In September's webinar, the Buildscout team walked through how automation and budget management can take the manual work out of running your campaigns, freeing up time each week without slowing down your lead flow. This article covers what was shown, so you can set the same automations up in your own account.
It's especially useful if you're finding it hard to log in and review new leads every day, or if you want your campaigns to keep running while you're on site or away.
Admin takes up more time than most business owners expect, and construction and property businesses feel it more than most:
The average SME owner loses around 15 hours a week to admin.
74% of employees who use automation say it helps them work faster.
Construction and property teams lose an average of 91 hours per employee per year to paperwork alone.
Over half of construction organisations are still using paper timesheets.
9 out of 10 construction projects run over budget, by an average of around 20%.
The knock-on effect for lead generation is simple: the longer a new lead sits waiting for review, the more of that early "golden window" is lost before a competitor gets there first. Automating your approvals closes that gap.
Automation works best when it's aimed at a tightly defined set of leads you'd approve every time anyway, rather than a whole general campaign. Being specific with your filters means you can trust the automation to send the right letters without you reviewing each one.
From Create (or by editing an existing campaign), set your filters as precisely as you can, for example: application type (e.g. extensions only), one dwelling, a value range (e.g. over £450,000 and under £600,000), excluding retrospective applications, and excluding specific keywords (e.g. "porch").
Check how many leads match, then keep narrowing until you're confident you'd want a letter sent for every result. Tightening filters like this can take a pool of thousands of leads down to a much smaller, highly relevant list.
Set up your letter as normal, then switch on auto-approve.
Click Next and Start Campaign to save. The campaign will now run in the background without you needing to log in and review it.
A good target to aim for is at least 50 letters sent every 30 days per campaign, and doubling that where your location and campaign allow, to keep a steady flow of callbacks and enquiries coming in.
Automatic and manual campaigns can run side by side on the same account. You don't need to automate everything: switch on auto-approve for the campaigns you're confident in, and keep others manual where you want to review each application yourself (for example, where extra judgement is needed). You can also turn automation on and off at any time, which is handy if you're heading out on site or away for a few weeks and want a campaign to keep ticking over.
Budget management sits under Campaigns > All Campaigns > Budget Management, and gives you control over exactly how much gets spent and where.
Daily budget: set an overall daily amount to work with across your account.
Roll over unused budget: if you haven't used your full daily budget on a quiet day, it can roll forward to the next day rather than being lost. To stop this building up indefinitely, rolled-over budget resets every Sunday at midnight.
Per-campaign limits: under Set Limits, you can see how your budget is allocated across campaigns and adjust the split. The allocation view updates as you change it, and turns red if you've allocated more than your daily budget covers, so you can spot and fix it straight away.
For an automated campaign, we'd generally suggest an allocation of around £2–£3 a day, which is normally enough to reach the 50-letters-per-30-days target. Manual campaigns don't need to stick strictly to their allocation unless you specifically want them to, for example if someone else on your team is reviewing applications in your absence and you want to keep their spend in check.
The Sending Today tab shows everything going out that day, including anything that's been blocked because it falls outside your budget. If there's a lead in there you do want to send despite the budget limit, you can select it and choose Send to force it through as a one-off.
If you're running an automated campaign, it's important to have auto top-up switched on. If your letter credits run out and top-up isn't automated, every letter (and the automation itself) will be blocked until you top up manually, which defeats the point of setting it up in the first place.
To set it up, go to Top Up in the left-hand menu, or Settings > Billing, and enable auto top-up. You can choose a preset amount (£30, £50 or £100) or set a custom value.
Our general advice is to top up with a bit more than you think you'll need, rather than a small amount often. A small, frequent top-up can mean several invoices a month landing on your desk (or your accountant's); a larger top-up covering a few months of automated sending, for example £100–£300, means one invoice to deal with instead of many, without changing how much you actually spend day to day.
All your invoices and card details are available any time under Settings > Billing.
Open an existing campaign's menu (the three dots) and select Edit.
Refine your location and targeting so the campaign is narrow and specific.
Set up your letter, then switch on auto-approval.
Click Next and Start Campaign to save your changes.
Set your daily and per-campaign budget under Budget Management.
Turn on auto top-up so letters and automation never get blocked.
If you'd like a hand setting up your automations or budgets, our Customer Success and Account teams are happy to talk it through with you, whether that's a quick call or a screen-share to set things up together.
Re-flow & YouGov — UK construction paperwork time & cost study (re-flow.co.uk/news/construction-research)
MHR — UK construction paperwork & digital timesheet research (mhrglobal.com)
Small Business UK, citing Sage — UK SME admin time & GDP estimate (smallbusiness.co.uk)
ORYX, citing Sage Digital Newsroom — 15 hrs/week admin figure (oryxaiautomations.com)
Vena Solutions — compiled automation statistics: WorkMarket, Salesforce, PYMNTS, iPSL (venasolutions.com)
Contimod — construction cost overrun statistics, international (contimod.com)
LeadResponse — speed-to-lead & first-responder statistics, compiling InsideSales.com/MIT, Forbes and CallPage research (leadresponse.co)
UPrinting — direct mail statistics, incl. personalised vs. generic response rates (uprinting.com)
