Email Marketing for Painters & Decorators
The next job is in the same house
The largest and most repeatable list in the trades
A full interior decoration on a three-bed is £3,260. Exterior painting, £2,380. A kitchen refresh, £915. Wallpaper hanging, £445. A single room, £410.
You finish something most weeks. Over five years that is a few hundred households, which is a bigger list than most trades on this site ever build, and every one of those houses has more rooms in it.
Somebody who had the living room done at £410 has a hallway and stairs they have been avoiding, two bedrooms, a landing that has not been touched since they moved in, and woodwork throughout that is now noticeably worse than the room you did. They are not comparing decorators any more. They are just not thinking about it.
And after five to seven years, the room you painted is ready again. Very few trades have a repeat cycle that reliable, and almost none of them use it.
Why they do not come back on their own
Because decorating is elective and easy to defer. Nothing fails. Nothing leaks. A tired hallway is not urgent this month and it will not be urgent next month either, and that is exactly why an external prompt works so well here — you are not creating a need, you are giving a decision that has been drifting a date.
The prompt also has to arrive at the right time of year to be acted on. Interiors are wanted from September to February, driven by Christmas, a new baby, a house move or plain impatience. Exteriors are March to August. An email about a hallway in June is a good idea at the wrong moment; the same email in late September books.
That combination — a large list, a genuine cycle, and a strong seasonal trigger — is why email suits your trade better than nearly any other on this site.
The ratio
A full interior is £3,260. Our Noticed package is £49 a month — £588 a year. One interior job covers five and a half years.
On a list of three hundred past customers, a three per cent response to an autumn email is nine jobs. Even at an average of £700 that is £6,300 from households already on your books, and the jobs quote faster and haggle less because they have had you in before.
What we’d actually send
The autumn interiors email. Late September, to everyone whose last job was interior work more than eighteen months ago. Rooms you have not done yet, what a hallway and stairs typically runs to, and how the diary looks before Christmas. This is your equivalent of the plumber’s August send and it should be the best-written email you own.
The spring exteriors email. February, before the March rush. To houses you have painted outside before and to anyone whose interior job means you have seen the state of their render and woodwork.
The five-year note. Automatic, off the job date. “We painted your living room in 2021 — it is about due.” Nobody else in your trade sends this and it converts remarkably well because it is factual rather than promotional.
The colour note. Two or three times a year, short: a finish that has worked well, a colour that photographs badly in a north-facing room, what a particular paint is genuinely like to live with. It keeps the list warm between the two commercial sends and it gets replies.
A landlord and agent brief. Separate list, separate tone, entirely about void turnaround times and working around tenants. Small list, large repeat value.
What good looks like at twelve months
- Two properly timed seasonal sends producing the bulk of the return
- A five-year flow running automatically from completed jobs
- Quotes going out to households where you already know the ceiling heights and the state of the woodwork
- A separate agent list producing repeat void work outside the domestic seasons
- A list that grows every week, because you finish something every week
The mistakes we see most
Finishing a job and never contacting them again. Overwhelmingly the norm in this trade and the reason most decorators rebuild their customer base from scratch every year.
Ignoring the season. An interiors push in June and an exteriors push in January is effort spent at the wrong time of year.
Sending the same email to everyone. The person whose whole house you did last year needs the five-year note, not the autumn one.
Not collecting addresses. You cannot email a list you never built. Two minutes at the quote stage is the entire cost of this.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–4. The list is assembled from your job records and tagged by what was done, which rooms, and when. Where addresses are missing we set up how they get captured from now on.
Weeks 5–8. Whichever seasonal email is next, written properly, with photographs of your own work.
Weeks 9–12. The five-year flow set live off historic job dates — which, for anyone with five years behind them, produces work immediately — plus the first colour note.
At ninety days the measure is quotes issued to past customers. In a trade with a repeat cycle this reliable, that number should not be zero, and for most decorators it currently is.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Job records hold the rooms, colours, finishes and products used, so the email can say what you painted and when rather than addressing them as a stranger.
Completion dates drive the five-year flow, which means the most effective email in this list needs no decision from anybody to send.
And a reply arrives as an opportunity against the existing customer, so a quote for the hallway goes out with the previous job’s detail already in it — which is why these jobs close faster than cold ones.
People who have just moved are the best customers you will ever have
There is one group that buys decorating faster and with less deliberation than anybody else, and reaching them is largely a matter of knowing when.
Somebody who has just bought a house is looking at somebody else’s taste in every room. The urge to change it is at its strongest in the first three months, before the furniture settles and the tolerance sets in, and crucially before children’s bedrooms and the hallway become jobs that require moving everything twice. Decorating booked in that window is often the whole house rather than one room.
You cannot email them, because they are not on your list yet. But estate agents, letting agents, removal firms, kitchen fitters and flooring companies all know precisely who has just moved and when, and every one of them is asked for a decorator recommendation regularly.
So this is a referral list rather than a customer one, run alongside everything else on this page. A short quarterly note to twenty or thirty local agents and allied trades — what your diary looks like, what you have just finished nearby, how fast you can turn a room around for somebody moving in — puts you in the conversation at the moment it happens.
It is a small list, it takes one email a quarter, and the jobs it produces are the largest and least price-sensitive you will quote all year.
Questions decorators ask
Will people be annoyed to hear from me years later? Very rarely, when the email refers to the actual room you painted. It reads as a decorator who keeps records, which is reassuring.
How many sends a year? Four or five to the whole list, plus the automatic five-year notes.
I have not kept addresses. Then we start now and rebuild what we can from invoices and messages. Most decorators recover more than they expect.
Is the commercial side worth a separate list? Yes. Agents want speed and access arrangements, and mixing that with colour advice weakens both.
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