Email Marketing Best Practices for Home Service Professionals
Email marketing provides home service professionals with a low cost and effective strategy for stimulating lead and customer engagement. Thrive Analytics found that 68% of home owners are open to receive email marketing communications on a quarterly basis. In terms of costs, most major email marketing providers (HubSpot, Klayvio, Mail Chimp, etc.) provide plans starting below $50 per month. Compared to running digital ads, that can cost home service professionals thousands of dollars per month, email marketing provides an excellent ROI. In my first article, I provide a brief outline on email marketing strategies. Here, we will discuss best practices for implementing those email marketing strategies.
Use a registered domain email address
The first step in any email marketing strategy is to set up an email address that is registered to your website domain. This is essential to making sure your emails get delivered to primary inboxes and not directly to spam folders. A domain email address will look like this: shane@odysseymarketinggroup.com or service@bobsplumbing.com. When I work with contractors and home service professionals, I often see that they are using a personal email or something like: bobsplumbing@gmail.com which is still classified as a personal email. The good news is, you can often buy your domain email when you buy your website domain. Many website builders and hosting providers like Squarespace allow you to buy a domain email address when you buy your web domain. In general domain email addresses make you look more professional so unless you want to burn your money on email marketing software, buy an email domain, I spend $12 a month for mine.
Email segmentation leads to better results
Segmentation refers to grouping your contacts based on their behaviors into their own email list. This is where keeping accurate customer information from the selling process to the completion of a job is essential. For example, if you’re a landscaping business who does sprinkler blowouts in the fall, you would want to segment past sprinkler blowout customers or leads requesting information on your sprinkler blowout service in an email list. The landscaping company could just send a massive campaign to everyone in their list saying “sprinkler blowout season is here” but this strategy is like a fishing boat dropping a mile long net on the seafloor when they are just trying to catch lobsters. Sure, they’ll get some that come up, but they will also drag up a bunch of things that they don’t need. In the case of email marketing, you want to avoid being marked as spam, and people unsubscribing. This generally occurs when you send a message that the recipient does not want. The most effective email marketing strategies provide useful content to their subscribers based on their interests and interactions with your business. In this case, the landscaping company might be sending their email to a smaller list (sprinkler blowout customers and inquiries) but those customers and leads are more likely to respond positively (call, email, online form submission) because you are delivering them with content that you already know they will be interested in. The only exception I’ll make to not using segmentation is for sending a holiday email or letting your customers know about a major business update or change.
Send consistent email campaigns
To be good at anything you need consistency and the same goes for email campaigns. There’s always a sweet spot between keeping your customer engaged and annoying them with emails. During the sales process for a new lead, a customer is more likely to appreciate more consistent communication during the process. However, once a customer is done with your service, they expect to receive less content from you. Factors like understanding your customer lifecycle is key, but in general you want to be communicating somewhere between one month and quarterly. I find that this is the sweet spot of not overwhelming my customers but also not having them forget about me entirely. It’s also important to know that you can stay top of mind with customers even when they don’t click on the email. Sometimes Even seeing that you sent them something keeps them thinking of you and they might even pick up the phone or just go directly to your website.
Here’s a list of email content ideas that I like to send.
Holiday emails: We have Christmas, New Years, Easter, Memorial Day, 4th of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving. Just because there’s a holiday it doesn’t mean we have to be salesmen, keep this simple and personal.
Anniversary Dates: Do you have a customer that has been with you since day 1? Or a customer that’s been with you for over a year? Send them an email with a little promotion. That will separate you from your competition as it helps build customer loyalty.
Review generation: Did someone just have an awesome experience with your business? Ask for their feedback. Reviews are a huge SEO rank signal so use the power of email to support your SEO strategy.
Referral Business: Referred customers are our bread and butter. Create a little referral incentive to have your current customers bring you more business.
Business updates: If you are adding a new service, location, or you and the team just put in some man hours supporting a local cause, let your customer know that you are growing as a business and that you are active in the community.
Implementing a new product: Here’s an example: A painter shares an update on a new cabinet and trim paint that Sherwin-Williams has launched. This accomplishes a few things: First, it shows your customer that as a business you are on top of your industry by using new and improved quality products, second I always find that this makes great content that I can use as a marketer for a landing page, social media posts, and a blog post, and third for SEO associating with a larger brand like Sherwin-Williams provides excellent value because you are linking yourself with an internationally known company.
Helpful tips: These are great to provide helpful information for a customer throughout the year and make your business their go to for advice on the service you provide. Here’s an example: ‘How to prevent septic system overload when guests are in your home’ or ‘4 tips to keep your heating system running effectively’ these also make excellent blog posts and social media posts.
Thanking a customer for their business: Sometimes a thank you goes a long way, we all want to feel appreciated.
Special sale or promotion: This is a straightforward topic and I’ll write a separate article on crafting a successful promotional email campaign. However, notice how I mentioned this at the end? That’s because we often associate email marketing with ‘just trying to sell something’ however this misses the plot. Our goal is to keep people engaged with your business. When we lose engagement and customer loyalty, your business becomes obsolete in the eyes of your customer. As demonstrated, there are a ton of email marketing campaign ideas that extend beyond sales and promotions.
Grab attention with creative subject lines:
A subject line should entice the recipient to click on the email. Designing an email, sending it to a segmented list and having the best content ever is all for nothing if your subject line is flat. Here’s some pro tips to getting a click:
Avoid being salesy: do not, use the word Sale (especially in all caps) these tend to get sent to promotions folders or go right to spam.
Use a call to action: One I like to use is “you’re invited” instead of sale. Here’s what that would look like. Instead of saying “Sale on lawn care services” say “you’re invited to a special offer” This makes the customer feel special, like you chose to give them a better deal.
Posing a question is always a go to: Is your air conditioner ready for summer? Is your house needing a new paint job? Are you tired of mowing your lawn? All of these make people think about a service you offer and when they are thinking about your services, they’ll be enticed to explore them.
Stand out with an emoji: Emojis can be effective in the subject line because they will stand out from the rest of the emails in an inbox. Just be sure to make sure you are using ones that make sense to your message and don’t over do it, sometimes an emoji isn’t appropriate for every audience type.
Use AI to help write subject lines: When I’m stuck, my email software has AI capabilities to write subject lines. I’ll sometimes use that to get an idea and then I’ll make it my own.
Insert a personalization: Most email software allows you to place a personalization code in the subject line and body of your email. That code will pull the recipient's name from their email and add it to the subject line. Here’s the difference: instead of a subject reading “your feedback is important” you can transform it with a personalization and a little more creativity: “How was your lawn care service Ben?” Here, you are asking a question, making it specific to the service your customer received and using their name to make it personal.
Automate your email marketing so nothing gets missed.
Successful email marketing strategies rely on consistency. Automating your strategies will take the heavy lifting out of the equation. Here’s some automation ideas:
Review generation: Once you complete a job, you try to get a review from the customer in the month following the service. I like to add a three step email to get that review where we space it out so we don’t bug our customer. That way we don’t have to create a special reminder or task to contact our customer, we let the email automation take care of that.
Website contact or quote forms: For these, you want to walk the customer through a step by step process on what happens after they contact you. That way, you are nurturing your customer through the sales process.
Helpful content: Keep up with your customers by sending tailored bi monthly content to keep them thinking about you. For the best results, keep it consistent and automate it.
Use branded email templates
Email marketing software allows you to design branded templates and that’s key for stimulating brand awareness. When designing an email I try to keep my word count down to under 200 words. The point is to be concise, to the point and have links for people to click on that go to a desired destination.
Improve email campaigns through analytics
Every time I send a campaign, I want to use it as an opportunity to learn and improve. One thing I like to do is A/B test subject lines or templates. This allows me to send altered versions to the same email list so we can see which one performed better. When it comes to data, I look at open rate, click through rate, read rate, and bounce rate. Open rate is the percentage of recipients who opened your email. Click through rate is the percentage who clicked a link. Read rate refers to the users who spent at least 8 seconds reading your email, and finally bounce rate shows emails that didn’t make it to the intended recipient. You can also learn when people open your emails. That’s important so that way you can schedule a send at a day/time when your emails are most likely to be opened. On that note, I always use a scheduled send instead of real time as I want to send my emails when my recipients will be checking them.
Summary
Email marketing is an extremely effective strategy that offers a cost effective way to keep customers thinking about your business. To get the most out of your email marketing efforts, it is essential to have a domain email address, use segmentation, be consistent with campaigns, send mixed email content, invest time in making a creative subject line, automate customer journeys, and to leverage data and analytics to improve future campaigns. Email marketing content can also be leveraged in your multi-channel marketing strategy as it makes excellent content and subjects for social media posts, videos, blog posts, landing page content, and it can even help your SEO when you leverage reviews and industry knowledge and expertise that gives your business industry authority. For a low cost, this article outlines the high reward potential of leveraging a strong email marketing strategy. There's a lot to dissect here so stay tuned for a follow up video outlining this topic.
This post was written by Shane Doudy Owner | Odyssey Marketing Group
