Email Marketing for Landscape Gardeners
The garden you built is phase one of three
Gardens are done in stages, and everybody forgets that
Full garden landscaping is £5,105. An Indian sandstone patio, £2,970. Fencing, £1,495. A garden clearance, £1,300. Turfing, £1,045.
Very few households do the lot in one go. They do the patio because that is what the money stretched to. Two summers later the fencing has had it. The year after that the lawn is a disgrace and they finally deal with the borders, or the shed area, or the side return nobody has looked at since they moved in.
Every one of those is a job worth between £1,000 and £3,000, and every one of them is decided by a household who already has a landscaper they liked. All that stands between you and it is being remembered in the January they start thinking about it — which, two years on, is not a safe assumption.
That is what email is for in your trade. Not chasing new customers. Making sure phase two and phase three are yours.
The second thing the list does, which is bigger
Maintenance.
Every garden you build needs looking after, and most landscapers raise it once, at handover, when the customer is thinking about the bill rather than about next spring. Six months later the planting is struggling and they ring a gardener out of the paper.
An email in the first March after a build — what needs doing now, what to watch for in the first year, and what you charge to handle it — converts a meaningful share of past clients into a recurring visit. That turns a one-off trade into one with a floor under it, and it is the closest thing to predictable income available to a landscaper.
The ratio
A full garden is £5,105. Our Booked package is £99 a month — £1,188 a year. One job covers over four years.
More usefully: two hundred past customers, ten per cent taking a maintenance arrangement, is a base that pays through the winter. Add two or three phase-two jobs a year at £1,495 to £2,970 and the programme has paid for itself several times over from people whose gardens you have already built.
What we’d actually send
The January email. The most important send of your year. Your customers look out at a wet garden in January and decide something has to change; you want to be in their inbox that week, with photographs of what you did last season and an honest note about how the diary is filling. Book work in January for May, and the year is made before your competitors have started marketing.
The first-spring note. Automatic, six months after completion. What the planting needs now, what is normal in year one, and what a maintenance visit covers.
The phase-two note. Two years after a patio, when fencing and lawns are the natural next step, and you know exactly what they have not done yet because you were standing in it.
A late-autumn note. Clearance, fencing and hard landscaping happen perfectly well in winter and almost nobody tells customers that. It fills the months when your phone stops.
The grown-in photograph. A garden you built two years ago, photographed now, sent to that customer. It is the least commercial email on this list and the one most likely to produce a reply and a referral.
What good looks like at twelve months
- A January send that fills the spring diary before March
- Maintenance arrangements attached to a real share of past builds
- Phase-two work arriving from gardens you built two and three years ago
- Winter jobs booked in the months you previously wrote off
- Photographs going out that make people forward your name to a neighbour
The mistakes we see most
Marketing only in spring. By spring they have chosen. January is the month that decides your year.
Never mentioning maintenance again after handover. It is raised once at the worst possible moment and then dropped.
Emailing everybody the same thing. Somebody who had a full garden last year needs a different note from somebody who had a patio in 2023.
Sending words without pictures. Yours is the one trade where a photograph does the entire job of persuasion, and a text-only email throws that away.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–4. The list is built from job history and tagged by what was actually done and when — which is what makes every send after this specific rather than general.
Weeks 5–8. The January email if we are anywhere near it; otherwise the next seasonal send, with photographs gathered from last season’s gardens.
Weeks 9–12. The automatic flows — first-spring note, two-year phase-two note — so they run from completion dates without anybody remembering.
At ninety days the measure is booked work from past customers. New enquiries are the website’s job; this service exists to make your existing gardens produce a second and third job.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Job records hold what was built, when, and the photographs from the day it finished, so the phase-two note goes to the right gardens with the right pictures attached.
Completion dates drive the automatic sends, which is how a first-spring note six months later happens at all.
And a maintenance arrangement becomes a recurring schedule rather than a good intention, with visits, invoices and reminders running from the same record as the original build.
The July email that asks for a name
There is one send that does not fit the seasonal pattern and is worth more than most of it.
In July the gardens you built in spring look their best. The planting has taken, the turf has knitted, the patio has weathered slightly and lost that new look. Your customer is outside in it every evening and is as pleased with it as they will ever be.
That is the moment to write to them — with a photograph of their own garden, taken on your last visit — and to ask, plainly and once, whether they know anybody else thinking about theirs.
Landscaping travels along streets and through friendship groups more than almost any trade, because a garden is shown off in a way that a rewire never is. People have friends round. They get asked who did it. If they have your name in an email from three weeks ago, they forward it; if they have to go and find an invoice from March, they say “I’ll dig it out” and never do.
Ask once a year, in July, of people whose gardens actually turned out well. Do not ask everybody and do not ask twice — the whole value of this email is that it does not feel like a campaign. It is the single highest-return message a landscaper sends and it takes a photograph and four sentences.
Questions landscape gardeners ask
Do people really book in January? The good ones do. That is precisely why the January email matters more than anything else here.
How do I get the photographs? From jobs you are already on. Two minutes at the end of a visit through the summer gives you the whole winter’s material.
How often should this go out? Four or five sends a year to the whole list, plus the automatic notes that only reach specific gardens.
Is maintenance worth the disruption? It is the only part of your year that is not weather and season dependent, which is exactly what makes it worth having.
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