Email marketing
The customers you already have, in an inbox you already reach.
A monthly newsletter is the wrong answer for most trades. A builder’s list is architects, not past clients. A plumber needs one email in August. A gas engineer has to keep the marketing away from the reminder that rebooks the business. Same service, eight different jobs.
The list you already have is worth more than the leads you are buying
Every trade business is sitting on a list. Not a marketing list — the invoices. Every household or company that has already paid you, already trusts you and already knows where you are. For most trades it is the cheapest source of work available and the least used.
The reason it goes unused is that “email marketing” sounds like a monthly newsletter, and a monthly newsletter is genuinely the wrong answer for most trades. Nobody wants twelve emails a year from an electrician. What they want is one email at the moment it is useful, and that moment is usually a date you already know.
So this is less about writing and more about timing. What was installed, when, and what that implies about when to make contact.
What we actually do
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Get the list out of the invoices.
Segmented by what you did, when, and for whom, because that is what decides the message.
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Send on the date rather than on a schedule.
A year after the install, a month before the certificate expires, the week the season turns.
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Write emails a customer would be glad to get.
Useful, short, specific to what you did at their property. Not a round-up.
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Keep the commercial list separate.
Agents and facilities managers need a different tone and a different frequency from homeowners, and mixing them costs you both.
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Handle the legal side properly.
Consent, records and a working unsubscribe, kept in a state you could show somebody.
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Measure rebooking, not opens.
The number that matters is jobs from the existing base.
For half these trades, the list is not who you think
A builder’s most valuable list is architects and specifiers, not the homeowners. A roofer’s is the roofs they patched four years ago. A commercial cleaner’s is the contract that ended amicably eighteen months ago.
The trade pages below work out whose list it actually is for each trade, and what one email a year should say.
The first ninety days
- Weeks 1–4
The list built and segmented from real job records, with consent and unsubscribe handled properly.
- Weeks 5–8
The date-triggered messages set live — service intervals, certificate expiries, seasonal prompts.
- Weeks 9–12
Rebooking measured, so the base becomes a number you can watch rather than a feeling.
What good looks like
- Every past customer is on a list that knows what you did for them
- Emails go out on dates, not on a calendar
- Commercial and domestic are handled separately
- Consent and unsubscribes are in order
- A measurable share of the month’s work comes from the existing base
Questions we get asked
Can I email past customers? Generally yes for existing customers about similar services, and every email carries an unsubscribe. We set the records up so the position is defensible.
How often? For most trades, between one and four times a year, plus the date-triggered ones. More than that and you train people to ignore you.
What if my records are a mess? Common. We build the list from whatever exists — invoices, job sheets, the diary — and it improves from there.
Does it work for commercial? Better than for domestic, usually, because the contacts are stable and the renewal dates are real.
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