Email Marketing for Garage Door Companies: Contractor's Guide

What is Email Marketing for Garage Door Businesses?

Email marketing is a channel garage door businesses use to deliver promotional and non-promotional content directly to customers’/prospects’ inboxes. Such content includes service promotions, job updates, nurturing sequences, and upsells.

One significant benefit of email marketing is the complete, unrestricted control it gives you over your audience. You can communicate your message without the intervention of any intermediary.

Emails also have high conversion potential since the recipient actively subscribes to seeing such content. This is a far cry from mass advertising mediums such as bus-stop banners, Google Ads, and social media advertising, which can generate many impressions but few job bookings.

Why Do Garage Door Contractors Invest in Email Marketing?

Garage door contractors invest in email marketing because of the following benefits:

• Builds brand awareness and loyalty. People consider their email inboxes an intimate space. Therefore, communicating with them through email fosters a personal connection that grows brand awareness and loyalty, leading to sales and repeat business.

• Generates sales. This online marketing channel allows you to communicate directly with a specific target audience who have opted into your list and may need your services. That's why it's highly effective.

• Produces measurable results. Conventional and industry-specific email software delivers detailed performance reports. This allows you to tweak specific elements to improve your campaign’s performance.

• Fosters customer engagement. Sharing promotional and educational email content relevant to customers’ needs allows you to interact with them.

• Cost-effective. If you’re running pay-per-click (PPC) ads, you’ll pay for each impression or click your ad receives. In contrast, most email platforms allow you to send as many emails as you want for a small monthly or yearly subscription fee. This makes it a cost-effective internet marketing channel.

• Supports other digital marketing strategies. Email marketing can support other lead-generation channels like content marketing, SEO strategy, and social media marketing. For example, you can share links to your blog posts to drive traffic to your website. This translates to higher rankings on the first page of Google and Bing search engine results.

Companies that enjoy these benefits invest in the right software to implement the email marketing strategies and best practices we’ll mention later and streamline their email marketing campaigns.

When purchasing email marketing software, you must pick between two platform types:

• Conventional platforms like MailChimp and Convertkit offer only email marketing. They have functionalities for building campaigns and tracking their performance. However, you’ll need to import and sort through customer data manually. Plus, accurate revenue attribution is almost impossible.

• Industry-specific platforms that integrate with other marketing channels and business processes like customer relationship management.

For a more seamless process, consider using an industry-specific email marketing platform like ServiceTitan’s Marketing – Pro Email. This allows you to send targeted emails using customer information and service history stored in ServiceTitan CRM and easily track each email's generated revenue.

We’ll explain how the software works in later sections.

What Types of Emails Do Garage Door Businesses Use the Most?

There are multiple types of emails. However, we have whittled down the list to the major types relevant to a garage door service company:

• Email newsletters are sent to customers using a specific cadence—weekly, monthly, daily, etc. They usually contain content published on the blog, educational garage door tips, and recent service updates. 

They are ideal for distributing or repurposing company blog content and sharing customer success stories, educational resources, and job updates.

• Promotional emails promote your services, time-bound offers, and service contracts to subscribers. They contain calls to action (CTAs) that prompt recipients to take a specific action, such as signing up for a service contract, attending a webinar, booking an appointment, or participating in referral programs.

• Lead nurturing emails are email sequences created to engage potential customers at different marketing funnel stages. The goal is to convert prospects into customers and loyal ambassadors by building trust with helpful content. Examples include welcome series and reengagement campaigns.

• Feedback emails are for soliciting feedback and online reviews from customers. They deliver service quality insights and help you understand customers’ preferences to serve them better. You can send them immediately after a job, event, or interaction with customer service representatives.

• Upsell emails promote higher service tiers and upgrades that cost more to existing customers and increase revenue. For example, you can promote a 10 percent discount on a maintenance agreement to a homeowner who just installed a new garage door.

How Can You Create an Email Marketing Campaign for Your Garage Door Business?

Creating an email marketing campaign is a five-step process.

Below, we will reveal how to implement each step and how ServiceTitan's Marketing – Pro Email facilitates the entire process.

1. Create an email list

Running an email marketing campaign starts with assembling email addresses. This includes existing and potential customers willing to receive emails from you.

While we agree that buying an email list is a cop-out for building one yourself, it's most likely a waste of resources. Why?

Because a large percentage of the list’s members won't fit your ideal customer profile, even worse, recipients may delete your emails, mark them as spam, or ignore them, lowering conversion rates and hurting your sender reputation.

Megan Bedford, founder of Mugyver Consulting, a small business consulting firm, advises against buying email lists.

“Buying generic lists off the street is not the best bet,” she says. 

“The people you email should be expecting to hear from you. That's the basic golden rule to live by.”

To build your list, request emails using website pop-up forms on your homepage, in the middle of your articles, and on your service pages. You could also write a valuable article like “Garage door repair tips,” package it into an ebook, and prompt people to submit their emails before downloading it.

2. Define your campaign’s goals

Defining a goal for your email marketing campaign keeps you focused. Goal setting also makes it easier to track and determine success.

Here are examples of email campaign goals:

• Driving website traffic to grow online visibility

• Growing engagement

• Generating new leads

• Nurturing leads into customers

• Promoting an event

• Encouraging signups to your membership program

• Re-engaging dormant customers

Before you pick a goal, identify what your company struggles with. For example, let's say your customer retention rate is low. To generate repeat business, you can run an email campaign promoting a service contract discount.

3. Choose your email type

The next step is to pick an email campaign type that matches the goal you’ve set, your target audience, and the content type.

Let's say you aim to grow your online presence using reviews. This means you'll run an email feedback campaign containing a form or a link to an external questionnaire.

4. Segment your audience

While we've already revealed the numerous benefits of email marketing, sending emails about changing aging garage doors to a customer who installed theirs a week ago isn't ideal. The lack of personalization will annoy the customer, who will delete, ignore, or label it as spam.

Effective email marketing depends on sending the right message at the right time to the right audience. That's where audience segmentation comes in.

Audience segmentation involves dividing your email list using their location, service history and type, and the channel they came from. This helps you send personalized and hyper-relevant emails, reducing bounce rates and increasing conversions.

Conventional email marketing platforms allow you to segment your audience by zip code, interactions with your last campaigns, and demographics. However, most of them require that you install multiple data platform integrations to access advanced segmentation functionalities. Additionally, you still have to manually import customer data using spreadsheets. 

Furthermore, a garage door company needs job history data to fully personalize emails and send hyper-relevant content. 

That’s why we built the hyper-targeting feature into ServiceTitan's Marketing – Pro Emil, to empower home service companies to create audiences using customer and service history data stored in ServiceTitan’s CRM.

You can select the criteria, and ServiceTitan’s system will automatically pick customers who fit them and use those customers to build an email group. Even better, the system assigns a score to the audience you built, allowing you to optimize your segmentation even further to boost performance.

ServiceTitan’s hyper-targeting feature also has exclusion filters that can help you increase the precision of your targeting. For example, you can exclude customers with old garage doors belonging to a certain model. This allows you to target only customers who are more likely to convert.

Returning to Mugyver Consulting’s Megan Bedford, she testified to this tool’s effectiveness in a recent webinar, having used it for email marketing campaigns for multiple clients.

For example, a recent targeted email campaign she ran for a client with the tool yielded the following results:

• 50 inbound calls from an unfilled estimates campaign

• 38 inbound calls from an email campaign targeting customers with expiring memberships

• 47 inbound calls from a holiday campaign

Even better, users report that ServiceTitan’s marketing Pro – Email helps them build targeted email campaigns in less than an hour, thanks to the tool’s intuitive interface. 

Robin Cody, director of marketing and business development for Cody & Sons Plumbing, Heating & Air, says the tool reduced the time it takes to build campaigns from over an hour to only 30 minutes (or less). 

“I just don’t have the time to look into our data, research, and start doing things like building audiences,” Cody says. “That’s what’s so great about ServiceTitan Marketing Pro. I can essentially use it as our customer relationship management software now. I can use and analyze our own data to target customers appropriately.”

5. Track the results

The work is not done after you’ve launched your campaign. You still have to track its performance. That’s how you know if you’re hitting your goals or not.

Here are basic email marketing metrics you should track to gauge performance:

• Bounce rate: Measures the number of emails rejected by the email service provider (ESP). A high bounce rate indicates violating the ESPs guidelines or having an unengaged email list.

• Unsubscribe rate: This indicates the number of people who have unsubscribed from your email list. A high unsubscribe rate could mean your emails are not valuable enough to your audience.

• Click-through rate: Indicates the percentage of people who clicked the link in your email compared to those who opened it. Low click-through rates may mean you need to tweak your email copy.

• Unique open rates: Shows the number of people opening your emails. A low number means you need to improve your subject lines.

Conventional email marketing platforms help track these metrics. However, they don't measure each email’s exact revenue and have limited attribution functionality since they don’t interact with your CRM.

ServiceTitan’s Marketing – Pro Email resolves the attribution problem by allowing you to create and assign unique phone numbers to each email. The system can then attribute each revenue and job to the originating email campaign.

This sort of next-level attribution allows you to optimize your email campaigns for revenue, which helps grow your business.

What Are Some Email Marketing Ideas for Garage Door Businesses?

There are multiple ways garage door companies like yours use email marketing. Here are some examples:

1. Before-and-after content

Using visuals to highlight the results of a recent garage door installation causes prospects to visualize the dramatic transformation you can deliver to their garage, prompting them to hire you.

Use images to visually illustrate the projects and text to tell the story behind them for maximum impact. 

For example, let’s say you are running a re-engagement email campaign for customers who haven’t booked an appointment in the last three months. Place an image of the dilapidated garage door and the new one you installed side by side. Then, use text to explain how you executed the project and back it up with direct quotes from the customer.

The customer's permission should be obtained before sharing the photos. Conceal sensitive information such as their home address, car license plates, or home numbers.

2. Case studies and customer testimonials

Case studies and testimonials are more powerful in convincing customers than your own marketing message. This is because they serve as social proof, provide real-world results, and are often written in an authentic language that resonates with the customer.

Therefore, use testimonials and case studies to support claims and convince readers to act. You can make the email copy more interactive by turning the customer quotes into visuals and strategically weaving them throughout.

Additionally, you can creatively use testimonials and star ratings sourced from customers or your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) listing. For example, you can use a review snippet like “My garage is now the talk of the neighborhood,” as your email subject line. This captures the recipient's attention, forcing them to stop and open your email. 

In email copy, there are other creative ways to use testimonials, star ratings, and case studies:

• Clickable visuals that lead to the case study on your garage door website

• Embedded testimonial videos

• Star ratings as call-to-action buttons

• Customer quotes as email headers

3. Limited-time offers

Exclusively promoting limited-time offers to your email subscribers can generate FOMO (fear of missing out) and an increased perception of value. This ultimately encourages subscribers to take action, leading to conversions. 

For instance, you could promote a 10 percent discount on service contracts for anyone who signs up within 24 hours.

When promoting limited-time offers, segment your audience using criteria such as their job history and ticket size to boost conversions.

4. Informational newsletter content

Sharing informational content in your email newsletter keeps customers engaged and retains top-of-mind awareness until they require your services. It’s also an excellent way to demonstrate expertise, ensuring a positive online reputation.

Here are some examples of garage door information content:

• Garage door maintenance tips

• How to install a garage door

• The costs of different types of garage doors

You can also repurpose a blog article into newsletter content.

What Are Some Email Marketing Best Practices Garage Door Contractors Should Know?

By now, it's already clear that email marketing has numerous benefits.

However, successful email marketing campaigns are the product of small but crucial best practices. 

Let's explore the mechanics of effective email marketing. 

1. Write compelling subject lines

Imagine for a moment that you’re scrolling through your email application and come across two emails. One has a subject line that reads “Last Chance! 20% Off Garage Door Installation This Week Only," while the second says, “Thinking About a New Garage Door?"

Which one would you open? The first one, right? That’s because it possesses the three key aspects of compelling subject lines: it’s time-bound, contains a promise, and sparks curiosity. Besides, no one will want to miss out on the opportunity to replace their garage door at a low price.

Subject lines are the difference between a subscriber opening your email and ignoring it. They convince subscribers to open your email despite their busy schedules and crowded inboxes filled with multiple unread emails.

To write compelling subject lines, reverse engineer what you want the reader to gain or the action they should take after reading your email. For example, say you want customers with creaking garage doors to replace them. Your subject line could be “Frustrated by a Noisy Garage Door? Quieten Your Home Today!"

Another way to capture attention is to personalize subject lines using the recipient’s name and service history. It could be as simple as “Ben, Your Garage Door is Overdue for Maintenance.”

Finally, avoid common subject line gimmicks like using all caps. This can cause ESPs to identify your emails as spam. Megan Bedford comprehensively explains this.

“Pay close attention to your subject line—no exclamation points, dollar signs, emojis, all-caps, or words such as “free” or “promotion” or “offer.” Those are red flags for email service providers trying to protect their customers, and they’ll get you marked as spam in a hurry. There are good online resources, including sendcheckit.com, for testing the spamminess of your subject lines.”

2. Create email sequences

Email sequences are ideal for nurturing garage door leads, re-engaging existing customers, and onboarding new ones. They help you send hyper-relevant content to specific audiences based on their stage in the marketing funnel to prompt them to take a specific action, like booking an appointment.

Three things make for an effective email sequence: a trigger, a goal, and hyper-relevant content.

The goal is the action you want subscribers to take at the end of the sequence. While the triggers are the specific actions or milestones that activate the email sequence.

For example, you can trigger an email sequence once a customer enters the last month of their service contract. You could also create one to welcome first-time customers and upsell them on a maintenance agreement.

Whatever the case, ensure your email list is segmented so the right message reaches the right audience at the right time. 

3. Have a clear CTA

An email campaign is primarily measured using the number of people it compels to take action. That’s where having a clear CTA becomes crucial.

Let subscribers know what to do next using a clear CTA that stands out from the rest of your email design. The copy should be clear, easy to understand, and action-oriented. 

Additionally, use one CTA per email so readers don’t suffer analysis paralysis while deciding which action to take. It should be above the fold and large enough to be clicked on mobile screens.

4. Plan for special occasions

Brands usually capitalize on special occasions, like Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving, to promote their services. This is because consumer spending skyrockets during these periods due to the feelings of joy and happiness.

You should prepare for these occasions ahead of time instead of waiting till the last minute, allowing competitors to get ahead of you. Create email templates and graphics and copy them before the day arrives.

5. A/B test your campaign

A/B tests involve creating two variations of your emails differing in one specific element and sending them to different audience segments. The essence of this activity is to measure an element's impact on email campaign performance. 

For example, you can vary your CTA’s placement on two landing page variations and send them to two different audience groups. The high-performing one becomes the template for subsequent campaigns.

Other email aspects you can A/B test include the following:

• Email copy

• CTA colors

• Delivery time and cadence

• Subject lines

Over to You

Running email marketing campaigns can feel daunting. Fortunately, implementing the above strategies sets you on the path to success.

Regardless of email marketing’s effectiveness, we advise you to pair it with other garage door marketing strategies, such as:

• Local SEO

• Partnerships with local businesses

• Search engine optimization (SEO) 

• Direct mail

• Pay-per-click advertising

Use ServiceTitan’s supreme segmenting capabilities to automate your email marketing campaign and generate significant revenue to grow your business.

ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software for home service providers that streamlines vital business processes to increase productivity, revenue, and cost savings. Currently, over 10,000 contractors across the country use it.