Email Marketing for Roofers
Your best list is the people who said no
The longest dormancy in the trades
A full roof re-tile is £5,090. Fascias, soffits and guttering, £1,830. A flat roof in EPDM, £1,790. A repair, £505. A survey, £175.
Think about what happens after you quote £5,090. Perhaps a third proceed. The rest do not say no — they say not yet. The roof is holding. There is a wedding, a car, a kitchen. It has waited four years and it can wait another.
Then, eighteen months later, it leaks properly, or the neighbour has theirs done, or the money appears. And at that moment a large proportion of those people start again from a search, because the roofer who quoted them has not been in touch since.
That is the most expensive silence in your business. You have already done the survey, climbed the roof, worked out the specification and written the price. Somebody else gets the £5,090 for none of that work.
Why email is the right tool for it specifically
A stalled roofing quote cannot be chased by phone without becoming pressure, and pressure is exactly wrong for a customer who already suspects roofers of pushing work. Advertising will not find them reliably either; they are one household among thousands.
Email does the one thing needed here: it stays present, at no social cost, for as long as the decision takes. Two or three genuinely useful emails a year, over two years, and you are the roofer they were already dealing with rather than a stranger with a ladder.
And it converts on the customer’s timing, not yours — which in this trade is nearly always after weather, and nearly always suddenly.
The ratio
A re-tile is £5,090. Our Noticed package is £49 a month — £588 a year. One re-tile covers more than eight years.
If you quote thirty re-tiles a year and win ten, twenty are dormant. Recovering three of those over the following two years is £15,270 from surveys you have already carried out and paid for. That is the case for this service in a single sentence.
What we’d actually send
The quote follow-up sequence. Not a chase. A short note a fortnight after the survey with the report and photographs attached, then a check-in at three months, then twice yearly. Each one useful in itself and none of them asking for a decision.
The storm email, written in advance. After serious wind you have a matter of hours before people start ringing round. A pre-written email — what to check, what is urgent, what to photograph before touching anything, how the insurance position usually works — sent to your whole list the morning after, is the single highest-response email in this trade. It cannot be written on the day; by the time it is finished the week has gone.
An autumn preparation note. Gutters, valleys, moss, loose ridge tiles. Sent in early September to everyone you have surveyed, it converts small paid work in a month when the phone is otherwise quiet, and small work is how a dormant £5,090 job gets restarted.
The repair customer’s escalation note. Somebody you patched two years ago is now nearer to needing the full job. A note offering to look while you are in the area is welcome rather than pushy.
A completed-job note to the street. Roofing sells to neighbours more than most trades, because they watched the scaffold go up for a fortnight.
What good looks like at twelve months
- Every survey entering a follow-up sequence automatically rather than depending on you remembering
- A storm email drafted, approved and waiting, so a weather event is a send decision rather than a writing job
- Dormant quotes converting at a rate you can actually see
- Autumn maintenance work filling the September and October gap
- Reports and photographs going out attached to the follow-ups, which is what makes them read as helpful
The mistakes we see most
Quoting and forgetting. The default in this trade, and the reason most roofers’ best asset is a stack of unread quotes.
Chasing by phone. It converts worse and it damages the trust the survey built.
Writing the storm email during the storm. Every hour of delay costs response, and the whole advantage is being first into the inbox.
Sending the quote without the photographs. The photographs from the roof are your entire argument, and a follow-up carrying them is worth several without.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–4. Every quote from the last two years goes into a list, split by job type and value. Most roofers are surprised by how much is sitting there.
Weeks 5–8. The follow-up sequence set live for new surveys, and the first reactivation email to the historic dormant list. This is where the quickest return comes from.
Weeks 9–12. The storm email written and held ready, plus the autumn maintenance note if the season is right.
At ninety days the measure is re-opened quotes — people replying to say the roof has got worse, or that they are ready now. In this trade that is the number that matters.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Quotes stay on the system with their value, their photographs and their survey notes, so the dormant list is a filter rather than a memory — and the follow-up carries the original report without anybody digging it out.
Survey findings sit against the property, so when somebody replies eighteen months later you know exactly which valley you were worried about.
And because a repair records what was patched and when, the escalation note goes to the right houses rather than to everyone.
The commercial list, which behaves nothing like the domestic one
Alongside the homeowner work there is a second audience most roofers reach only by accident.
Letting agents, managing agents, commercial landlords, facilities managers and small property portfolios all have roofs, and unlike a homeowner they are dealing with several at once, on a maintenance budget, with a duty to keep the buildings watertight. Flat roofs in particular run on a genuine replacement cycle — an EPDM or felt roof reaching the end of its life is a predictable, plannable, repeatable £1,790 job.
That group needs a different email entirely. No advice about stained ceilings. What they want is a schedule: which of their buildings you have looked at, what condition each is in, what needs doing this financial year and what can wait until next. A managing agent who receives that once or twice a year has been handed a document they can take to a budget meeting, and it is worth a great deal more to them than a price list.
It is also the most reliable winter work available to you, because commercial repairs get authorised on a budget cycle rather than on how bad the weather has been.
Keep it as a separate list of perhaps twenty to sixty named people, sent quarterly, written in the language of buildings and budgets rather than homes. It will be the smallest list you run and quite possibly the most profitable.
Questions roofers ask
Isn’t following up an old quote a bit desperate? Not when the email carries the report and asks nothing. It reads as competence. Ringing them would read as desperation.
Do the prices still stand after eighteen months? No, and the email should say so plainly. A range and an offer to re-survey is honest and converts perfectly well.
How soon after a storm should the email go? The same morning. It is why we write it months beforehand.
How many emails is this a year? Roughly four to the whole list, plus the automatic follow-ups that only reach people with a live or dormant quote.
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