Construction Email Marketing: Nurturing Construction Industry Prospects Through the Sales Funnel

Construction email marketing can be difficult and confusing. In past blog posts, we’ve discussed how digital marketing for construction companies is different from other industries. One of the biggest factors that sets your industry apart is its extremely long sales cycles–it can take months or even years before a prospect actually makes a purchase. Creating a marketing strategy for construction companies means taking that long sales funnel into account. Your digital marketing tactics should include construction email marketing to help guide prospects through every stage of the sales cycle, to ensure that the leads you generate transform into real revenue and repeat customers.

Using Construction Email Marketing for Lead nurturing and scoring

After you’ve attracted a prospect to your site and converted them into a first-time lead (maybe they’ve filled out a form or clicked a social media link and given you permission to communicate more with them, but aren’t yet ready to purchase), you need to nurture them through the sales cycle. With hundreds of prospects, doing this manually is rarely feasible. Luckily, there are some great marketing automation tools that can help you convert leads to finalized sales.

A key aspect of lead nurturing is “lead scoring”–assigning a worth to specific marketing behaviors (filling out a form, clicking on an email, visiting a page on the website, downloading a gated content piece, etc.) and determining at what score a lead is considered ready to purchase and talk with a sales representative. To do this, look at your current clients to see what marketing tactics they engaged with. What web pages did they visit? Which emails did they open? What content pieces did they download? Then, assign the most number of points to those behaviors. With marketing automation tools like Salesforce, SharpSpring, and HubSpot, you can input lead scoring rules and the software will do the rest of the data tracking and point assigning for you, even alerting you when a lead hits the predetermined point threshold.

Moving prospects through the sales funnel with construction email marketing

But beyond assigning scores, how do you actually move leads through the sales funnel? One common way to nurture leads is via email drip campaigns: a series of emails, sent at predefined times, at progressively further stages of the buyer’s journey. For example, set up an automated email cadence for any prospect who downloads your gated content. Keep the first email casual by saying something like “hope you liked this article, here’s another you may find interesting.” Include a more targeted piece of content that is specifically relevant to that user’s job role (general contractor, architect, etc.). If they download it, follow up with another email and a decision-stage content piece (for example, an article on your site discussing the process of selecting a vendor), and keep going until you drop in a direct connection to the sales team. By that point, the prospect will be convinced about the authority and expertise of your brand. And the best way to keep all these emails and decision trees moving smoothly is by using marketing automation tools.

Always close your emails with a compelling call-to-action–something like: “If you’d like to learn more about this topic, reply to this email or call us at XXX-XXX-XXXX to connect with our experienced team.”

Partner with a construction industry marketing partner who can help

We get it–you’re busy running your business and building great solutions for your customers. To ensure that no prospect falls through the cracks partway through the sales funnel, you need a marketing agency with deep knowledge of the construction industry and what makes your company unique.

At ZAG FIRST B2B Marketing, we’ve worked with dozens of subcontractors, specialists, architects, and other construction companies to build and execute data-driven digital marketing plans that achieve real results. We know how to leverage industry-leading marketing automation tools and create targeted email campaigns that will resonate uniquely with your different audience segments. We pride ourselves on being a digital marketing agency for construction companies, and we’ve spent the time to truly understand the needs of your customers and prospects.

For more information on the best marketing practices for construction companies, get in touch with our team.