7 Ways Tradespeople Can Use Their Email Database

If you’ve been running a heating & plumbing business for more than a couple of years, you’ll have a good sized collection of customer email addresses.

You need these contact details to send invoices and contact your customers (and to send certificates, too, if you use a certificate app), but they’re also a fantastic marketing resource for getting a lot of extra work with minimal effort. 

Word-of-mouth marketing is always going to be a great source of work, but lots of businesses jump into complex and time-consuming marketing strategies without realising they’ve been sitting on a gold mine all along. Email marketing is cheap, easy, personal, and highly effective. 

In this article, we’ll walk you through the basics of email marketing for heating & plumbing companies. We’ll answer questions and offer guidance on:

What is, and isn’t, email marketing?

Emailing paperless certificates, quotes, and invoices alongside general communication is standard practice. It’s quick, easy, and convenient for both you and your customer. But most businesses stop there and, from the customer’s point of view, stay completely silent.

This is where email marketing comes in. It’s sometimes given an unfair reputation as being spam, but proper and thoughtful email marketing is far from it.

Good marketing emails reach out to customers and provide them with some kind of value. This could be anything like a helpful reminder or some useful tips. In any case, reminding them of your business and the potential for some extra work is simply the byproduct.

Check out Gas Engineer Software’s automated service reminders – voted our most profitable feature. 

The best way to store, manage, and send to emails

The most important thing is to have your emails stored digitally. This will save you hours of time and allow you to send emails in an instant.

Using a job management system will help you automatically collect all these emails in a single location as you go about your daily business. It will also attach other information such as names with their corresponding email (this will come in handy as you send an email)

To send emails to a large number of customers at once, you’ll need to sign up for email marketing software. Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign are two good options for this.

All you need to do is import your database into this software and you’ll be able to create and send emails to a list of customers in one go. If you’re able to import customer names as well, you can use special tags for the software to fill in their name for you on each email, adding a personal touch.

7 different types of emails you can send customers

Service reminders

Whenever you complete a routine gas safety, you know your customer will need another one in a year’s time. If you send out an email in 11 months, not only does it act as a useful reminder for your customer, but they’re almost guaranteed to book with you again after reading it.

While this can be done manually, Gas Engineer Software can completely automate the process. Learn more about that here.

Special offers & discounts

Especially with the way the economy’s going, everyone loves an offer or discount. You could run a summer offer to try to fill your schedule in the quiet months, or even a discount for existing customers. This will be a one-time email, so don’t worry about spamming your customers.

Referral programmes

If you offer discounts for customer referrals, let them know! It can be useful to send out a quick email every now and again to do so.

Review requests

In today’s world, online reviews (on Checkatrade or Google for example) are everything. You could schedule an email to be sent to all customers after completing a job simply asking them to drop your business a review. Most customers are willing, and it’s just a matter of asking.

New services

Offering a new service? Let your customers know. You never know what work someone might need doing.

Tips & tricks

This is a nice and harmless way of being helpful and generating positive relationships. Given everyone’s focus on energy and cost-saving, one idea is to send out tips on how to reduce gas bills.

Installation follow ups

Installations are longer and more costly jobs for a customer. Get in touch – maybe after 2 weeks or a month – just to ask them if everything’s alright. The goal here is to show that you care and make more people loyal to your business.

These ideas all have one thing in common: the idea of turning one time customers into repeat ones. This process is much quicker and easier than finding completely new customers, meaning you’ll save time and make more money in the long run. 

Remember to always include a CTA (call-to-action) in your email content. This is simply a marketing term used to guide a customer towards a goal. It could be something as simple as “Book an appointment” or “Give me a call”.

Why is email marketing important?

Email marketing is a great way to get your business in the minds of your customers. This is the ultimate goal of all forms of marketing.

But email marketing has a few key advantages:

• It’s completely free
• It’s easy to personalise 
• Emails have a high engagement rate compared to other forms of marketing

Some worry that sending out emails is just going to annoy customers or feel pushy. But in reality, well written emails that provide real value do wonders for fostering better customer relationships and getting extra work in the process.

What does GDPR mean?

You’ve probably heard about GDPR at some point (General Data Protection Regulation) 

There’s a common misconception that GDPR means you can’t send out marketing emails. This isn’t the case. Email marketing is still extremely effective, but you need to be mindful of a few thingsz

Firstly, you’ll need to make sure that you keep your email database secure. You’ll also need to make sure that your customers are happy to receive marketing emails. Soft opt-ins are fine (where your customer didn’t explicitly say they do not want to receive emails) as long as you gave them an option to opt out when collecting this information. You should also have an unsubscribe option on any email you send out. 

The good news is that email marketing software will do most of the heavy lifting for you with GDPR.