When companies large and small want to reach customers and prospects, they rely on e-mail marketing primarily because it’s fast and affordable.

Today, construction businesses and contractors are using e-mail marketing campaigns tied in to landing pages that are custom designed and programmed for easy distribution and powerful reporting. What’s more, savvy construction companies are now integrating social-media marketing vehicles into their e-mail campaigns and leveraging powerful and geo-targeted applications like Twitter and Facebook. What do all of these marketing tactics have in common? The cloud is now the preferred platform for distribution, measurement and marketing campaign scalability.

Clearly, it’s still ultra-important for companies and organizations to have a web presence that publishes the right content and photography and navigates the user through the buying process simply. Similarly, a website that allows visitors or homeowners to publish their own opinions in the form of a blog or user review will cultivate a community of followers and encourage viral distribution, in other words—online word of mouth marketing. And today, adding video to your website is quite simply the most engaging way to educate, inform and empower your audiences on your brand and influence their buying behaviors.

But why stop there? Construction companies and contractors that have made investments in website and e-mail marketing now have the opportunity to close the marketing loop and truly promote their products and services leveraging cloud technology. Doing so will provide them an opportunity to significantly grow their business, strengthen the relationships they have with their customers and ultimately lower their operating costs.

Cloud marketing is a business development strategy that allows a construction business owner to shift investments in IT and marketing communications from in-house to off-premises environments. This approach saves time and money and gives the business owner all the control they need to make informed, cost-conscious decisions. It also allows small-to-mid-sized companies to focus on their core business, rather than their IT or their website.

 
Then & Now

Five years ago, most racquet construction outfits, as well as companies in just about any business-to-consumer or business-to-business industry were leveraging e-mail marketing to reach customers, members and prospects. But carrying out an e-mail marketing campaign was labor intensive and there weren’t a lot of analytics outside of the limited versions offered by the particular platform being used. Business owners needed to figure who was going to create the campaign, distribute the e-mail, store the campaign data, figure how to prepare for increased landing page and website traffic and how to accurately measure bottom-line performance.

The cloud changes every aspect of this process from distribution to scale to measurement. Today, executing marketing campaigns that rely on cloud technologies allow construction businesses the ability to build an e-mail marketing campaign in less time and at a lower cost. Instead of having to create the campaign from scratch, manually pull the list and import the data, design the e-mail and decide which versions of it go to which parts of the list; it’s all processed dynamically based on the criteria loaded into the automation tools being used.