Plumber Email Marketing Best Practices To Generate Leads
Updated on February 14, 2024
We’re all familiar with those dreaded emails that flood our inboxes and inevitably end up in the “unsubscribe list.”
It’s a business owner’s worst nightmare to be a nuisance to their customers, but when email marketing is done right, you could be the company that your customers look forward to hearing from.
With the number of global email users predicted to hit 4.73 billion by 2026, it’s an essential platform with opportunities not only for generating more leads but for gaining trust and establishing relationships with current clients as well.
Plus, with nearly 1 in 4 small businesses not using email marketing, it provides a great opportunity to get ahead of some of the competition.
With the right plumber email list, content, email frequency, and testing, the payoff can be well worth it. But absent a plan, you could end up doing more harm than good.
Don’t fret just yet, we’ve got some great plumber marketing ideas to get you on the right track for creating plumber email marketing campaigns to effectively grow your business!
Determine What Role Email Marketing Will Have in Your Comprehensive Plumber Marketing Plan
It’s important to first establish your goal for email marketing.
Are you trying to nurture and inform current customers to ensure you remain their go-to plumbing company for maintenance and other plumbing projects? Maybe you’re just trying to bring in new leads or balance the workflow of your company during the slow season.
Whether you're a plumbing business looking to attract more customers or an affiliate marketer using targeted email sends to generate leads for plumbing advertisers, it’s beneficial to understand the main purpose of email marketing and how it can increase your plumbing leads.
There are 3 Goals of Email Marketing
- Increase Delivery Rates. Get the email into their inbox successfully.
- Increase Open Rates. Get them to open the email.
- Increase Click-Through Rates. Get them to take the action you want from the email.
Once you set your goal and have an email marketing strategy, whether that’s having a consistent email newsletter campaign schedule or holiday discount email, it’s important to track these metrics.
Tracking key metrics is the only way to truly determine how successful your campaigns are. Once you have a clear understanding of how well your campaigns are performing, you can start to optimize your strategy to improve results.
Because this is one of the biggest challenges small businesses face when embarking on email marketing—36% listed optimizing email metrics as the biggest challenge—we’ll give you some tips on how to adjust your campaigns accordingly.
Increase Delivery Rates by Cleaning Your Email List
The delivery rate is simply the percentage of instances your email was successfully delivered to the intended recipient. For example, if you sent an email to 100 customers but 10 of them bounced back and 5 of them marked your email as spam, your delivery rate would be 85%.
Important Tip: If your delivery rate is low, email providers may flag your account as spam, meaning virtually none of your emails will reach their desired recipients.
Here are our top tips for ensuring you always have a solid list of email recipients:
- Ensure your list has up-to-date, accurate email addresses
- Ensure your list has up-to-date, accurate email addresses
- Run your list through an email validation tool
- Remove inactive subscribers
- Remove duplicates
- Remove hard-bounced email addresses
Once you have your plumber email list set up for success, it’s time to think about how you are going to make sure they engage with them instead of just marking them spam and moving on.
Increase Open Rates Through Your Email Settings
Often overlooked by novice email marketers, the settings you apply to your emails can have a huge impact on their success. No matter which email software you use, you’ll have the ability to alter those settings. Here are the main things you should focus on:
- Optimize for mobile. With 66% of consumers researching small businesses on their mobile devices, it’s increasingly important that you ensure every facet of your plumbing company is optimized for mobile—including your emails.
- Set delivery day/time for optimal engagement. Figuring out what time people check their email is important because sending your email at that time will simply give it a better chance of being seen. Generally speaking, the highest click-to-open rates are at 10 A.M. at 21% and 1 P.M. at 22%.
Increase Open Rates by Improving Subject Lines
Since people receive about 121 business emails daily on average, it’s even more crucial to ensure your subject line is compelling enough to click on.
Subject lines play a huge part in whether or not an email is actually viewed, and with such high competition, it’s not something you want to overlook.
Keep these subject line tips in mind for your next marketing email:
- Personalize your subject lines. This could be as simple as including your recipient's name or location. On average, personalized subject lines lead to a 22.2% higher open rate than generic subject lines.
- Use 1 emoji in your subject line. This may seem silly, but emojis offer emotive story-telling in a way words cannot in a brief subject line. Plus, 56% of brands using emojis in their subject lines experienced higher open rates.
- Offer value in 7 words or less. Let your clients know you’re looking to benefit their life and are offering them an opportunity, like saving them money for example. Just be brief about it as it results in higher click-through rates.
- Use tools to get your subject line graded. After you’ve put all the work into crafting a spectacular subject line, put it to the test with a subject line grader and see where you’ve landed. Don’t settle on anything less than an A!
- Be strategic about your preview text. Your preview text is the short text users see before they click on an email. They’re usually between 35-90 characters long. It’s best to concisely describe what your offer is, why it’s valuable, and how to get it using action words. When done properly, preview text can increase click-through rates by 30%.
Increase Click Through Rates with Great Email Copy & Formatting
As you can probably guess, data has consistently proven that creating compelling, relevant, and informative content is essential if you want to see success with your email campaigns (and really any plumber marketing ideas).
So what makes the above email great? Let’s dive into the key ingredients:
- Use a single call to action. Your CTA lets them know what you want them to do, whether it’s visiting your page, giving you a call, or filling out a form. Emails with a single CTA experienced a 371% higher click-through rate than those with multiple CTAs.
- Make emails short and easy to read. Let your clients know you’re looking to benefit their life and are offering them an opportunity, like saving them money for example. Just be brief about it as it results in higher click-through rates. Layering your content with headings, subheadings, and bullet points makes it easier for your audience to skim and find what you want them to do quickly.
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- Personalize your emails. Personalization builds trust with customers that you are the right choice for their plumbing service needs. In fact, 74% of customers become frustrated when their email communication experience isn’t personalized. And yet, we found that only 1 in 4 small businesses uses personalization tokens in their emails. So use this to get ahead!
What Email Campaigns Should My Plumbing Company Run?
So now that you have the basics down, how can you put those into practice? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
The first thing you will want to do is decide which email campaigns to begin with. We recommend taking a look at the campaigns other small businesses are running and finding effective:
By looking at the engagement levels of different types of emails and choosing which ones align with your goals, you can begin to venture into email marketing for plumbers.
Use Email to Generate Key Testimonials
Google reviews are becoming an increasingly important factor in the decision-making for many consumers, which means that you need to do everything you can to generate positive reviews.
Luckily, with 71% of consumers reporting that they are likely to leave a review if the company makes it easy for them to do so, it’s easier than ever to get testimonials for your plumbing company.
By simply including a link to your Google review page in "thank you" emails to customers you are well on your way to getting more reviews. You can even go the extra step and create a review-generating email campaign, solely for encouraging reviews.
