9 Effective Email Marketing Tips for Painting Contractors
Email can be one of the best ways to keep in touch with your customers or educate future ones.
The problem is, if you don’t have an email strategy, it’s a bit more difficult to do this correctly.
However, if you develop some very basic email marketing skills I’m about to show you, you can succeed in communicating better with your customers and maybe even getting more!
With that in mind, Here Are 9 Effective Email Marketing Tips for Painting Contractors
1. Build Your Subscriber List
First things first… you can’t judge how well your emails are doing if you only have 18 subscribers.
There are quite a few things you can do to build your subscriber list.
If you have a blog you can use this to encourage people to get more information on a regular basis by subscribing to your company email list.
Here’s an example of an opt-in form from Aspen Painting & Wallcovering:
2. Make Your Emails Personal
Generic emails from companies that don’t actually speak to the reader tend to receive a high unsubscribe rate.
If, on the other hand, you try to speak to the reader of the email in some way, you have a better chance of getting somewhere.
A lot of email programs such as MailChimp make it easy for you to insert the name of the person you are emailing.
In MailChimp use *|FNAME|* to insert the first name.
Here’s an example from Peek Brother’s Painting:
Think about the difference between an email that starts with “Dear Reader” versus one that starts with your name.
This chart shows the massive difference between emails that aren’t personal and emails that are.
3. Get Your Emails Looking As Clean As Possible
If your email has a bad design or looks like it was designed in the early ’90s, it’s entirely possible it’ll get quickly deleted.
Bad email design is just a matter of whether or not you decide to use an email program with templates
Here’s a tutorial on how to do better email newsletter design.
4. Make Sure You Give the Option to Unsubscribe
If the readers of your emails want to unsubscribe, it should be relatively easy to do so – they shouldn’t have to jump through hoops.
Ideally, unsubscribing should be just one click on an email with perhaps one more click to confirm or to collect the reason why.
Here is a good example of providing an easy way for the user to unsubscribe:
5. Mobile-Friendly Is A Must
Over half of all emails that are read today are opened on a phone or other portable smaller device like a tablet.
The way that your email looks on a desktop or laptop should not be the same as how it looks on a person’s phone.
Often when they do have the same look, a person will have to spend minutes moving the email around with their fingers and lose interest quickly.
A good email service such as MailChimp will allow you to see exactly how your email is going to look on a phone so you can fix things that don’t look good.
6. Include Interesting Links In Your Emails
You should make sure to include interesting links in your emails that give content to your readers.
It should be something that they can look forward to seeing every week.
This doesn’t have to be something that relates directly with what you do so long as it is interesting to your audience.
Here is an example of a few of the “interesting links of the week”…
7. Tips For Keeping Your Emails Out Of Spam
If your emails are getting sent to the Spam folder, they’re not getting read – so it’s important to make sure they don’t end up there.
There are ways to avoid your emails going to the spam folder, such as making sure to be honest in the subject line.
The physical location of your business should be clearly stated somewhere in your email.
Here’s a good video tutorial on keeping your email out of the spam folder:
8. Test and Retest Before Sending
You might think that you are ready to send an email after composing it but it’s important to test it first.
Testing your emails does a few things for you:
- it shows you how the email will look to the reader.
- It’s also a good opportunity for you to re-read your email to make sure that it flows well. (Read it out loud).
There is also the idea of A/B testing for email which means that you try two different ways of writing the same email and seeing which gets better results.
Here’s a video that explains A/B testing ideas for your email campaigns.
9. Track Your Data
There are different ways of tracking the data of the emails that you send ranging from…
The number of people that open your email to how many of those people actually click on the link in your email.
Mailchimp, for example, allows for in depth reports about the emails you send.
Quick Recap:
1. Ensure you have people reading your email in the first place by building your subscriber list
2. Don’t make your emails too generic, personalize them with a first name.
3. Ensure the best reader experience by using a clean email design.
4. If a user wants to unsubscribe, don’t make them jump through hoops in order to do so.
5. A large amount of email are read on mobile, make sure you preview all emails on mobile before sending it out.
6. Send out a weekly email of “interesting links” – this doesn’t have to relate to what you do but instead just a list of things that may appeal to your audience.
7. Make sure your emails are read by keeping your emails out of the spam folder (see video).
8. Ensure your emails look as good as possible by testing and retesting your emails.
9. Regularly review your campaign reports to find out who is reading what and clicking where.