Why your Painting Business Needs Email Marketing

I get it, as a painting contractor email marketing is the last thing on your mind.

But did you know that email marketing has the highest ROI of all digital marketing mediums? With an average ROI of 42:1 (that’s 4200%) there is no reason your painting business shouldn’t be investing time into this marketing strategy.
(Source: Litmus)

In this article, I’m going to review the benefits of outbound email marketing, what kind of results you should expect as a painting business owner, and the steps you need to take to set up your first email marketing campaign.

First, let’s start with a simple question…

The two primary methods contractors use to get clients are inbound and outbound marketing. Inbound marketing refers to advertising and content marketing, anything that gets customers coming to you. Outbound marketing is any method of proactively reaching out to prospects, such as email marketing and cold calling.

Inbound marketing has its place, but it can be time-consuming and expensive. In comparison, outbound marketing is less sexy, but the return on investment can be huge.

Why email marketing?

Like a phone number, it’s a safe assumption that most everyone who will engage you for business has an email address. The benefit of email marketing is it’s less invasive than phone calls or text messages, it’s easy to set up, and did I mention it’s extremely profitable?

Let’s talk numbers.

On average we see a 2% conversion rate (closed jobs) for email marketing campaigns we run for other painting contractors. For best results, we recommend a mailing list of at least 100 contacts.

Here’s what that looks like in the real world:

Let’s say your primary lead source is a contact form on your website, and you receive around 5o submissions a month. In just two short months you have built a sustainable mailing list.

Consider this — most email marketing providers are free for the first 1000 monthly emails/contacts. That’s A LOT of emails/contacts for most contractors. So, to get started you’re just looking at a time investment, a few hours at most.

Results will depend on the quality of your email list. For instance, if you acquired 100 emails through your website they are more likely to convert compared to leads obtained using third-party services, which we’ll dive into next.

So after investing a few hours of your time you could have a sustainable marketing list that generates another 1-2 jobs a month.

Where do you start?

Before you can start sending emails, you need to build a mailing list. We recommend using MailChimp for its easy-to-use interface and at the time of writing this article, they have a free plan that allows you to send 10,000 emails/month.

Most painting contractors we engage do not have a mailing list. This makes sense given that email marketing is an underutilized channel in the painting industry. Fortunately capturing emails is easy, but it can take time.

Let’s review the two primary methods of capturing new contacts:

First-party contacts

Any contacts you capture yourself are considered a first-party contact. These are the best leads as they have established buyer intent by providing their contact information, they are familiar with your business, and they are exclusive to you.

The best way to obtain these leads is by utilizing the tools at your disposal — your website.

MailChimp makes this easy. Simply create a contact form on their platform and embed on your website. The contact form will function as any other contact form would, but it will automatically add contacts to your mailing list.

Third-party contacts

While we recommend against it, you can use data aggregators to quickly build a relevant mailing list. This option expedites the process, but you’re purchasing leads that others in your industry have likely tapped into as well. Also, these contacts are cold, they’re completely unaware of your business so you can expect conversion rates to be lower.

For residential leads, we have found success with Leads Please. We simply target new homeowners and define our relevant demographics and typically for under $100 we can have a new list of 250+ qualified contacts, which is more than enough to get started on a new email campaign!

For commercial leads we recommend Coldlytics. They have extremely targeted lists, fast turnaround times, and they even verify email addresses before delivery.

Find an email template that fits your logo and color scheme. For best results, keep it simple.

Every template is made up of a header, body, and footer. The header and footer can remain the same across all of the emails you send. So after your template is customized you’re only responsible for adding a few lines of content to the body to click send!

For best results, we recommend starting with two email campaigns: one for leads/prospects, and one for past customers.

This is critical for customizing your messaging. The emails you send need to be as personalized as possible, and in many cases, you may only have an email address to work with. So how do you personalize an email without knowing the recipient’s first name? Segmentation.

Segmenting your contacts into two buckets allows you to speak to your audience in a way that will encourage opens and clicks.

Bucket #1: Leads and prospects

This one is obvious, simply create a campaign that triggers each month with a promotion or incentive. Tailor your promotions to the time of year or industry trends. Other examples include:

Bucket #2: Past customers

Customers you have already served will likely buy from you again, but more importantly, they serve as a great referral source. We found results in offering a referral incentive, either a monetary dollar amount or a discount on future services for every closed job they send. Other examples include:

Email warmup is a practice of sending emails slowly at first to ensure they hit your recipient’s inbox and not their SPAM folder. There are several factors that contribute to inbox placement, but just a few play a significant role.

If you’re starting from scratch simply start sending to your mailing list immediately, even if it’s just to one or two recipients.

If you have a large, established mailing list you will need to use a third-party email warmup service first. We like Warmbox for its simple interface and its ability to integrate with several email service providers.

There are several schools of thought when it comes to the best time of day or the best day of the week to send emails for optimal engagement.

For instance, you wouldn’t want to send emails on a Morning morning as this is the busiest day of the week for most. The same applies to Friday afternoons, your audience is likely occupied and your business is the last thing on their mind.

For best results send mid-week on Wednesday or Thursday first thing in the morning.

There is no point in marketing if you’re not going to measure the results. Nearly every email service provider records data and measures the results of your email campaigns, use this data!

You measure the success of your email marketing efforts using the following metrics: