In your emails, go with substance over flash.
I think about interactive content (e.g. GIFs and quizzes) like salt for my favorite dish. A little bit brings it all together. Too much ruins the experience.
Here’s when I recommend a sprinkling of interactive content for solar and energy efficiency contractors.
Events: Countdown Timers
People hate losing things.
A countdown timer shows your audience that they’re about to lose something unless they take action. Consider adding a countdown timer when you’re introducing webinars or other events. They come standard with most email marketing platforms and look like this:
Engagement: Quizzes
Quizzes give your audience a chance to share their perspective.
Use quizzes to better understand your clients and to make sure you’re creating content that hits the mark. After a project, I recommend asking each client how their project went. It could look like this:
What was your experience?
- It couldn’t have gone better!
- Mostly good. I’d work with you again.
- It went OK, but there were issues.
- I wouldn’t work with you again.
- I wish I never worked with you.
Depending on how your clients respond, you can ask for reviews and referrals, or follow up personally if things went sideways.
Feel free to schedule a chat if you’d like to talk about setting up an automated email sequence for your past clients.
New Leads: Personalized Calculators
Some contractors use personalized calculators to connect with new clients, especially clients who are interested in what you do but aren’t ready to schedule an estimate. You’ll definitely want to stay in touch.
For example, you could add a solar calculator to estimate the costs and savings of a new solar energy system. Someone gets the report by entering their email.
Here’s a calculator I created to offer a preliminary SEO audit for website visitors.
The calculator kicks off an email report that looks like this:
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You can set up solar or energy saving calculators to send similar reports to your prospective clients. Could be a good conversation starter.
