Email Marketing for Construction: How to Generate High Quality Leads

An airtight email marketing strategy is one way that construction companies can stay ahead in today’s competitive, digital market. Email marketing is a powerful tool for the construction industry because it enables construction businesses to foster client relationships, generate quality leads and increase brand awareness at a relatively low cost. No other digital marketing tool available gets your construction company directly in front of prospects and ideal clients in some of the most valuable internet real estate available: their email inbox.

The purpose of this blog is to equip you and your construction company’s email marketing team or manager to create an effective email marketing strategy for your construction business.

This blog delves into the numerous benefits of email marketing for construction firms and highlights key principles and themes to keep in mind when creating an email campaign, offers digital marketing agency selection tips and showcases real-world success stories to illustrate email marketing’s effectiveness and place within the construction industry.

Unlike paid advertising, social media marketing or local search marketing, email marketing serves your construction company directly to prospects and ideal clients. Getting inside your target audience’s email inbox is invaluable digital real estate and can offer your construction business a significant ROI. 

Main benefits:

Email marketing allows construction companies to engage with clients effectively by providing updates on projects, sharing industry insights and showcasing completed works. You can also send certain emails that invite replies so that your marketing team can read and review actual responses and feedback from your construction business’s contacts.

With email campaign tracking, your construction company’s marketing team will be able to see how many contacts opened your email and clicked through to convert. They will also be able to tell how many unopens, unsubscribes and spam-lands your emails generate.

All of this data offers valuable information and insight to your construction company’s marketing team about your business’s ideal customer and how you can better serve them. Tweaking subject lines, email content and ensuring email subscription consent are all ways to elevate your construction company’s brand and perceived value among your target audience.

Through targeted email campaigns, construction businesses can nurture leads, convert prospects into clients and drive sales.

Email campaigns can be created in flows (or automations) that certain contacts get segmented into. Each of these automations has a specific goal they want the contacts to reach and a sales funnel they are working to move the contacts through.

By clearly stating the value a contact receives when they subscribe to an email automation, you are increasing the lead’s quality and conversion probability. By adding continuous value  to contacts who expressed interest when they subscribed to an email automation, your construction company will remain top-of-mind and experience high conversion rates.

Compared to traditional advertising methods, email marketing offers a cost-effective solution for reaching a wider audience, saving resources while yielding significant returns on investment.

Depending on the size of your email list, there are many free email marketing platforms available. However, once your business begins to scale, it will be necessary to invest in a quality platform and an experienced email marketing team or manager.

Consistent email communication builds brand recognition, reinforces credibility and helps your construction company stay top-of-mind among potential clients.

Ensure that your construction company’s branding is notable throughout individual emails and within email automations. Branding can be communicated through design elements, copy and messaging, calls-to-action and any special offerings within the emails.

When creating a successful email marketing campaign for your construction company, there are a few best practices to keep in mind.

1. Customization. Tailoring emails to specific client interests and needs increases engagement. For instance, create a segmented email automation that provides project updates, relevant industry news or personalized offers based on previous interactions.
2. Audience Segmentation. Dividing the contact list into specific segments allows for targeted communication. For example, categorize contacts based on project type they are interested in or working on with your business, their location or their overall engagement level. Send specialized content to each group to keep interest and offer continuous value.
3. Implement Drip Campaigns. Drip campaigns are scheduled, automated emails sent at specific intervals to nurture leads throughout the sales funnel.
4. Use Automations. Streamline email send processes and communication through automated triggers. You can set up automated emails to trigger when a contact takes a specific action on your construction company’s website like make a purchase, fill out a contact form or download an infographic.
5. Personalization. Customizing content to resonate with individual recipients. Include personalization tokens like the contact’s first name, previous purchases or abandoned cart items.
6. CRM Integration. Utilize a customer relationship management (CRM) system for data that can help create more personalized and effective campaigns.

If you choose to outsource your construction company’s email marketing, it’s important to choose and hire an agency that will act as a true business partner. Here are a few things to look for when choosing an email marketing agency:

• Construction industry expertise and experience.
• A strong portfolio full of success stories related to construction email marketing.
• An email marketing approach with segmentation, personalization and automation that fits with your construction company’s goals.
• Their understanding of compliance and legal regulations related to email marketing.
• How easy they are to get a hold of to make strategy changes, pay bills or access campaign data. 
• Their rate to make sure your construction company’s marketing budget matches.
• Their transparency and policy with data sharing; both with your business and if they share with any third parties.
• If they have contracts or month-to-month business relationships and what breaking a contract entails if necessary.

Vetting an email marketing agency or manager with this list will give you a good idea of the value your construction company will get from the agency and what it will be like to work with the agency or manager.

Testing is a vital component of any successful email marketing campaign. Establish a feedback loop early on in your email marketing strategy so that your construction company’s marketing team can make adjustments in real time and learn more about your business’s ideal customer.

A/B testing is a universal method of testing in the digital marketing field. It involves isolating and changing one variable of an email or email campaign, sending the original email and the altered email to similar contacts and evaluating the response.

Common variables to test within emails are subject lines, personalization tokens, calls-to-action, send times, design elements and email formatting. When conducting an A|B test, it’s important to alter one variable at a time to control for any lurking variables that could be responsible for the different responses.

In addition to routine A|B testing, it’s important to keep an eye out for other technical factors that could cause high bounce rates or spam-lands.

• Make sure that your email campaigns are formatting correctly for desktop and mobile.
• Click through each link inside an email to ensure they all work and send the contact to the appropriate web page.
• Check that personalization tokens pull the correct data from your construction company’s CRM.
• Respect all unsubscribe requests and eliminate that contact from unsubscribed automations.

With these routine tests, your construction company’s email marketing team will be able to perfect email marketing automations and provide valuable insights into your contacts’ online behavior, preferences and engagement with your business.

Consider a construction company that formerly operated without an email marketing strategy. In order to increase quality leads and conversion rates, the business implemented a drip email campaign targeting local prospects interested in residential remodeling. In just a few weeks time, the construction company experienced an influx of quality inquiries and a rise in bookings.

A construction company recently added a commercial development branch to their business offerings. To get the word out, the construction company’s email marketing team created a personalized email automation targeting past clients who are involved in both the residential and commercial sector of construction and development. This email campaign was able to leverage the construction company’s current customer base and reap more business and revenue through advertising their new commercial arm.

Whatever your construction company’s goals are, email marketing can help you achieve them.

Email marketing is a versatile tool for construction companies to connect with their audience, drive conversions and establish long-term relationships. By implementing the principles outlined in this blog and continuously testing campaign effectiveness, your construction business can leverage the potential of email marketing to propel its growth in the competitive construction industry.

Venveo knows the construction industry inside and out and we are proud to offer a high ROI email marketing service. Contact us to learn more about our proven track record of helping construction companies scale with email marketing and how we can help your business.