Email campaigns are a great marketing strategy, both because they’re cheap and because you have a captive audience – even if your targets don’t open your emails, they’re at least going to absorb the information in the subject. I’ve talked before about how to maximize your open rate, but a good open rate will be meaningless if the subsequent content baffles or bores readers.
Put simply, each email campaign should be planned with a specific goal in mind. And when I say specific, I mean specific – it’s not enough to say, “Well, some new leads would be nice, so let’s send out some emails.” Are you looking to attract new customers? If so, your email should contain an overview of your services, rates and customer testimonials. Or are you hoping to get repeat business from previously satisfied clients? In that case, they’re already going to be familiar with the basics of your business, so you can get their attention by delving into detail on a new service or offering them a small discount for being a loyal customer.
Lead generation is the end goal of any campaign to one degree or another, but the more focused your idea is the better. Are roofs your specialty? When winter winds down, that’s the perfect time to remind customers of the damage brutal winter storms can do – preferably with before pictures of fresh damage, and after pictures of gorgeous new roofs you helped build. Or maybe bathroom renovations are your thing, in which case a newsletter with images and helpful information about the ROI of a bathroom makeover will help you win new business.
Whatever your purpose is, don’t stray from it. Even the most dedicated homeowner will get bored and skim a long, rambling email that jumps from point to point without any apparent theme. Keep your message short, simple and precise, because at the end of a long work day that’s the only kind of message most people will want to read. If you have a lot of information to convey, it’s better to spread it out across multiple emails rather than writing the War and Peace of home improvement advertisement.
If you have to stop and think about what you’d want an email campaign to accomplish, maybe now’s not the time for one. But if you have a clear vision for where you want your business to go next, emails are the perfect low-budget method for delivering a pointed message. Just make sure you run it through the spell-checker first – if you email hundreds of people about an exciting opportunity to renovate their garbage, you probably won’t get many leads. 
