4 Email Tips For Home Contractors
Today we’re going to talk about email marketing. Email is such a huge part of our strategy, not only at Market With Mario but with our clients as well.
Think about it, everyone checks their email every day, multiple times a day. It’s a great way to stay in touch with both your current customers and your prospective customers! I’m going to go over four tips that’ will help you with your email marketing strategy.
1. Build your list:
It starts with the list. You have to build your list. First of all, you want to make sure you have some kind of a contact form on your website, where someone can enter their email address, at the very least. Sometimes you can set it up to where you have they give you their first name, last name, maybe some other information, and their email address. But at the very minimum, each person who comes to your website should be able to enter in their email address. If you’re at some kind of trade show, or some kind of marketing event, or live event, have an iPad with you, so you can enter email addresses on the go.
Obviously, you want these people to want to be on your list! I cannot stand it when someone just adds me to their email list without me wanting them to. Always make sure you give them the selfish reasons why they should give you their email—point out what’s in it for them. You know, “Subscribe to our list for tips, sales, discounts, etc.” Give them a reason for them to want to subscribe!
If you have a brick and mortar building, you can have a form out in the waiting area, where customers can write their email address. However you do it, you always want to be proactively capturing email addresses.
2. Be consistent:
When you’re emailing your list, be consistent. You don’t want to email every day, and then suddenly disappear for months. You don’t want to email sporadically.
You have to think about your industry too. If you’re a roofing company, do people really need an email from you every single day? Probably not! But if you’re a restaurant, it may make
sense to send out your daily special. So whatever you do, whether you email once a month or once a week, be consistent, and on a schedule that makes sense! That way people know they can look forward to your emails, and they know they can count on that content.
3. Send from a real person:
Make sure that your email comes from a real person. What I mean by that is you don’t want your emails to come from an info@ account, or sales@, or something generic like that. People are more likely to open your email if it comes from a person. When you get an email from our list it comes from mario@marketwithmario.com. For our clients, we typically put it in one of the owner’s names. That makes it seem more personal, and you are going to get a much better open rate if you include a name.
4. Segment your list:
This might be the most important tip. As you start to get subscribers, you want to start to segment your list. There are different mail services, such as Constant Contact, and MailChimp (we actually use Mail Chimp) which will allow you to segment your audience, or split them up into categories.
For instance, we have a “potential clients” audience and a “current customer” audience. I would not send the same email to all of those people, because it may not make sense to all of them. I may want to send something to my current clients that may not make sense to my prospective clients.
Another example: We have a client who is an occupational therapist with two different clinics, one in Houston and one in Allen. It doesn’t make much sense for the Allen people to get emails about an event in Houston, and vice-versa.
You can segment based on location like that, or by prospective/current, or you can create your own kind of segmentation. Just remember, email marketing (and marketing in general) is about getting the right message in front of the right person! If you send out a particular subject to too broad an audience, it may not resonate with all of them.
If you need help with these types of things, that’s our specialty, that’s what we do! Online marketing is our thing! So if you do need help with setting up some email campaigns, let us know!
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