How to send automated emails (construction business)

LVL, FFE, O.C., and R.O. are all acronyms that those in the construction industry are familiar with. How about CRM? When we ask this question in a room full of construction owners, less than 10% raise their hand. Customer Relation Management is a key aspect of success for any business. Construction businesses are no exception. We consider your CRM one of your most valuable assets as a business. If you don’t have a list of your past, current and future customers then you are solely at the whims and hopes of chance when it comes to new leads. 

Take control of your chances

If you haven’t been maintaining a list of your clients up to this point, start now. Begin putting all new and potential clients in a spreadsheet where you collect their Name, Address, Phone and Email. This will give you the ability, mainly to not forget about them. Most companies SOP once a job is complete is to collect the check and hit the road. They don’t have a plan in place to follow up ever again. Use your list of clients to stay in touch and to continue to bring them value in the months to come. 

HubSpot in our business

We use the free version of HubSpot to maintain contact with our clients. Within the platform you are able to create email templates to send out to your clients based on where they are in your customer journey. For example, you can create a Project Complete – 1 Month Followup email. Once you collect final payment for a job, you can schedule for this email to get sent to your client on a specific date. You copy the template, add their email and put in the date 30 days from when you were complete. Set it and forget it. 

You can and should do this several times every year, with everyone in your CRM. Create 7-15 “touches” and schedule their automated send dates. 

Most of your work will be upfront

It will take some careful planning and some dedicated design to get started. When you look at creating 7-13 touches you must ensure that they are bringing value to your clients. Please do not send your clients emails about you, your brand, motto and logo. People don’t care about you. They care about themselves and they want things that bring them value. We use the EIO principle when creating content. EIO stands for education, information, and offering. Only send your clients content that is bringing them education, information or offerings that they can use.

Once you have your templates generated you can begin plugging your clients into automated emails. You may find that you tweak the content a bit here and there, but for the most part you are done. Whenever you get a new contact or list of contacts, add them to your HubSpot account and get them started on the CRM journey. 

Additional Reading

If you haven’t read our article “Send small bursts of value to your clients” go back and get some ideas on what kinds of content to create for your clients.