Top 5 Email Marketing Tips for Roofers.

When you open your email inbox, what do you see?

Exclusive discounts on sandals? Reminders about that big dentist appointment next week? That email from your mother that was sent over a month ago with the subject line CAN WE VISIT THIS WEEKEND??? that you forgot to respond to?

Everyone’s email inbox is a collage of promotions, deals, transactions, schedules, important documents, and unresponded inquiries from family members. While you might disregard much, if not most, of what enters your email inbox, odds are once in a while, your eyes cross a subject line that simply cannot be ignored.

This tends to happen for most people shortly after they’ve entered a specific Google search, ranging from new basketball shoes to cheap flights to – you guessed it – “roofing contractor near me.”

In an industry as competitive as roofing, finding ways to connect with potential customers and stay in touch with previous clients is essential to distinguishing your brand and helping your roofing company stand out in the pack.

In the past few years, Email Marketing strategies have emerged as a primary component of digital marketing, allowing roofing businesses of all sizes to find more prospects, close on more leads, and remarket themselves to previous customers who need professional roofing services.

If email marketing sounds like an unnecessary investment for your roofing company, consider the following statistics:

• Businesses make an average of $42 for every $1 they spend on email marketing strategies.
• At least 81% of small businesses utilize email marketing as their primary source for customer acquisitions.
• The average email opening rate is over 21% – meaning over one in five people will open and read your email content.
• Emails with a personalized subject line have an open rate of over 50%.

These stats demonstrate email marketing’s significant advantages, particularly for generating new leads and maximizing your return on digital marketing investment.

To make sure your email marketing campaign is as successful as possible, check out these five essential email marketing tips to help your roofing company stay in touch with old customers and expand your brand to new ones!

Bulk Up Your Subscriber List

Before you start sending out emails left and right, you’ll need some email addresses to write to!

To build up a solid email subscriber list, you need to start asking for an email address from every customer you do business with (if you aren’t already).

Other tips to bulk up your email subscriber list:

• Feature an email signup form that’s significantly visible and accessible on your roofing website. The form should be on your home page, contact page, all blog articles, etc.
• Use social media to encourage your followers to subscribe to your emails.
• Provide specific incentives for visitors to sign up, such as exclusive promotional offers, discounts, or access to exclusive content on your website.
• Utilize email subscription pop-up forms that appear on your home page.

Taking the time to set up lead generation strategies for email addresses will make it easier for your roofing company to obtain and retain old and new customers alike, keeping in touch with them however often you please.

Provide Engaging, Personalized Content

Now that you’re building up your subscriber base, the key moving forward is providing emails your subscribers feel inclined to click on and read.

Though it might seem tempting to entice your subscribers with some feel-good, wholesome content just to get some clicks (Adorable puppies? Sneezing panda videos?), it’s best to stay relevant and generally stick to the roofing world.

The first step to providing engaging content to email subscribers is making it as personalized as possible. You can start by addressing every email personally, using the subscriber’s first name in either the subject line or the first line of the email address. (You can do so effortlessly via email automation services.)

Other ways to create more intriguing and engaging email content:

Enticing Subject Lines

Combine intrigue and information with your personalized subject lines, laying out what the email is specifically regarding without giving it all away.

Example: David, Could You Use 15% Off Your Next Roofing Inspection?

Relatable, Cordial Voice

Write your email content as if you were directly talking to the person. Be fun and friendly, but also be direct and to-the-point, and be sure to come across as a real person and a reputable roofing contractor.

Short But Sweet

A quick way to deter any subscribers from fully reading your email is bombarding them with paragraphs of wordy introductions or information.

Keep your emails short and sweet and always encourage the reader to contact you directly to learn more or compel them to schedule an appointment.

Stimulating Visuals

Nothing is more visually intriguing than eye-catching visuals that accompany your email message.

Coupon cards, infographics, on-site photographs – any images that can break up paragraphs will be more effective in engagement.

Cater to Their Needs

Knowing what the email recipient likely needs from you as a roofing contractor will boost engagement and provide more of an incentive for enlisting your services.

If you’ve done gutter work for them in the past, suggest a free gutter inspection that can hopefully lead to another roof-improvement project.

Putting the time and effort into producing creative, personalized, and enticing email content is what will make your Email Marketing efforts all the more difficult to ignore.

Intriguing Designs & Templates

The look, layout, and feel of your emails can have an enormous impact on your open rates. Your email designs and templates don’t have to be award-winning works of art, but if your subscribers click on an intriguing subject line offer only to see multiple paragraphs written in small, Comic Sans font, odds are you’re going to lose them upon first sight.

Your emails should be laid out in a natural, narrative-flowing manner, carefully balancing text with visuals while installing an overall story arch that concludes with a compelling call to action.

Some general do’s when it comes to email design and templates:

• Create a relatively balanced text-to-image ratio, generally around 60% text, 40% visuals.
• Your visuals and graphic design elements shouldn’t overstimulate the reader, only using minimal color schemes and patterns to complement your email, not distract from the content.
• Establish some content hierarchy with more pressing information or offers appearing first, then gradually compel and instruct them to take action the further down they read.
• Utilize headings and subheadings to help the reader navigate their way through the email.
• Your email should be easy to scan over, with the reader being able to distinguish what the email is about and how they can take action just by glancing over it.
• Be sure to optimize your emails for both desktop and mobile devices.

Remember, long blocks of text, several paragraphs, busy layouts, and overstimulating visuals are big no-nos when it comes to elegant email design and templates.

Email Automation & Contact Segmentation

Two words that will make your email marketing campaign go smoothly and successfully: segmentation and automation.

Let’s start with segmenting your email contact lists. Rather than just having one long list of all your email subscribers, it’s essential to break down your email subscribers into separate, distinct groups, which will allow you to provide specific, relevant email content to the right recipients.

Some ideal examples of how a roofing company can segment their email contact list:

• Recent and existing customers
• Residential and commercial customers or leads
• New and existing homeowners
• Geographic regions
• Roof repair vs. roof replacement recipients
• Single-person or family households
• Free quote inquiries
• Referrals list

Once you’ve been able to successfully separate and distinguish your email subscribers list, you can send them the content they prefer, ultimately doing wonders for your lead conversion rates.

You’ll also be able to set up an email automation system that will allow you to better manage, respond, and track your email click-through rates and engagement levels.

Email marketing automation tools will simplify your entire email marketing campaign, offering many advantages:

• Auto-response assistance
• Increase transaction potential and maximize targeting with relevant email content
• Landing page and email sequence builders
• Analytic reports and consumer behavior tracking
• Learn consumer purchasing habits and cycles
• Free up time for managerial and sales teams

Think of a professional email automation setup as an all-seeing, all-knowing system that will make your email marketing campaigns reach their full potential.

Test & Track

To determine what’s working within your email marketing strategy, you need to test your email designs and content and then track and assess the data and results of that testing.

The primary way to test your email marketing strategies is through A/B testing. For A/B testing, you split up segmented contact lists into two sections, sending each one a different style or template of essentially the same content (newsletter, promotion, offer, etc.) in order to distinguish which design or layout is more engaging.

Various design and content elements you can analyze through A/B testing include:

• What topics, promotional deals, and exclusive offers are most intriguing to customers.
• What images, videos, colors, and patterns have higher click through rates.
• What length, sizing, formatting, and fonts are most visually appealing.
• What links, contact forms, or call-to-action buttons have higher engagement rates.

Once you get a better understanding of what content and design elements are most successful with your email subscribers, you can track these analytical measures to continue improving your click-through rates and other KPIs.

Having the ability to access and assess measured results with your Email Marketing Campaigns provides your roofing company with a variety of tracking tools and resources:

• Unique opens
• Bounce and unopened rates
• Click-through and lead conversion rates
• Clicked links percentage
• Forwarding rates and social media shares
• Website traffic
• Growth and unsubscribe rates and more

With all of these resources at your disposal, you’ll be able to track your lead generation and conversion rate numbers in real time – all while evaluating how much ROI you’re receiving from your email marketing investments.

If you’re not utilizing proficient email marketing strategies to gain more leads and convert more sales, you can all but guarantee that your roofing industry competitors are getting a leg up on the prospects you’re missing out on.