Typically a roofing company will send SMS messages to send appointment reminders or follow up with past clients. That is, they’re using SMS as a way to communicate with leads they already have in their system.

However, our data shows that using outbound text campaigns (both SMS & MMS) as part of your marketing strategy can be an effective and affordable way to:

• Quickly target the highest performing neighborhoods in your market

• Lower your cost per lead

• Generate a higher ROI

The problem is that most roofing companies don’t know how to legally and efficiently deploy an SMS marketing campaign. If you don’t set up your campaigns correctly – and that means adhering to federal law and carrier policies across the US – your messages won’t get seen, and you won't see results.

In this guide, we cover:

• The benefits of using SMS marketing as a roofing company

• The challenges with SMS marketing

• How to put together your own SMS marketing campaign with GlassHouse (with real customer stories)

About us: GlassHouse helps you get more affordable leads by sending targeted, personalized text messages and emails to prospective customers in areas that you designate. We consult with a national law firm whose attorneys specialize in Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) compliance and regularly review our platform to help ensure our service complies with federal laws. In our experience, an SMS outbound marketing strategy works best for roofing companies that are bringing in $5 million+ in annual revenue. If that’s you, you can schedule a free demo or keep reading below to learn more.

The benefits of using SMS marketing as a roofing company 

To get new leads, roofing companies typically rely on a mix of: 

• Email marketing

• Ad campaigns (like Google Display Ads, Facebook Ads, etc)

• Direct mailers

• Physical door knocking / canvassing

While these various marketing strategies work, they can come with tradeoffs. First, these strategies treat your whole city like one giant, undifferentiated market, which means you’re allocating marketing spend to areas of the city where your customers are not. Second, these traditional marketing strategies lack personalization, have expensive set up costs, and come with hard-to-track attribution and steep competition. All of these tradeoffs can result in a much lower overall ROI and unpredictable growth.

For example, direct mailers are generally very expensive to execute. Plus, once the campaign is executed, you need to wait for your mailer to arrive in someone's mailbox and hope they engage with your mailer. And even if a customer does, it’s hard to track attribution. Without knowing where and which types of mailers worked well for your business, you can’t strategically scale up your roofing company into new territories. 

Or take physical door knocking. D2D canvassing continues to work for roofing companies, but it’s expensive, labor-intensive, and time consuming. You need sales reps going door to door, which means there’s a significant limit on how many prospects you can target. 

SMS marketing can solve these pain points and much more. When you use SMS marketing to canvass an area (such as a neighborhood or a ZIP code), you can:

• Filter your audience so you’re only targeting your best customers. When you send outbound texts with our software, you know key information about who you’re reaching out to. You know the age of their home, when they moved in, their income, etc. This lets you target only those customer demographics that are a good fit for your business.
  
  

• Get your message in front of your audience immediately, not a week or two after creating your campaign. An SMS message is immediate. This is especially important when you’re running a campaign in a neighborhood that was just hit by a storm and is in need of roof repair.
  
  

• Target a larger audience. With SMS marketing, you’re not limited by how many doors your team can physically knock on.
  
  

• Track attribution. When a customer responds to a message you sent, it’s easier to track attribution. This helps you evaluate whether or not a campaign was successful. Sometimes customers won’t respond directly to your text message, but instead look up your business online, and then reach out to you. At GlassHouse, we can set up integrations with your CRM to help us track those leads as well, so you can get a fuller picture of what’s working and what isn’t.

Plus, you can support your door knocking strategy with outbound SMS

Most of the roofing companies we work with don’t fully replace their door-to-door canvassing efforts with SMS marketing. Instead, they use our software to send personalized messages to homeowners before a physical person goes out to knock on their door. By reaching out to homeowners before you go knocking on their door, you’re turning a cold touch outreach into a warm touch, because your sales rep is following up on a text that was sent out. 

You can also use SMS marketing to first discover which homeowners are more interested in your service, and then send your sales reps there. This means less time chasing prospects that won’t turn into leads, and more time closing deals.

The challenges of putting together an SMS marketing strategy

A key challenge in SMS marketing is making sure your message is seen by your target audience. Most of us use our phones throughout our day. Our phones are one of the first things we interact with when we wake up, and one of the last things we interact with when we go to bed. This means your customers can engage with a text from your business when it’s convenient for them, and a text won’t go as unnoticed as an email buried in an inbox or a direct mailer that’s lumped in with junk mail. 

But there’s still a risk of a customer never receiving your text – thanks to features like spam filtering – if you don’t set up your campaign correctly. 

When putting together an SMS marketing campaign, you want to:

1. Make sure that you’re reaching out legally.

2. Make sure that your texts won’t get blocked by phone carriers.

3. Personalize your message to your audience, so it doesn’t read as spam.

Below, we look at how GlassHouse helps you develop and send out an SMS marketing campaign that can get your messages seen by your target audience.

How to increase ROI and lower your cost per lead with GlassHouse (with real customer success stories)

At GlassHouse, we help roofing companies increase their ROI by lowering their cost per lead. We do that via text outreach, or what we call digital door knocking. 

When you use GlassHouse, we help solve the challenges associated with SMS marketing by:

• Making sure customer information is updated. We use various data sources to pull customer data, to make sure you’re contacting the right people with the most up to date information.
  
  

• Making sure you’re reaching out to your customers legally. We consult with a national law firm that specializes in TCPA law – which is the law that governs how companies can contact customers – to make sure our service is fully compliant.
  
  

• Making sure your messages aren’t being blocked by carriers. We follow best practices, such as carrier campaign registration, message content review, and message variant testing, to help ensure carriers don’t block your outreach. (Read more about how we adhere to federal law and carrier policy here.)
  
  

• Making it easy for you to personalize your campaigns towards the homeowners you’re targeting. We make it easy for you to choose which homes you target with your campaigns.
  
  

To see how GlassHouse would work for your business, you can schedule a free demo or keep reading below.

Getting started with GlassHouse

To set up your SMS marketing campaign, you first focus on where to prospect. In our software, you can draw around the neighborhoods or streets you want to target. This would be where your best prospects are, where there were recent weather events, where you want to crack into a new neighborhood, etc.

Then, you can filter who you’re targeting. You can filter by home size, home value, home age, lot size, and last sale to hone in on the homeowners that make the most sense for your jobs. 

Finally, you can customize and monitor your campaigns. 

You can use our proven message templates for roofing companies or create your own. 

As replies start rolling in, every positive reply surfaces in your sales dashboard, where you can manage the conversation and track its status.

Types of SMS marketing campaigns you can set up with GlassHouse

Sending out an SMS campaign after a storm

When a hailstorm hits an area, most homeowners haven't even contacted their home insurance company, let alone start their search for a roofing company. This means you have potential customers who may need roofing services but haven’t started looking yet.

The night before your crew rolls out, you can use GlassHouse to draw shapes around the affected neighborhoods and schedule your texts to go out at 9 a.m. By the time your door knockers arrive, homeowners have already heard from you. This is changing a cold touch to a warm touch and increasing the chances of a lead closing.

Breaking into a new neighborhood after completing a job

Every job you complete is a credibility signal for the surrounding neighborhood. A message like "We just finished a roof on Elm Street and noticed several homes nearby with similar shingle aging — we'd love to stop by for a free inspection while we're in the area" lands completely differently than a cold ad from a company the homeowner has never heard of. GlassHouse lets you capitalize on that before you pack up and leave.

Next steps and additional resources for your roofing business 

If you’re ready to learn more about how GlassHouse can help your roofing company generate a higher ROI by lowering your cost per lead, you can schedule a free demo.

We also have additional resources available on our website for roofing companies, including:

• A guide on getting roofing leads, from using D2D canvasses, lead aggregators, referrals, and more.
  
  

• The three-part system for growing a home service franchise, including tips on operational systems, marketing, and how to choose the right franchisees. 

You can also use our ROI calculator below to estimate the kind of ROI you can see when using GlassHouse to help with your SMS marketing.