Why email marketing is vital for tradesmen

As a tradesman, you might think that marketing (or email marketing for that matter) is not essential for you to grow your business. After all, we constantly hear, from tradespeople like yourself that word-of-mouth referrals and repeat customers are the backbone of your businesses. This is true, and will always be one of your primary sources of leads. Typically, if you’re good at your job, then referrals will naturally follow.

That being said, in today’s digital age, marketing has taken on a whole new level of importance and can help accelerate your growth and let you be pickier in the jobs you choose to work. Think about higher quality customers enquiring about larger jobs (or more stress-free projects).

One marketing strategy that every tradesman should consider is email marketing. 

It’s always overlooked. This is because tradespeople see email marketing as those Groupon or B&Q emails you always delete and never read (no offence B&Q).

Well, we’ll hopefully change your perception in this article and show you some tips of our marketing trade!

There’s a reason we call our email marketing service for tradesmen “Clever Email Marketing”.

Email marketing does allow you to reach out to your customers directly and stay top of mind. It is a super cheap way to gather prospect details (those who would have just left your website without enquiring), promote your services, build customer loyalty, and drive sales. Unlike channels like social media or other forms of digital marketing where you’re at the mercy of the platforms you are advertising on, email marketing gives you complete control over how you communicate and when allowing you to tailor emails to your specific audience segments.

In this blog, we are going to deep dive into tradesmen email marketing, why it’s crucial for your business and how you can use it to grow. 

We will cover the benefits of email marketing, what types of emails you should send, how to build your email list, and best practices for crafting clever and effective email campaigns. 

Whether you’re a plumber, electrician, home improvements expert, or any other type of tradesman, email marketing can help you reach new customers, stay connected with existing ones, and ultimately, grow your business.

What are the benefits of email marketing for tradespeople?

There are a host of different benefits of email marketing for tradesmen. Below, we’ve dug a little deeper into some of the key advantages that make email a must-have strategy for any tradesman looking to grow their business.

Capture prospects who wouldn’t have made contact

If someone is on your website, they’re usually looking for something. Whether it’s inspiration, social proof like case studies, examples of what services you provide, or to get a quote. 98% of all visitors will never make an enquiry.

They’re probably not ready to make a decision in their journey and that’s fine. But using email marketing, you can capture contact details by offering something in return, this lets you stay with them and top of mind throughout their buying journey. We’ll come on to this later in the article.

Stay Top of Mind

Email marketing allows you to maintain regular communication with your customers. Customer journeys tend to be quite lengthy, especially for expensive home improvement decisions.  By sending regular newsletters, you can showcase your expertise, customer work, and reviews, and offer valuable insights that help them as homeowners.

This will help to establish trust with your prospective customers.

Build Customer Loyalty

Using email can help you build customer loyalty. By segmenting your email list based on customer behaviour and preferences, you can create targeted campaigns that are tailored to their interests. This could be anything from post-home improvement maintenance and care or ways to improve their energy efficiency and save money, plus a ton of other content based on your industry and service offering.

You can run review campaigns, or referral campaigns too!

Increase Repeat Business

Increasing repeat business from your existing customers is key, and as discussed, doing a good job for them in the first place is key. But by sending targeted promotions and personalised content, you can encourage your customers to use your services again – going back to the staying top of mind section again.

For example, if you are a plumber, you can send a campaign to your existing customers reminding them to schedule their annual boiler inspection. You can also offer special promotions to your email list, such as a discount on their next service or a referral program that rewards them for bringing in new business.

Cost-Effective

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies available to tradesmen. For every £1 spent on email marketing, marketers make £36 through their email channels and campaigns – crazy right? There are no printing or postage costs associated with email marketing, and no pay-per-click, which means that it is much more affordable than traditional advertising methods.

A big plus here is that email marketing platforms tend to have affordable pricing plans that are designed to meet the needs of small businesses. If you’re looking for an email marketing tool, we can recommend one, just give us a shout.

Measure and Improve

Imagine being able to effectively track and measure the success of your campaigns, with ease, which will help you to improve your strategy over time. By monitoring your email open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, you can see which campaigns are performing well and which ones need improvement (or be binned!). This data can help you to refine your email marketing strategy and create more effective campaigns that are designed to meet the needs of your audience.

This is where we come in – we can help you build email marketing strategies that drive leads and build your list of prospective customers.

As you can see, email marketing has a ton of benefits, and is an essential tool for you, as a tradesman, looking to grow your business and establish a stronger relationship with your customers. 

By using email marketing to stay in touch with your audience, you can build loyalty, attract new customers, increase repeat business, and ultimately, grow your business over time.

What tools do I need for email marketing?

As we’ve seen, there are a ton of benefits, but what tools and tech are needed? Well luckily for you, not that much. Below, we’ve given a quick overview of what’s needed to get started and this is what we tell our clients, so you’re getting a little insight as to what we’d help you get set up if this seems like a little too much for you!

Email Service Provider (tool to send emails and store details)

The first tool that you will need is an email marketing service provider (ESP). An ESP is a software platform that allows you to manage your email marketing campaigns, contacts, segmentation, automation and more. You’ve probably heard of some of the popular ESPs for small businesses, these will include Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and Sendinblue.

Personally, we feel that these lack the full functionality needed to run super effective (clever) email marketing campaigns so we recommend using Get Response or Mailerlite. These platforms will help you to create and send emails, manage your email list, and track the success of your campaigns. Super simple.

Opt-In Forms

To grow your email list, you need to have opt-in forms on your website (need something better, click here) and social media pages – this is crucial. Opt-in forms allow your visitors to subscribe to your email list and receive updates from your business. You can create opt-in forms using your ESP, but we usually work with another third party like Get Site Control as they allow for better form management like testing variations and more form templates and formats.

Other third parties are available, you could use tools like OptinMonster, Sumo, or contact forms on your WordPress (like CF7) and plugins to create more advanced opt-in forms that push contact data into your email platform.

Analytics and Reporting

This is another tool and step that ends up being forgotten. But if you want to measure the success of your email campaigns, you need to track and analyse your email and sign-up metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, as well as conversion rates on your website (things like enquiries, brochure requests, call-back requests).

Your ESP should provide you with analytics and reporting tools that allow you to track your email performance over time and identify areas for improvement but you’ll also need to ensure you have Google Analytics (other analytics platforms are available) to track the real revenue-driving results like enquiries.

Overall, these are the three basic tools that are vital for tradesmen who want to create and manage effective email marketing campaigns. By using these tools, you can reach and communicate with your customers more effectively and drive more customers into your business. If some of this has gone over your head, we handle all of this for our customers and can run this whole process for you, just get in touch to discuss email marketing for tradesmen.

Email marketing ideas for tradesmen

Here are some email marketing campaign ideas that you as a tradesman can steal to help you engage with your customers, grow your email list, and/or make your email marketing more effective.

Opt-in Value Strategy

Are you tired of seeing the same old “Sign up for our newsletter” pitch on every website you visit? Yeah, potential customers who are visiting your website are feeling the same way.  Let’s face it, most people don’t want another email newsletter cluttering up their inboxes. I mean, who has time to read all of that stuff anyway?

But fear not, tradespeople, because there’s a better way. 

Instead of just asking people to sign up for your boring old newsletter (which they think it just going to be spam), why not offer them something that actually has value? I’m talking about a free resource. Here are a few examples of what value-led resources can be:

• Exclusive discount on your services(cost play)
• Guide on reducing household bills by £XXX
• Access to a pricing calculator
• Door or window builder (try before you buy play)
• Access to a brochure on their services
• Tools to help them get closer to a decision without a sales meeting
• Free security stickers for their home (beware of the dog, CCTV etc..)
• Free samples of your product or service

Anything to grab their attention, add value, and convince them that you’re worth their precious email address. The value bit is super important here. If you’re asking them for something personal, they need to feel like the value of what they’re receiving is greater than the effort and sacrifice of giving you their details.

Let’s be real, nobody wants to give up their email address for nothing. People need a good reason to hand over their contact information, and “signing up for our newsletter” just isn’t going to cut it anymore.

So use the above and shake things up a bit. Instead of being like every other boring website out there, let’s offer something unique and valuable to our potential subscribers. Let’s give them a reason to look forward to our emails instead of hitting the delete button before they even open them.

Learnings here. Don’t be that website that just asks people to sign up for a newsletter. Be the website that offers something useful, and valuable. This way, you’re on the right track to start building your list and developing new customers.

Segment your list

If you’re a tradesperson and you already have an email list of potential clients. Do you just send out a mass email to everyone on your list and hope for the best? I hope not, but this is usually the case. We have something to send, push it to the full list. We have an alternative.

Segmenting your email list is key to reaching the right customers with the right message. By segmenting your list into specific groups based on their interests, behaviours, location, and demographics, you can tailor your emails to each group and increase the likelihood of engagement and conversions. It’s unbelievable the performance difference in a targeting email campaign versus a mass send.

Let’s say you’re a landscaping company with a wide range of services, from large-scale landscaping to small communal area maintenance. You could segment your email list based on the type of property (garden size, house size/type), but also based on location. Someone living in a rural area will have different landscaping needs than someone living in an urban area. By segmenting based on location, your landscaping company can tailor their emails to each group and provide information and services that are relevant to them.

We can also segment on intent. Intent marketing is basically marketing a product or service based on a consumer’s intent to make a purchase decision. You can get their intent, when they sign-up, by asking them specific questions on your opt-in form (e.g. when is your boiler due for a service?), but also through the activity in your email newsletters (the customer keeps clicking on conservatory service and resource links). In my example above, you can see that a segment of customers is consistently engaging with conservatory elements in your emails, you can add rhythm to a sequence that promotes your conservatory service, with offers and social proof, helping them get closer to a decision and ultimately persuading them to make an enquiry.

Segmenting your email list allows you to personalise your emails and make them feel more personal and less like a mass marketing message – think about being more human. 

Yes, segmenting your email list is crucial for tradespeople who want to improve the quality and effectiveness of their email marketing campaigns – better segmentation equals more enquiries. It’s a tried and tested approach of ours.

So don’t just send out a mass email to everyone on your list and hope for the best. Segment your list and send targeted, personalised messages that will resonate with your subscribers and drive much better results I promise.

Get started with email marketing

Hopefully, you can see that email marketing is a key, essential tool for tradespeople who want to grow their business with real, intent-driven potential clients. By using the right strategies (some of those listed above), such as offering value-led opt-ins, segmenting your email list, and creating engaging email campaigns, you can establish a strong email list which will result in your attracting more leads and customers for your trade business.

We understand that not everyone has the time or expertise to execute a successful email marketing campaign. That’s where Tradepixels comes in. We offer a done-for-you email marketing service that takes care of everything from start to finish, so you can focus on what you do best – providing top-quality services to your clients.

With our service, you can rest assured that your email marketing campaigns will be expertly crafted to resonate with your target local audience (whether domestic or commercial) and drive real leads for your business. So why wait? Get in touch with us today and let us help you take your email marketing to the next level. Together, we can help you achieve your business goals and grow your trade business to new heights!