Do you ever wish you had a simple way to reach a large number of potential cleaning clients for your business without having to invest hours or lots of money to do it? Well, email marketing could be a great option for you. In this post, you’ll learn how to get more cleaning clients with email marketing.
Why building an email list is important for your cleaning business
Some people in the digital marketing world have made claims that email marketing is obsolete, however, the reality is that email marketing is one of the best strategies to build your cleaning business for a number of reasons. One of the key reasons you should be building an email list and utilizing email marketing is that it can give you massive leverage.
With tools like an email autoresponder, you have the ability to instantly write and email and reach every single one of your potential customers, existing customers, and leads. You’ve probably heard that sales is a numbers game, so being able to reach the masses of potential clients in almost no time is powerful.
In addition to having massive leverage, email marketing gives you the ability to follow up with your potential cleaning clients on autopilot. You can build an email series that will send multiple days of educational emails that can passively sell your leads on your services.
Not every person who becomes a lead for your cleaning business will be ready to hire you on day one. With email marketing, you have the ability to continually remarket to those leads, which can develop a relationship of trust and credibility.
When your leads feel like they know, like, and trust you, it’s much easier to convert them into cleaning clients.
How to build your email list to get cleaning clients
As a cleaning business, there are several ways to build your email list effectively. The most common option is going to be to offer a free quote or free estimate of your services.
This free estimate option is a great way to start, and it should be on your site, but it may limit the number of leads you can generate. Ideally, you want to have methods of generating leads from potential clients, that may not be ready to request a quote yet.
Many of your website visitors will be in research mode or comparison mode and are just checking out your site first before they decide if they should do business with you. For people in these categories, you’ll want to create some method to capture their information.
A great way to generate cleaning leads outside of a free estimate is with a lead magnet. A lead magnet is just something you offer for free in exchange for a name, email, and even phone number. This could be something like an ebook, checklist, video series, infographic, etc. Another great option is to have them sign up for special offers only subscribers will see.
Lots of businesses have developed an ongoing newsletter to try and get leads. This is a good place to start, but you’ll get more cleaning leads and build your email list faster if you offer something in addition to just an email newsletter.
How to use email marketing with a followup series to convert cleaning leads
To help you automate some of your sales and followup process you should develop an email series for your new cleaning leads. The basis of this email series should be to educate and sell your services.
Unfortunately, most cleaning businesses just write emails that sell their services. Selling is important, but if you are too pushy you come off as desperate, and it can be a turn off for new potential customers.
Ideally, you should focus most of your emails on education about your services. This could cover things like your process for cleaning a home or business, the standards you use, how your products are safer, how your employees are better trained than the competition, etc. At that point, you want to simply sell your services on the back end.
Follow the 80/20 rule. 80% of your content should be value-based and educational, and only 20% should be a sales message.
How to structure your email series for effective email marketing
When you are structuring your email series it should ideally last about 5-7 days. You should send out one email a day for the first 2-3 days and then gradually spread out the frequency of emails by a day or two for each email.
This reason for this is that you don’t want to get annoying for your prospects. You start out sending an email a day for the first few days as that is when people are most likely to hire you.
Over time you spread out the email broadcasts to continue to build the relationship with the list. This can continue to develop a relationship with your leads.
Each piece of value-based and educational content your leads receive develops credibility for your business and positions your company as an expert. In the future when the timing is right for your prospects, they will tend to hire you versus your competitors because of this relationship you developed.
How to write emails for marketing cleaning business
Now the good news is that you don’t need to be a professional writer to write quality emails for your cleaning business. There are some simple techniques you can use to improve the quality of your writing and to send emails that can turn into customers.
The first thing you should use as a foundation for writing quality emails is to keep them conversational. Often times, cleaning business owners write emails like a corporate robot.
For many people, this writing style comes off as fake and insincere. Instead, write conversationally like you are talking to one person face to face. Also, with this strategy, act like you are writing as one person and not a company.
Another tip is to use calls to action in your emails. This means you tell your reader what to do. For example, “Click here to check out our new blog post on ways to save money when hiring a janitorial service.”
If you are looking for additional ways to sell in your emails, without being salesy, consider using a “p.s. line.” What this means is that at the end of your emails, you insert a “P.S.” and then add a call to action that leads to the next step in your sales process.
For example, you could say something like, “P.S. Are you still considering hiring a house cleaning service? Click here to get a free estimate on our services.” If this P.S. line comes after your email you can sell without being overly pushy.
Tips for writing email headlines so people actually open your emails
Your email headline could be one of the most important aspects of your emails. You could write the greatest email ever, but if no one opens it, it doesn’t matter.
There are several strategies for improving your open rates on emails but one simple one you can implement is asking questions. Along with asking questions, you want to bring up a problem or pain point for your ideal customers.
For example, you might use a headline like, “Are you sick of paying for a commercial cleaning service that misses the little things that are important to you?” With a headline like that, you could then talk about your cleaning service and how attention to detail is one of your strong suits.
Asking questions in your headlines makes people think and it creates engagement immediately. This can help increase your open rate significantly.
You can also ask questions while casting vision or while mentioning a desire your ideal clients have. For example, you might say something like, “Are you ready to come home from work to a sparkling clean home?”
Another thing to pay attention to regarding your headline is the first sentence you write in your email. In most email browsers, the first sentence is also readable for most people. That sentence can be another method to draw people into reading your email.
Other ways of how to use email marketing to grow your cleaning business
If you’ve followed this process of writing quality emails that lead with value first, and don’t overly spam your list with sales offers, you can use email marketing in a lot of other ways to grow your cleaning business.
When you sparingly use sales emails, you can write the occasional email promoting a discount or special offer and people will actually take action on it. You can also use email marketing to help you fill open spots for a day if your calendar isn’t completely booked.
Another option that can work well via email marketing is selling gift cards. Typically people who buy gift cards to your cleaning service have used your services before and your email list is likely full of warm leads perfect for selling gift cards.
You can also ask for referrals through email marketing. As part of your email marketing strategy, you should segment your email list. This means separating customers from just leads.
With a list of your customers, you can ask for reviews or referrals from the people who have likely been your customers for a long time. Another benefit of a segmented email list of customers is you can upload that list into Facebook and use it to run highly targeted Facebook ads.
Overall, if you are looking to grow your cleaning business effectively online, be sure to implement an email marketing strategy.