Task Force Entrepreneur
Task Force Entrepreneur (TFE) is a podcast for entrepreneurs interested in the service industry. It began as a way to document the creation of a new service-oriented business, and aims to provide a no-fluff narrative on all things entrepreneur!
Task Force Entrepreneur
You're losing customers if you don't do this one thing
In e-commerce, everyone knows email marketing is key. But in service businesses? Pressure washing? Cleaning companies? We'll discuss why it should be a key part of your strategy if it's not already. This episode originally aired July 28th, 2023.
Hey everybody, mike here and welcome to Task Force Entrepreneur. The podcast I started went from being a tech engineer to starting a house cleaning business. Yep, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I hope you enjoy the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to Task Force Entrepreneur, and in today's podcast I want to talk about why companies in the service industry are missing a major aspect of their business, and that is email marketing.
Speaker 1:And I know email, you know a lot of us. It kind of has a negative connotation, right. It's kind of annoying. You get spam emails, you get on a list, that sort of thing, right. But the reality is it works. The majority of Americans or people in the world check their email, right, I'm not saying it's the most effective always, but it is effective, and so I want to talk about that. And you know, if at this point you're shaking your head, saying, mike, that's an outdated method of marketing or advertising, whatever you want to call it right, let me just let me make you a believer.
Speaker 1:I want to lay out a couple of situations that I've encountered personally. So the first one is we got our house painted. So we live in Florida, where the sun perpetually bakes the paint on your house and it seems like every five to seven years tops. You got to get your house painted again and we also have a really strict H-Way Don't get me started on that so we'll get real friendly letters from them after about five years telling us we need to paint our house again. So we got our house painted a few years ago. Company did a great job, found them on Google. They had good reviews. We hired them. Like I said, they did a good job. But the funny thing is that was a few years ago and now, as we start to talk about, hey, it might be time to get it painted again, I don't even remember the name of the company. I mean, I can Google them and maybe I'll recognize them, but I don't recall them off the top of my head. So the reality is, when it comes time for me to spend a lot of money on this service that they already did a great job on, I'm going to roll the dice essentially, and hopefully I get the right company, and if I don't, then that's okay too. I might land on a different company. I might mistake a different company for them, get a quote and say, yeah, that quote looks great. I know it's a different company, but that's okay. Another scenario we hired a pressure washing company. Same exact story, same outcome. We had them. They did a great job. I have no contact with them. I don't know the name of the company anymore. Again, I'm sure if I really dug I could find it, but I don't have the time for that, I'll just Google it. I'll Google pressure washing companies near me and I'll go based on reviews. That's what I typically do.
Speaker 1:Final example my daughter's car needed some work. So I Googled a mechanic that specialized in European cars and I found one called them. Everything was great, even set up an appointment. To be fair, it was kind of like a loose appointment. It was kind of like, hey, bring it by sometime on Friday or whatever. Right? I said, okay, yeah, sounds great.
Speaker 1:Again, I was very busy, I was traveling at the time and all of that. I just said I'll get back to it. I'll look up their address later. I knew it was in the area, I just didn't know exactly where. But unfortunately, when my trip finished I went to look them up. I could not find who I had talked to. I couldn't find it in my recent calls. I Googled them again. Nothing stood out to me, I completely lost the contact that I had.
Speaker 1:In that case, that might have been solved by a simple hey, let me get your phone number and email and I'll send a confirmation email or something. That's neither here nor there. That's not the topic that we're talking about. The point is that in all of these scenarios, the service business missed out on potential revenue and ultimately profit because they did not keep in touch with me. So my position on this is that every service business should have an email list. I don't really care what you do If you're a plumber, pest control, handyman, roofing company, pressure washing, landscaping, you name it dog grooming you should have an email list, at the very least to use it to stay in touch with your customers.
Speaker 1:So let's lay this out. Let's lay out this alternate reality. Let's say the painting company. You know when I originally used them, as you know when I hired them. Let's say they added me to their mailing list and they said hey, you know, mike, we're only gonna contact you, you know, like once a year or something, right? Just as a reminder, would you want to get on our list so we can stay in touch? We also have occasional discounts or something like that, right? And I said, yeah, you know, I mean I don't need anything right now, but sure, why not? They could easily automate a workflow where I got an email once a year or once every six months or once every three months or whatever, right, but they could ensure that the email frequency increased Once it got to around five to seven years, when the average paint job here kind of wears down right, so they could really target me during the time I'm most likely I'm going to need to hire another painting company. So that's, that's one potential case, right?
Speaker 1:Another example is the pressure washing company, right, that's something that you know. It's not necessarily five to seven years, especially in Florida. I think it could be sooner. I mean, not every, you know, some people will do it on their own, but the results provided by an actual pressure washing company are oftentimes better, right? Plus, they don't just do your driveway, they can wash your house and all kinds of stuff, right? So let's say, in that scenario, I hired them to do my driveway and they continue to stay in touch and they put me on a list for, you know, house cleaning prospects or something right? So I would get emails all about house washing, about the chemicals they use. You know why, or why not, they're safe.
Speaker 1:You know, maybe trends, maybe how it can. You know, just a simple house wash can make your house appear, you know, better shape and get more money in terms of selling it. I don't have it in front of me, but I saw a statistic not that long ago that actually did say that a basic house wash and roof cleaning would actually, on average, get I want to say it was like five or ten Thousand more an asking price just by having the house look really clean from the outside. Again, I don't have a reference for that, but it sounds legitimate to me. So, if you're with me and at this point you're like, yeah, you know, I think I agree with you, mike, that these companies are missing the boat in terms of email marketing, the solution is really simple and it blows me away how you know me being new to the service industry in terms of being an owner owning my cleaning business mission cleaning services, which I'm documenting as part of this podcast, obviously and kind of walking through starting it all the way to the first million.
Speaker 1:The thing is with email marketing is it's so crazy simple to implement and I understand why people don't get it right. If you are a plumber, you probably Are just not the most technology savvy person. It's just. It is what it is right. I'm more tech savvy, but could I fix your toilet? Yeah, probably not, and you probably wouldn't want me to right. So I'm not saying it's better or worse, it's just different skill sets.
Speaker 1:All you really have to do, you know, to not over complicate it is you know, pick an email marketing provider, right? My favorite is MailChimp. I've just always used them. I know there's some other options, but I just kind of defaulted to them and they've been okay. So you pick a provider such as MailChimp, you sign up, you create a list and at that point you need to capture emails for your list. Pretty straightforward. Once you've captured emails, you then send out emails. Now you can do this manually, not what I would recommend.
Speaker 1:What I've always been a fan of is automating it so you can actually write emails ahead of time with sales discounts. You know, I don't know five reasons you need to pressure wash your house or something like that, right, you can automate those and have it kind of a customer Enter, kind of like a workflow and like an automation workflow. So what that means is, once they get added to your list, they get their first email right away, right. And then maybe they get another one two weeks later, then another one three months later and then another one two months later Right, you can automate all of that. So it just happens. 99% of that work is done up front.
Speaker 1:Now, obviously, you'll probably want to keep, you know, tweaking your emails and playing with the subject lines and that sort of thing, right, subject lines alone can actually determine quite a bit. You know how many people will open that email, right. So there's things you can play with and tweak. But the point is you don't have to be a tech expert to implement these things. It's really, really simple and I think a lot of people know this, but I don't think a lot of people know this in the service industry Get your email list, create it, capture some leads and then automate some emails to those people and make sure you're asking for something right. Ask for a phone call or, you know, a quote request or something right. Ask for something. That's really all there is to it. If you enjoyed this podcast, you found it useful or maybe just nice to hear different perspective. It would mean a whole lot to me if you could leave me a review for a new podcast like Task Force, entrepreneur reviews or everything. So that said, thank you, I'll see you next time.
