Establishing brand awareness, nurturing leads, and fostering customer loyalty demands a strategic approach in the competitive landscape industry. Landscaping Email marketing emerges as a powerful tool to achieve these goals, offering targeted communication, cost-effectiveness, and measurable results.
This guide provides a comprehensive framework for landscaping businesses to cultivate a thriving email marketing program.
Why email marketing for landscaping businesses?
Email marketing is a form of digital marketing that uses email to connect with potential customers, raise brand awareness, build customer loyalty, and promote marketing efforts. It is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It is a more evolved, digital form of traditional direct mail marketing.
Though often ignored, Email marketing is a cost-effective way to:
- Generate new landscaping leads (outbound mailers, newsletters)
- Improve lead conversions (drip campaigns, nurture mailers, re-engagement campaigns)
- Encourage Retention and repeat order purchases (newsletters, promotional offers, milestone emails)
- Improve your services (Feedback, survey emails)
As you read this article (or skim through it ;)), you will be able to understand how to best use email marketing to achieve the goals mentioned above for your landscaping business.
Essentials of lawn care email marketing
Now that you have an overall goal in mind, you need to look at several other things before you hit that send button.
Understand that the basis of all emails is contacts. You need a recipient to whom you’ll send your email.
Contacts and email lists
You need contacts to create an audience and send personalized emails.
How you acquire those contacts is a different game altogether.
Buying an email list from a third party is rarely a good idea. If you buy email lists in bulk and send them mass emails, it might land your business in legal trouble.
Why? Mass email techniques are non-personalised non-relevant emails that get in the spam folder faster than you can see your campaign to completion.
There are very specific laws against sending bulk emails to contacts who have not opted to receive any emails from you. See Canada CASL, the US CAN-SPAM act, and Australia’s Spam act.
Always aim to acquire your contacts through legitimate strategies and get their permission so that you can email them.
Some helpful ways you can build your landscaping marketing email list
- Acquire contact details from your landscaping website. Use a pop-up, offer newsletter signup form, or lead magnet landing pages.
- Use your leads from offline marketing such as in-person sales, leads captured in events, from property managers, etc. You can use this list to get them to opt in your emails in your first email.
- Use social media ads or search ads to acquire contact information from those people who have expressed interest in your brand. Include an optional checkbox to get permission for newsletters.
- If you’ve got a database of people or your former prospects, you can get them to opt in.
- Get lead information from your referral programs. Your affiliates can get you leads from your discount programs or partner pricing programs.
- You can acquire leads using giveaways, gamification, and contests on social media or online groups and communities (Your target audience should be present there).
Tips to keep your email lists working for your marketing campaigns
Segment your contacts: Enrich your data as much as you can so you know who exactly you are sending your emails to. This would help in making your emails more personalized and help with the open rate and click rate. If you do not know about these email metrics, you can learn them here.
Keep your contacts in the email list fresh: Prevent contact decay and regularly clean your lists so that all your emails are deliverable to the recipients.
Tag or categorize your contacts: Map actions of each prospect/customer touchpoint with your service. Tag your contacts in multiple ways. Examples: add tags for prospects, customers, your service category, how they were acquired, and location.
Email types
There are multiple options when you are publishing emails. Some content works well as standalone emails while other works better in a series (e.g. welcome sequence, sales cadence). The correct choice will depend on your overall strategy.
Here are some examples to get you thinking about your options:
Transactional emails
Transactional emails are those necessary emails that you send to communicate important account-related information to your contacts. If a person is signing up with you, you need to automatically include them in this segment.
The following email types come in this category:
- Billing and invoices
- Changes to your terms of service or company policies
- Updates to account information including password reset
- Onboarding emails
- Appointments
- Feedback and survey emails
Promotional emails
These are offers, discounts, and coupons you release to get more customers to directly sign up with you.
- Gifts or a value add bundled with your core service
- Promotion offer with a limited-time validity
- Coupon code emails to offer a discount
- Referral credit offer
- Reminders to validity or recharge subscription packages
- Company announcements
Re-engagement emails
Re-engagement emails are used when you want to remind your contacts that your offerings are available for grabs. The goal of these emails is to start the conversation with your contacts again or to get reorders.
- Holiday and seasonal emails (landscaping and snow removal)
- New service offerings
- Reorder your last service package
- Awards that you won
- Your new industry association
- That event you are going to
- Press releases
- Product/platform tutorials
- Top service picks
Nurture emails
Nurture emails help bring your prospects down the funnel. The ideal audience for these types of emails is those who are interested in your service but are not ready to buy yet. The goal of these emails is to nurture the relationship that you have with your contacts. If they start to trust and keep you in their minds, they’ll likely buy from you.
- Curated content emails
- Testimonial and review emails for social proof
- Milestone emails (your business anniversary, customer account milestone, etc.)
- Educational emails
- A day in the life of your employee/contractor
- Industry trends or roundups
Other email types
- Request for referrals
- Thank you emails
- Invite for collaborations or partnerships
- Reminder emails
Cadence and drip sequence
You might have heard about a drip campaign, sales cadence, or welcome sequence. Know how can you use them to achieve your lawn care email marketing goals for your business.
Learn what is an Email cadence and what are drip campaigns here.
The most important thing you can identify to make your drips effective is the trigger.
A trigger in a drip campaign with a defined cadence is either an action or an event. Your email is sent based on a trigger such as on a prospect’s birthday (event) or when a lead checks out your landscaping service but doesn’t call you (action).
Examples where email sequences make sense:
- Welcome sequence and onboard drips to let your customers know how they can fully utilize what you have to offer. (Think lawn maintenance or subscription packages, We love landscaping subscriptions.)
- Subscription renewal emails.
- Retargeting engaged leads to move them down the funnel. Engagement could mean either they click links in your email regularly or you’ve shown them a demo.
- Blog subscriber conversion
- Drip to collect reviews and feedback. They can easily be attached to one of your check-in emails or calls.
- If you have a SaaS platform or an app, incorporate landscaping drip campaigns at user drop-offs to re-engage users.
Please note that your email cadence will differ based on the lead you’ve got. For top-of-the-funnel leads, you’ll do nurture first. For leads with higher purchase intent, you can do an email drip attached to your sales cadence to get them to sign up.
Now that you have a sender (or email list) along with information on what you can send, it’s time to make sure that content from your topic is complemented with context and design.
Content, context, and design
Content and design matched with the right context can do wonders for your email campaign.
Content
For email content, you need to focus your efforts on the following elements:
Not diving deep into the elements (you can identify and understand the elements from the image), we’ll dive right into the prominent practices for success:
- Optimize your subject and preview text (Pre-header) for maximum opens. This is where you make your first impression with your email.
- Hook: Start with a hook that ensures that your email recipient gets hooked to read the rest of the email. The most common hook is starting with a problem that you know your contact is looking to solve.
- Email copy: Always think of your objective before getting your email copy written. Why do you want to send an email to a lead? What would they learn after reading, and what do you want them to do after they have read it? These basic questions will help you write a relevant copy to the recipient and help you get more engagement. Every copy should be directed towards a particular action. Such as clicking on a CTA to buy from you, calling you, or learning more about a particular topic.
- CTA: Include a single CTA and keep it short, simple and visually appealing.
Design
Design is another important element of your email.
There are 2 simple ways you can think about email design. You can either keep it a text-only email (with a CTA button or a graphic-heavy footer) or you can add visual elements to your email to complement your copy.
Remember that email design is not only crafted to make your email look cool, it is also done to compliment your email copy.
In addition to using your brand identity in design, the artwork should help readers get an instant realization of what your email is about.
Context
Context is at the heart of any email in your campaign. The context defines your success with your emails because it is with context your awesome content and email design get noticed and get the right engagement.
Saul explained it much better. Context in email marketing is delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.
The more you know about your audience (who might be/might not be interested in getting their lawn mowed yet), the better you can personalize it for your email recipients. Focusing on context helps you tailor messages to your prospect’s preferences, behaviours, and needs.
Imagine sending a newly launched lawn mower feature to a senior. Do you think the content would be of any use for them? What if you turned that email around to explain how seniors can use the lawn mower and which choice would be best for them (robotic mower vs diesel one that requires pulling a jammed rusted chord to start)? Wouldn’t that be more helpful?
This is one example where context can make all the difference between your email being read you get a call, and your email being moved to the archive or for worse, sent to spam.
The only secret sauce here is “knowing your audience”. When you know who your contact is, you’re better able to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.
Landscaping email marketing Strategies
The best way to start email marketing right away for your landscaping business is by creating a simple strategy and revising it over time to improve your results.
How to create your email marketing strategy
Every good strategy starts with a goal.
Define what your goals are.
If that is too broad, think about what you want to achieve from marketing in the near short term and long term.
Defining Goals
- Do you want to target new service areas? Or you’ve launched a new landscaping service offering and want to get leads for that service? (Short to medium-term goal)
- Are you looking to acquire new customers? (Short term goal)
- Do you want to establish yourself as an industry leader in a few selected landscaping services? (Long term goal)
If you are not ready to think about these goals right now, that’s okay.
As a stakeholder in your business, you would know some problem areas.
Let’s use those problems to create goals for you and then get you thinking about a strategy to achieve those goals.
Thinking about the problem
Think of some problem areas in your business.
- You are acquiring new landscaping customers often but you’re not able to retain them for longer. This is affecting your bottom line and your long-term expansion plans.
- Your marketing department is getting you landscaping leads, but your leads are not ready to commit yet.
- Your customers forget about you the minute they hang up the phone.
- You’re only able to ‘sell’ a few services when you still have a pretty wide portfolio. Your resources take a lot of money, while revenue from those unused services is not that great.
and so on…
These are some of the examples of issues you might be facing along with your day-to-day.
When you have a good list of issues that you want to resolve, start thinking of how you can go about using lawn care email marketing to aid in achieving some of your solutions.
It is worth noting that along with your issues, you need to think about your prospect problems too. So if you want to send emails to your existing customers, you need to know what problems they face regularly within landscaping.
Creating an email marketing strategy
After you have the data such as your contact information, a problem that you’re trying to solve and you know some email types, the email strategy creation becomes easy.
Use this framework and the example to create a simple email marketing strategy for your lawn care business:
What – The purpose of your email
Maplescapes Landscaping wants to start an email marketing campaign to engage existing residential customers with a newsletter and motivate them to avail of our high-quality services again.
Why – Your problem statement
Maplescapes wants to improve its customer retention and increase the repurchase of its services from existing customers.
Who – Who will be the audience of this email campaign
The audience for this campaign will be our existing residential customers from the year 2015. From this set, we’ll segment customers who are more likely to engage in our emails and repurchase. We’ll also use contacts who are decision-makers or can influence the decision-makers.
We know that our existing customers have hardly any time to focus on their lawns. They know about the value of maintenance. They only need a push as to what they can achieve with our services and increase the value of their property.
How – How will you achieve your goal
To engage existing customers and allow for repurchases, we’ll start a weekly newsletter with useful and helpful information on best practices for lawn maintenance and solving day-to-day problems related to lawn care, pest management and tips for enhancing their outdoor living space.
For email campaign delivery, Maplescapes will use the existing email provider that we use (Mailmodo) and we’ll source the contacts from our existing CRM (Hubspot) and create an email list in Mailmodo.
For recipients, we’ll filter out contacts who generally do not engage in our transactional emails and who have repurchased our services in the past three months.
Maplescapes will also refresh and enrich its contact data using a third-party data enrichment provider to gain context and a better understanding of our context.
The design and content will be in-house with excerpts sourced from our team of professionals who are experts in their field.
Context: We know that our customers are from this region __, where they have warm season grass and x grass types. Our initial set of advice will focus on keeping one’s lawn looking green and fresh.
Details – more details for your strategy and execution of it
Content topics:
- Seasonal Lawn Care Tips: Tips on how to maintain lawns during different seasons, especially focusing on the care needed for warm-season grass and x grass types prevalent in your customer’s region.
- Pest Management Advice: Information on common pests that affect lawns in our customer’s region and how to effectively manage them.
- DIY Landscaping Ideas: Simple and cost-effective DIY landscaping ideas that our customers can implement (or call us) to enhance their outdoor living space.
- Professional Insights: Share insights and advice from our team of professionals on various topics related to lawn care and landscaping.
- Success Stories: Showcase before and after stories of our recent projects to demonstrate the effectiveness of our services.
- Promotions and Offers: Announce any special promotions or offers that we have for existing customers to motivate them to avail of our services again.
Cost:
The data enrichment (optional) will cost us $200 for 5000 contacts. This will be a one-time cost.
Design and content will be in-house. We’ll incur around $40-$60 for each newsletter according to our cost per hour for our content writer and designer. (average of $50 per hour if we hire freelancers). We will need 4 newsletters each month and 24 newsletters for a total duration of 6 months.
Mailmodo already costs us $70 per month, there will not be any additional charges for email newsletter campaigns.
Total cost for the next 6 months: $1400
Timelines and targets:
We’ll send 1 newsletter in a week, and alternate times between mornings and evenings to optimize the opens and clicks. We’ll start with weekends since that is when a residential decision-maker will most likely open their email. We’ll also try other days in a week to optimize our delivery.
The target will be to get 2 service calls to services from each newsletter. We’ll target a total of 18 service calls in 6 months and a revenue of $9,000.
The expected return from this email campaign is 642%
Landscaping Email marketing strategies for your landscaping business
Here are just some of the email marketing strategies you can start with.
We’ll create a spin-off post to give you some strategies successful businesses have been using for growing their business. Subscribe to our newsletter to get notified when that post goes live on Maplescapes.
- Send monthly/weekly newsletters to your existing (Current and past) customers. Keep it highly valuable for your audience.
- Use segments of your audience to send special offers, and new service announcements to upsell your services.
- Invite customers to a relevant landscaping event you’re attending to connect with them using email. Make sure to do it while you’re planning for your next lawn care event.
- Early bird discounts for seasonal maintenance. Give your past customers an irresistible offer for work that they need to get done anyway (Deicing, seasonal contracts).
- Offer free maintenance with a service. You’ll not earn with the maintenance, but you’ll get a customer who is going to buy that service from you and will remain your customer until you keep doing maintenance.
- Use your leads that are not ready to buy from you but can be your good customers someday. Nurture them through content that builds trust and credibility with you.
- Create a separate list for contacts who are not the direct decision makers for buying your services, but can influence that decision with their referrals. Use that list to create an email campaign drip where they do not call you to buy but influence others(Property managers) to contact you.
- Updated a page, added a new service page or published a new blog on your website? Email it to people who would find it useful to aid in your website marketing strategy.
Stay tuned for the email marketing strategy post 🙂
Tracking performance
To evaluate your email campaign performance, you need to measure some prominently used metrics.
A good email marketing solution will help you track number of email opens, and clicks including who clicked what link, conversions, bounces, who unsubscribed and more.
There are some things that software might not be able to help you with – Revenue from emails, ROI, calls that you get because of your emails, and interaction of your website after a user lands on your website from an email link.
Some of these you can calculate yourself – Revenue, calls, conversion, ROI etc. For example, revenue would depend on the service that a customer buys from you and conversion would depend on what action you consider as a conversion – downloading an ebook from you, creating an account on your platform or booking a free consultation call with you.
For user behaviour on your website, you can use UTM parameters along with your URLs and use Google Analytics/PostHob to see their activity. More details on analyzing user behaviour are in our lawn care website creation guide.
Keep a record of how each email is doing in your campaign or drip in an Excel sheet so that you can improvise and do better in the next set that goes out to your audience.
Side note: email opens is a vanity metric and doesn’t work on iOS users. Emails sent to them might be seen as open by default due to privacy features.
You can use a free template from Hubspot for tracking your campaigns. (Delete what you do not require and add some metrics and targets that you’ve created).
Want to know more?
Contact us to create your email marketing strategy at ZERO cost.
We’ll need these details from you:
- A business problem you’re facing that you think email can solve.
- About your business – Your products and service, areas you serve and more. The more non-sensitive details you can give us, the better (Context in email marketing is the key)
- What do you expect to get out of the campaign?
Why we’ll help you with email marketing strategy:
Our experts at MapleScapes like a challenge!
Since the strategy will be free and we won’t sell you anything at all, we request you share Maplescapes among business groups you know.
Please note that we’ll only create a comprehensive strategy for you to achieve your business growth goals. The execution and ownership of results will fall on you. If you’d like your campaign to be executed, we’ll refer an agency that can get you the results you need without burning a hole in your pocket.
