7 Email Marketing Tips For Painting Contractors in 2020

Your customers are getting flooded with tons of emails everyday,

which is why it’s best to learn some basic best practices for email marketing.

Here are 7 email marketing tips for painting contractors in 2020:

1. Create A Targeted Marketing List

As a painting contractor, you probably have a number of specialties — you might spend more time painting kitchens cabinets, for example.

You also might be able to split up the people on your mailing list into groups based on things like demographics and even where they live.

You can use groups of people to send emails instead of sending the same email to everyone on your full email list.

Here is a video tutorial on how to use targeted marketing lists:

 

[Related: 7 Ways a Monthly Email Newsletter Will Benefit Your Painting Business & What to Include In It]

2. Welcome New Subscribers

The average open rate of a welcome email is 82%.

When someone signs up for your mailing list, the very first thing that you should do is to welcome them with open…digital…arms.

Of course it has become a standard practice to automatically send an email to new subscribers, but this usually has basic information.

It’s the sort of email that tells the new subscriber that they have successfully subscribed to your list.

However, if you really want to do your new subscribers a favor, you might want to really properly welcome them.

You can tell them about your business and then if you really want to get their attention, you can give them a special coupon with a discount off a new paint job.

With an offer like that one, they are more likely to feel like they are happy that they made the decision to join your email list and possibly could take advantage of the deal that you send.

3. Make A Schedule And Stick To It

As much as you might want to send out an email to your list whenever you have some news to share, it may end up being too much.

What might happen is that you might end up overwhelming them with too many emails, which will ultimately get them to click that unsubscribe button.

Instead of sending emails with no sense of schedule, make a schedule first and plan when you will send your emails.

It’s also a good idea to plan out the content of your emails in advance so that you’re not just making it up as you go along the day you are to send the email.

As you are thinking about the schedule, you should consider the fact that not every day of the week is good for sending emails.

The best day of the week to send an email is Tuesday, and if you send an email on a Friday or a Saturday your email might get lost in a sea of other emails.

4. Create The Best Subject Lines

When your subscribers get your emails, the first thing they will see is the subject line.

A good subject line is the thing that makes the difference between your subscriber noticing and then opening your email and them not seeing it… and then deleting it.

The first thing you want to do with your subject line is to get the attention of the person reading over the subject lines.

You’re going to want to make sure that the subject is relevant to the person reading it and make them want to read the email.

As soon as you can in the subject line, you will want to get to the point of why you are sending the email, and you will want to do that in as few words as possible.

By working on a better subject line, you will greatly increase the fact that your email actually gets read.

5. Try Different Email Layouts (Until One Works!)

The way that your email looks is as important in some cases — people on your subscriber list that open up your emails will not want to spend too much time doing so if they are hard to read.

The different things you want to focus on when you are designing your emails is to first make sure that your email is not just a bunch of text.

Naturally, you also don’t want to have too many images because that would make the emails take too long to load, which will get people not interested in reading the email.

Having a really good email layout is a sure way to get people to read all the way through your emails and more likely to go for one of your offers when you put them out there.

6. Make Sure Your Emails Are Mobile Friendly

The chances are that you are reading this blog on your phone, and in all likelihood you like most people regularly read your emails on your phone rather than a laptop or desktop computer.

It’s therefore quite important that your emails look good on a phone just as they would on a computer.

The good thing to know is that making your emails mobile friendly is no longer as hard as it used to be, depending on who you use for sending emails.

Just about every company that helps you send out emails to lists of people will have helpful guides to making sure your emails look good on a phone.

Here’s a short and simple guide to being sure your emails are mobile friendly if you use MailChimp:

 

7. Use A Good Sender Name

In addition to the subject line, people looking to open your e-mails will look to the sender name to see if they recognize it at all.

That being the case, using just a generic first name (even if it’s your own name that you know well) may not be the best idea.

You are much more likely to get some sort of recognition from the people who are subscribed to your emails if you instead put your company name, as subscribers will recognize it.

If you feel like you need to make it more personal and add a name as well, you can modify it by putting ‘name from company name’ so people will still understand how they know you.

So while people might not recognize your email if they see that it was sent by Edgar, they are more likely to recognize it if they see it was sent from Edgar from Marvelous Painters.

Quick Recap:

1. To make sure that you’re not sending the same generic email to your whole email list, create a targeted marketing list and send specific emails related to the different segments.

2. Welcome emails receive an 82% open rate. When you receive a new subscriber, send them a welcome email, you’ll be surprised how big of an impact this makes.

3. To ensure that your subscribers don’t feel like they’re overwhelmed hearing from you, make an email campaign schedule and stick to it.

4. To get people to open your emails and not skip over or delete them, create the best subject lines for your emails. (see blog)

5. Keep your subscribers reading your email by trying different email layouts, until you find one that works!

6. Since so many people read their email on their phone, make sure your emails are mobile friendly.

7. Use a good sender name so that people will know who is sending them emails and will be more likely to open them.