Business is Slow? Send a Monthly Newsletter

Summary

In this episode of the Off the Ladder podcast, Branden Sewell discusses effective strategies for home service business owners to thrive during slow periods. He emphasizes the importance of utilizing past customer relationships through newsletters and CRM systems to maintain engagement and foster connections. Branden shares insights on how to create newsletters that are not solely sales-driven but focus on building relationships and providing value to clients. He also highlights the significance of consistency in communication and offers practical advice on implementing CRM tools like Jobber for better customer management.

Takeaways

Utilize past customer relationships to drive business.
Newsletters should focus on relationship building, not just sales.
Consistency in communication is key to staying top of mind.
Share personal stories and updates in newsletters to foster connection.
A CRM is essential for managing customer relationships effectively.
Automated emails can simplify the newsletter process.
Engagement through newsletters can lead to future work.
Building relationships can enhance customer loyalty.
Use tools like Jobber for efficient customer management.
Be a resource for your clients to enhance their experience.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Business Growth Strategies
00:51 The Power of Newsletters in Business
05:22 Building Relationships Through Communication

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Transcript

Branden Sewell (00:01.56)
Hi everybody, I'm Brandon Sula. I'm the owner of Seal Pro Painting, located in central Florida. I'm also the host of the Off the Ladder podcast. And we exist to help home service business owners learn so that they can lead well and ultimately live life off of the ladder. I'm on this series right now. We'll jump right into this. It's all about what to do when business is slow. And really these principles apply when you're starting out as well.

There's a lot of hustle involved and it's just doing some really fundamental things to help drive business. So last week we talked about getting on the phone and calling past customers and how that is overlooked so many times. You have this gold mine sitting in front of you in a CRM or some type of database and you're not calling past customers.

And so in that last episode, is something that I talked about. Today's episode, we're going to talk about the power of a newsletter. Now, honestly, I've done newsletters ever since I started my business. So for eight years, I've done newsletters. Now, there was a really fundamental change to my newsletters.

in around 2022, 2023, I believe it was, when I had a coach and he taught me a new way to go about my newsletters. So a lot of these principles are things that I've done over time and through coaching and mentorship, I've kind of tweaked how I've done them and it's made a world of difference. So with newsletters,

They are powerful and the whole concept to newsletters is staying top of mind with your client. So what good does your database do for you, your CRM? You know, for us, we use Jobber and so we have over 2500 contacts in Jobber that we have the opportunity to stay connected with and build a relationship with. And that's really what your newsletter should be about.

Branden Sewell (02:21.238)
Now before I had coaching or mentorship, I treated my newsletter like a sales tool or email marketing as a sales tool to just sell something and to try and drive sales that way. The only problem with that is that people avoid being sold to. don't want to be sold to. So if they pull up their email,

and all they ever see from you is a bunch of sales offers and just click bait emails, then they are not going to engage with those. So where you might want to say top of mind and build relationship through those, you don't. You just drive your customers to frustration. So what I learned is that your newsletters should be consistent and they should be relational.

What that means is when you send out a newsletter, don't make it about an offer. Make it about giving your customer, your client base, a update on what's new going on in the business. What are you currently experiencing as a business owner personally? That could be...

family updates. It could be a vacation you took. It could be your favorite restaurants around town. It could be your favorite places to visit in your local area with your kids and family to have fun. Really what it is, is it's building relationship and then it's becoming a source of, it could be a source of entertainment, a source of information.

a source of just relationship and connection. And so you want to get away from the sales and you want it to become like this thing that customers look forward to getting and seeing updates and information and all of those things. So we've shared things over the years of, you know, what are our Christmas traditions? What

Branden Sewell (04:36.046)
What do we do on the new year? Where are our favorite places to vacation? If we were doing like a local staycation, what are some fun things that we like to do in our state? Places we've been that we love and would recommend people going. We've given updates about our family growing and expecting children and children being born and anniversaries and birthdays and all of those things, we get a ton of feedback on from customers.

And so what that does again is it helps to build relationship. It helps to foster connection and communication with your past clients, which in turn can lead to future work because now you've created this relationship that isn't all about sales. You're letting your customers into your world and then they feel more connected to you. So the next time that painting project comes up,

the first person they think about is whoever at whatever company and that's who they're going to use. they're, they have a conversation with a friend or a family member or someone in their community and they're looking for your services, now you're top of mind and you're going to be the person that they refer to. So do newsletters, they're incredibly valuable and I think some takeaways

from this episode would be if you don't have a CRM to collect your customer data, then you need to get one. And if you want to, you can use Jobber. In my show notes after the show, you can go look, there's a link where you can sign up for Jobber. And if you do, I'd really appreciate it if you use my link because I do get credit if you choose to sign up. And again, if you have any questions about Jobber,

reach out to me directly. I would love to answer any questions that you have to make it a great experience using jobber as your software. Now the other thing is the newsletters. You might be thinking, well, how do I send a newsletter? Well, what's great is when you have jobber, you can also use jobber marketing. That's one way that you can go about it. And so with jobber marketing, you can actually send out automated emails. You can send out

Branden Sewell (07:00.942)
Newsletters you can send out whatever you want to with job or marketing and they make it really simple easy Seamless and you can send it to all your contacts Now the other thing you could do is use like a third party app or software like MailChimp Which for a long time before job or marketing we used MailChimp to send out our monthly newsletters so there's different resources out there, but ultimately

Big things are have a CRM, have a newsletter, do it consistently, make it relational. I hope that's some actionable advice for you on doing newsletters. If you have any other questions about it, please reach out to me. And I'd love to be a resource to you to get that going. And as always, thank you so much for listening to the Off the Ladder podcast. Again, resources are in the show notes below.

Stay tuned next week as I share another great tip on what to do when business gets slow. I'll see you next time on the next episode of the Off the Ladder podcast.