Three Ways To Kickstart Your Company's Email Marketing Campaigns

As a business leader in the home improvement industry, you know that success takes more than great building skills. To succeed in the long term, you need a big enough customer base. High-quality work and word of mouth are both important, but they aren’t enough on their own.

When it comes to marketing your home improvement business, there are all sorts of modalities to consider. Social media is a big one, and print ads — while expensive — can be highly effective when targeted well. For larger businesses, call centers may play a role.

But no matter your size or level of experience, email marketing is essential. Email drip campaigns, where readers receive an automated sequence of emails (one that can change depending on their actions, like clicking on a link or requesting more information) are vitally important. But, of course, to perform well, your email marketing campaigns must be designed and implemented well.

Challenges to Successful Email Marketing

Email marketing campaigns can run into a range of problems. Managing your email list can be time-consuming, and figuring out who to target (and how to do it) goes well beyond the skill set of most home improvement business owners. If your company isn’t large enough to hire a dedicated marketing team, getting drip campaigns right can seem overwhelming.

As effective as email is, open rates can be pretty low. And some businesses have been burned in the past. Because of a failed or mediocre campaign, they’ve concluded that email isn’t a worthwhile marketing strategy.

It’s also worth noting that businesses need the right analytics tools to make any sense of the data they get from their email campaigns. Without the right tools, it’s nearly impossible to know whether a drip campaign was successful.

3 Tips for a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

Now that you understand the challenges, let’s look at three factors that can inject results into your next drip campaign.

Understand and Segment Your Audience

First, put in the time to understand your audience. What sorts of people are in your email database? What can you do that they want? What problems might they be facing that you can solve? Don’t write emails that are interesting to you; write emails that will interest your audience. The goal is to send relevant and digestible information that your audience will want to read.

Second, you need to segment your audience. Here’s a simple truth: not everyone in your email database is the same. So if you’re sending them all the same email, you’re likely missing out. Do you have residential and commercial customers? Middle and upper class? English and Spanish speakers? Investors and landlords?

Each of these groups will respond differently to different messages. You want to have in place a CRM tool that allows you to easily segment and target your audience with messages relevant to them.

Nail the Subject

The best copy in the world doesn’t matter one bit if you can’t get that crucial click to open the email. And what gets that click? Usually, it’s the subject. Everyone does this with marketing emails: irrelevant or uninteresting subjects get ignored or deleted, simple as that.

Don’t Market Alone

If you have a dedicated marketing person or team, or if you’re doing it all yourself, don’t do it alone. Unevaluated email campaigns tend to be bad ones, and people working in isolation don’t often understand the complexities of every facet of the business. Whatever your business’s size, work across departments or job functions to create email campaigns that sizzle.