Email marketing gets written off constantly by people who are doing it badly and blaming the medium. Done right, email is still the highest ROI marketing channel available, including for contractors. The math is simple: you own the list, delivery is cheap, and customers who opted in are already warm.
Building the List
Your customer list is your email list. Every time you complete a job, you have a customer's email address in your system. That's the foundation. Add the email capture on your website (the lead magnet popup helps), and your list grows automatically.
Don't buy email lists. Don't scrape addresses from directories. Only email people who have done business with you or explicitly asked to hear from you. Anything else burns your sender reputation and gets you marked as spam, which is worse than not emailing at all.
What to Actually Send
The mistake most contractors make is only emailing when they want something: a tune-up appointment, a spring special, a referral. Customers notice when they only hear from you when you need business. Mix in content that helps them.
Send a fall email about winterizing their system. A spring email about what to look for before you turn on the AC. A short note when there's a manufacturer recall on equipment you commonly install. A "here's what that noise means" breakdown when something weird is happening with residential systems in hot weather. Useful content earns you the right to send the promotional stuff.
Frequency and Format
Once a month is plenty for most contractors. Twice a month if you have enough genuinely useful things to say. Weekly is too much unless your content is exceptional. The fastest way to get unsubscribes is to email people too often with not much to say.
Keep emails short. Three to four short paragraphs with a clear call to action at the end. No giant wall of text. No five different offers in one email. One subject, one message, one action you want them to take. Mobile-friendly layout because most people will read it on their phone.
What to Measure
Open rate and click rate are your two main metrics. Industry average open rates for home services email are around 25-30%. If yours are below 15%, your subject lines need work. Click rates of 2-5% are normal. If you're getting higher, you're doing something right.
The metric that actually matters most is calls booked directly from an email campaign. Track your scheduled appointments in the week after you send a seasonal promotion. That's your real ROI number.
WerkOps keeps your customer contact info organized so running a list export for an email campaign doesn't require digging through three spreadsheets.
Put this into practice with WerkOps
Run accurate load calculations, build estimates, and send invoices - all in one tool.
Start Free Trial
Written by
Dina Good
Founder, WerkOps
Dina grew up in the trades. Her father was a contractor, then a building inspector, and the job site was her classroom long before any formal one was. She went on to own her own contracting company, which is where she first felt the pain of running a skilled trade business on bad software and worse spreadsheets. A love of data pulled her into programming, and the two worlds eventually collided into WerkOps - software built by someone who has actually been on the truck.