. Otherwise, your contacts may be frustrated that you automatically signed them up. If your emails get flagged as spam, it ultimately hurts your email program by affecting your email deliverability rate and your sender reputation.
Once you have a list of contacts, it’s time to segment that list into a variety of groups.
Segment your list: Segmentation allows you to group your contacts based on factors like location, project type, or relationship to your organization. Segmentation ensures that you’re sharing the right information with the right group of people.
Personalize content: Create emails that resonate with specific segments by tailoring the content to their unique needs and interests. If you want to take it a step further, consider hyper-personalizing the content for added engagement.
Your email content will depend on the type of email you’d like to send. Are you looking to send promotional emails, event invites, or newsletters? A healthy email program has a mix of email content.
Subject lines, preview text, and CTAs: The anatomy of an email includes a number of different components:
Subject lines are the text in your inbox highlighting what the email is about. You want to keep these short and sweet (7 words max!).
Preview text is what directly follows the subject line and gives the reader more details about the email.
Call-to-actions (CTAs) are the actions you want users to take once they’ve clicked on the email. Do you want them to
Educational content: Consider creating a monthly newsletter to share educational content. If one of your audience segments is homeowners, you can share seasonal tips on how to best care for their home. For partners, consider sharing interesting data and reports that speak to trends in the industry.
Highlight case studies: Share success stories to demonstrate your capabilities. Customer stories, quotes, and reviews can help establish your company as an expert. Use these in your email marketing as social proof to showcase your expertise and credibility to potential customers.
The visuals of an email matter just as much as the copy. When in doubt, turn to email marketing templates to help you design your emails.
Use high-quality images: If you’re in the business of home building or remodeling, then share your successes through images. Before and after images can be a powerful way of sharing your business’ capabilities without diving into the nitty-gritty details.
Create infographics: Perhaps your business is on the more technical side, such as HVAC installation, home inspection, or a structural engineer. You may not have as beautiful of photos to share with your email contacts. In this case, infographics simplifying some of the complex concepts of your business can help educate and engage your user base.
Design for mobile: Most of us read our email, especially our personal email accounts, on our phone just as often as desktop. For that reason, when you test your email before sending it, check your mobile device to see how it appears on the smaller screen size.
The final step before you schedule or send your email is testing it. This allows you to double-check that everything is displaying correctly across devices and inboxes.
Check links: This is an easy one, but so easily skipped! Send a test email to your inbox and confirm that all of the links direct to the right location.
Check multiple device types: Look at how your email displays across devices, including desktop, mobile, and tablet.
Check different email clients: Emails show up differently in Gmail than Outlook or Apple. It’s important to test how your email looks in different inboxes to make sure everything is rendering correctly.
To get your wheels turning, here are a couple of examples of construction marketing emails. As I was perusing construction websites, there aren’t all that many that have email newsletters or marketing emails. This means more opportunity for you to use email marketing to get in front of potential customers.
WIN Home Inspection shares monthly newsletters with homeowners to help them keep their homes in tip-top shape. These regular emails help keep WIN top-of-mind.
Even if I do not require home inspection services for the next few years, I’ll keep the newsletter because they’re experts in the space and share useful information. This makes me more likely to remember and recommend WIN to friends going through the home-buying process.
The below is not the most inspiring email visually, but the company is following excellent best practices. By making me confirm my subscription before subscribing me to their newsletter, the company ensures that I want their communications.
There aren’t a ton of pre-designed email templates for construction companies, but there are a number of templates for small businesses. Take the templates and design them to be your own by adding your brand colors, fonts, and logo.
While this template uses a t-shirt company as an example, the template can be easily redesigned for a construction company. Share an event your company is hosting or completely repurpose the template to be promotional in nature. Twilio SendGrid’s drag & drop editor makes it easy to reconfigure templates and design emails for your brand.
This email newsletter template may be designed with a workout company in mind, but its two-column layout with multiple blocks makes it a great contender for any newsletter.
A construction business could include tips in each text block, showcase different projects, or link out to articles and resources.
To support your email marketing journey, you’ll need a solution that makes it easy to manage your contact list, build emails, and measure performance. Fortunately, we have just the platform.
Twilio SendGrid offers responsive templates, drag & drop tools, approachable email automation solutions, and so much more.
