Email marketing remains one of the most effective digital marketing channels for reaching customers and prospects. However, the construction industry faces unique challenges when it comes to email campaigns.
Standing out in crowded inboxes requires tailored strategies that speak to your audience. In this article, we provide 11 email marketing tips to help construction companies cut through the noise and drive results.
Whether you’re looking to segment contacts, improve deliverability, or boost engagement, these practical tips will help strengthen your email marketing game.
Importance of Email Marketing for Construction Companies
Email marketing delivers results for construction companies. Studies show that for every $1 spent on email marketing, companies earn $40 on average – an impressive 4,200% ROI.
Beyond revenue gains, email enables construction firms to nurture customer relationships, promote their brand, drive website traffic, advertise new project wins, and keep stakeholders engaged during long sales cycles.
With the ability to segment contacts, personalize messaging, automate campaigns, and analyze data, email gives construction marketers the tools to deepen engagement with architects, property developers, contractors, vendors, and other key decision-makers.
The versatile channel also integrates seamlessly with CRMs, websites, and other systems to optimize the impact of your sales and marketing. For these reasons, no construction firm can afford to overlook email as a client acquisition and retention strategy. Email marketing platforms are basically a must in this industry.
1. Collect Emails from Bids and Proposals
Many prospects first engage with construction firms through bids, RFPs, and project proposals. Yet few companies actively capture email addresses during this crucial touchpoint.
Make sure your quotes, bids, and project documents feature an email sign-up form or simple Call-To-Action inviting contacts to join your mailing list. This allows you to continue nurturing prospects even if you don’t win their immediate business.
You can incentivize sign-ups by offering exclusive discounts, flash sales, or gated design catalogs that email subscribers access.
If a prospect doesn’t convert into a customer right away, you gain their permission to continue the conversation over email. This allows you to showcase new project wins, awards, and certifications that may pique their interest down the line. Just be sure your forms comply with anti-spam laws by allowing contacts to easily opt-out at any time.
While bid and proposal documents remain static, your outreach doesn’t have to. Use email to demonstrate continued innovation in your engineering capabilities, safety standards, and cost savings – anything that might tilt future selection processes in your favor. Armed with prospect contact info, the deal isn’t over when the bid is.
2. Segment Lists by Project Type
Construction projects vary enormously, from high-rise complexes to retail builds to industrial warehouses. Make sure your messaging aligns with each prospect’s area of focus. Segment your lists by public sector projects, private commercial developments, residential builds, renovation programs, and other project categories relevant to your firm.
This allows you to deliver emails with precise specificity to the needs of each subgroup.
Are you promoting innovations in modular construction or sustainable materials? Target those messages to commercial developers more likely to appreciate their value.
Touting superior safety standards? Government contractors will respond better to that messaging. Segmentation ensures no one gets bombarded by irrelevant information.
List segmentation also enables you to test how different projects respond to unique offers. You may discover retail build contractors love to flash sales promotions while industrial developers prefer VIP previews of new equipment capabilities.
Match the message to the market for better campaign performance. Segmentation gives you the insight to fine-tune conversion tactics over time through continual testing.
3. Send Personalized Project Updates
According to reports, personalization is the key to email marketing success. The graph below shows that the majority of email subscribers state that they want to receive automated emails that are personalized to their preferences and past choices.
Construction projects often span months or years before completion. Don’t go silent during long project timelines. Send regular project updates to key stakeholders letting them know progress to date. These could be monthly, quarterly, or annual updates depending on project length and client preferences.
Personalized project update emails demonstrate attention to detail and accountability. Include photos, milestone announcements, scheduling changes, safety records, and other details that reassure clients their build remains on budget and on time. Ask stakeholders directly in your emails if they need any information or have additional questions.
Project update emails also represent networking touchpoints to spur referrals. A client who is pleased with their current build may connect you with associates embarking on new developments. Regular check-ins remind contacts of the professionalism you bring to every job. Don’t just send updates when problems arise – share the wins along the way as well.
4. Promote Current Capabilities and Equipment
The equipment, machinery, and technology available often dictate the complexity of construction projects a firm can undertake. Don’t let your full capabilities get outdated in clients’ minds. Send periodic emails showcasing your current roster of build capacity.
Share photos and videos of your new earthmovers, cranes, generators, or scaffolding. Show off that new fabrication shop expansion complete with cutting tables and 3D printers ready for prototyping. Display your entire fleet of trucks wrapped in branded graphics to underscore project readiness from the ground up.
Promotional equipment emails remind past customers and prospects what you bring to the bid table before new RFPs emerge. This also enables data capture on who engages most with assets tailored to specialized projects like high-rise structures, industrial builds, or sustainable materials integration. Keep your operational readiness top of mind.
5. Highlight Safety Milestones
Safety remains the utmost priority across complex construction projects. Don’t just emphasize safety during the bid process – showcase superior safety performance throughout builds via email.
Develop a regular cadence for sharing safety milestones like hours without incidents, new protocols launched, and supervisor certifications earned. Keep stats simple and easy to digest while underscoring the proportion of projects completed injury-free thanks to your rigorous
standards.
Safety milestone emails represent powerful trust builders with existing clients. Getting contracts signed is just step one – actively demonstrating a commitment to safety at every phase is what transforms customers into vocal brand advocates.
For new business prospects previously unaware of your firm, safety stats emails offer credibility boosters that could make you a front-runner for future site builds.
6. Spotlight New Techniques or Materials
In addition to highlighting safety milestones, you can also use pre-made email marketing templates like the ones in the example below to spotlight new materials, services, and techniques.
Construction Engineering continually evolves with new project management techniques, sustainable building materials, and innovative fabrication technologies. Use email to educate your audience about the latest offerings within the industry.
Curate content that inspires, whether it’s showcasing a new vendor that enables modular home construction or demonstrating how autonomous equipment promises to enhance safety on complex builds. Share behind-the-scenes photos of your team integrating a breakthrough material like self-healing concrete into projects.
Email is ideal for spotlighting techniques or materials you’ve adopted early while conveying thought leadership. Use buzzworthy headlines that promise exclusive insights into emerging construction trends. Whether promoting your innovations or commentary on outside advances that could impact future projects, position your firm at the leading edge.
7. Share Company News and Awards
Don’t keep your company’s accomplishments under wraps – share news of awards, media features, new certifications, big contract wins, executive appointments, or community project donations via email.
Promotional news emails boost brand visibility and search engine discovery. This third-party credibility also reassures customers while positioning your construction firm as an industry leader worthy of referral business.
Most companies drastically underutilize email for timely news distribution compared to social channels. Yet email enables you to reach key decision-makers directly without algorithms burying your updates.
Create a monthly or quarterly e-newsletter format to package your latest headlines for easy skimming by busy construction contacts. Infuse these news emails with multimedia like embedded video clips, and photo collages, and pull quotes that capture attention between paragraphs. Let your achievements speak for themselves.
8. Reward Referring Partners
Landing new construction projects often relies heavily on word-of-mouth referrals within tightly-knit development communities. Yet most firms fail to properly reward partners who offer referrals by connecting them with new customers.
Send personalized emails thanking intermediaries for an introduction when contracts get signed as a result of their help. Consider setting up a simple referral rewards system that offers tiered gifts based on the contract value their introductions yield – perhaps a gift card for under $50k, a luxury dinner for $50-$100k, or weekend getaway credit for over $100k.
Rewarding referrers demonstrates gratitude while incentivizing partners to continue vouching for your services.
These rewards also strengthen lead-sharing relationships with suppliers, engineering partners, commercial brokers, architects, and vendors in allied industries. Just be sure any gifts comply with the partners’ own ethics regulations. A little appreciation goes a long way.
9. Automate Project Follow-Ups
Letting sales leads or bid proposals go cold after submission represents lost revenue for construction firms. Yet few have systems in place to prompt timely follow-ups if they don’t hear back right away.
Automate reminders using conditional logic in your email platform. When prospects visit key pages on your website or sales reps log interactions in your CRM, have the system automatically trigger staggered follow-up emails every few weeks asking if they need any additional info.
You can even integrate bid submission forms to send automatic notifications checking if a decision has been reached or find out if competitor pricing led prospects to pass for now. Just be sure all email automation allows instant opt-outs.
Seamless follow-ups demonstrate persistence without pressure while keeping your brand top of mind during lengthy sales cycles. Don’t let hot leads or competitive bids go cold.
10. Retarget Website Visitors
Driving traffic to your website offers little value if visitors disappear forever after a one-page view. Implement retargeting campaigns via email to re-engage past visitors who’ve shown interest.
Many platforms enable setting up audience segments of those who’ve visited key site pages like “Our Projects” or “Materials Overview” in the past 30-90 days. Further filter based on their firmographics for precision. Then create emails highlighting website content they originally clicked on to entice return visits.
Retargeting past visitors combats the “out of sight, out of mind” curse that befalls most websites. Construction buyers endlessly research materials, permitting requirements, sandbox city ordinances, and other nitty-gritty details across vast digital footprints.
Don’t lose their attention as just another pit stop. Implement stickier onsite experiences and customer journeys tied to post-visit email nurturing campaigns. Soon random visitors transform into qualified leads already educated on your services before sales ever reach out.
11. Track Email Open and CTRs
Want to know which emails resonate most with your construction contacts? Enable open tracking and link click-through tracking in your email campaigns. This reveals who engages with your messages versus those who delete them without reading them.
Monitoring analytics helps gauge current customer sentiment while optimizing future nurturing approaches for higher click-through rates as you repurpose top content.
You can even integrate email analytics with your central CRM database via API for a holistic view of real-time engagement visible to both marketing and sales teams.
Analyzing campaign performance sheds light on when customers and prospects are most receptive to outreach. It also helps you double down on segments offering the greatest ROI while pausing campaigns missing their mark. Let data guide your path to higher conversion rates.
Email marketing delivers proven value for construction companies when executed strategically. By collecting more contacts, segmenting thoughtfully, automating workflows, and analyzing data, construction marketers can break through noisy inboxes to drive meaningful customer engagement.
Whether you want to keep existing clients updated on safety milestones or nudge new prospects toward a future bid request, these email tips help you continue the conversation.
With contractor email responsiveness rates hovering around 90%, the channel remains essential for nurturing relationships across long sales cycles. Now put these tips to work in your next campaign.