Get New Revenue from Old Customers with Email Marketing

This is why it's so important to be emailing your clients through the sales process and even on prospects and lead nurture, because they get used to getting emails from you in their inbox and they engage with it, so then you'll get better open rates because they've already interacted with that email address. And so it's warmed up. It's primed is what they call it.

Welcome to Jobbers Masters of Home Service, a podcast for home service pros by Home service pros. We are in sunny Las Vegas today. We're talking about getting new revenue from old customers using email marketing. Today we have two great guests. Phil Risher, he is the owner and founder of Flash Consulting. And Katie Pierce, the owner of Glimmer Cleaning Company and Glsen Academy. Both of you, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Katie, tell our listeners more about you, what you do, what your companies are, all that kind of stuff.

Sure. So I started a basically residential cleaning company back in 2008 and grew it quite large and actually started working with Jobber around 2014. Then I went into consulting and started Glsen Academy. So I've taught marketing to people in all industries, you know, for quite a while, about 20 years or so. And I really wanted to specifically work with people in, you know, the cleaning industry. So I started Glsen Academy in order to sell courses and consulting services with. With cleaning businesses. And then my current cleaning company, Glimmer Cleaning company is a commercial cleaning company.

Got you. They've done done both residential and commercial. Awesome. Well, you're great, great resource. Thanks for being here.

Thank you for.

Phil, what about you?

Yeah, Phil Richer, Flash Consulting. We work with local service businesses, help them increase their sales, keep their schedules full. I used to be director of business development at a large air duct cleaning company and helping them with email marketing, sales, SEO, all that kind of stuff. And now we help companies do that. That same stuff.

Well, this is great. I think both of you are experts in email marketing, which is what we're talking about today. I think there's tremendous value to our listeners to implement email marketing into their business because as I always say, if you're not emailing clients on a regular basis, you're losing money. You guys both agree with that?

Absolutely.

Yeah. Katie, what has been your experience with email marketing? Just give us some fundamentals.

Email marketing. As a digital marketer myself, email marketing is my absolute favorite tool. It's so simple. It's so easy. Everyone's checking, you know, their email all day, every day. It doesn't Cost you anything to send those emails. And it's just so, so simple. So I just love it. I've sold, you know, millions of dollars in both cleaning and consulting services pretty much just by email marketing.

Yeah. For us, when it, when it comes to, as far as the tactical side of things is there's really two, two main things that we look at is the open rates and then your click through rates and so we can talk, dive into what those numbers mean and stuff. But when it comes to email marketing, it can be very strategic on how you send things. Our company, we send over three or four hundred thousand emails a month for companies. And what it comes down to is are people opening them, are people clicking on stuff and are they engaging and actually turning into revenue from there?

Yeah, yeah. I have a quick story I send. Back in the long time ago, I was testing out some email stuff and I ended up sending that email that's like thank you for subscribing to our email list. Just, just by accident, complete. And I was mortified, you know, oh my gosh, everyone's going to unsubscribe. I look like a buffoon. And some couple of people were like, hey, I think there's a mistake. And one person said hey, this is wrong. But like can I get a quote for some stuff? And that's when I realized the power of email marketing. What if it was a good email? What would the results have been? So we'll get into some of the specifics here. So what should email say? Let's just start there. What should email say to the list?

Yeah, I can start with that. So what it comes down to for us is really we're sending two different emails. The first one is we're going to send like a specials and promo type of style email. And that can be kind of a one off thing if you have specials going on in your business. The second type of email of what it should say is more of a newsletter style email that we would typically send on a monthly basis. So from an email, newsletter style we usually have like four components in there. We'll talk about a recent case study or blog post or something relevant to them. We'll share a cross sell of different services. So let's say you do landscaping or lawn care, irrigation, you'll cross sell something like that. We'll also share something that's very relevant to the local area. So if it's summertime, here's five things to do with the kids in the summer. Something that adds a little value, that's contextual to the local area. And the last thing is we'll share a recent review about a service. So from a newsletter perspective, that's kind of the what, what we would focus on and what we would say in those in the special and promos emails. What we would typically do is something that's very structured and targeted towards that promo. Like in the subject line, you'll get $25 off today for your specific cleaning or something like that. And then in the actual copy it will be more about like why would you get your carpets clean now? Or why would you get your lawn care done now or whatever. And then a special just like strong call to action for that. So that's what we would usually include in those emails.

Yeah, I mean I think that's, that's a really good point with Glsen Academy. I would say that the majority of my emails are going to be tips. You know, they're going to be how, you know, how to, how to use email marketing, for example. So I want to use as much of my own training and give people really valuable information on how to market, you know, their own cleaning business or home service business. When it comes to, you know, marketing, sorry, email marketing for the cleaning company. I don't do a whole lot, you know, now with commercial, but when it comes to residential, you know, I use email marketing for lead, follow up for explaining, explaining of course why we're better than everyone else in terms of overcoming objections. So one of my most popular emails was about are you nervous to have, you know, to hire a cleaning company? So what are those objections? What are you worried about? And then how can we, you know, assuage those, those fears for people so they feel com confident hiring a cleaning service as well using like last minute specials. I was really big on that and then selling packages. So we sell and what I teach people is to sell contracts. So sell, you know, 6 month, 12 month contracts with your cleaning customers. And we would only release, you know, a limited amount of those. So because you know, we don't have all the staff in the world and we're fully booked all the time. So when we have a package available, I would definitely use email marketing to say, hey everyone, we've got, you know, we've got one of these up for grabs, goes out to your list and then people are just like scrambling to order and we'd get, you know, tons of tons of sales. So the first time I emailed my list, I only had 600 people on it. It was my first sort of purchase promotional email And I'd hurt my back so, you know, I couldn't really do much. And all I had was my computer and my stiff back. And I thought, you know what, I'm just going to send out a promo. It was a Sunday morning and we sold 25, 000 in prepaid residential cleaning, like without one email. So just amazing. And so, you know, when you find something that works, just, you know, stick.

To it, keep doing it.

Yeah.

25, 000 email.

Yeah.

One thing that just made me think of this lawn care company that we work with. They will do promos like that, but they'll do it in their shoulder season, like January, February, and they'll say, hey, if you prepay for the entire year, then you get 10% off for the entire year, but you just pay for the entire year up front. Kind of like what you're saying, it's.

So important for cash flow. Right. Businesses like us, that's.

Yeah.

One thing I'm working on is determining the 52 most like problems our clients face with our services. Like insecurities they have, fears they have, questions they have. And making 52 posts, your videos or whatever the case may be and just releasing those one at a time each week for a year. And you could just put that on repeat with automation, but like that. So someone comes to your company, they might not say yes right away, but then you're nurturing them every week with those emails and you're addressing, oh, I was thinking about that. Oh, that was if you're mine, are they reading my mind? And then eventually you turn them in because you answered all their questions automatically.

Yeah. There's a great book on this called they Ask youk Answer by Marcus Sheridan. I would highly recommend it. And basically it's taking those questions that your customers are asking and then creating content around that and you hit the nail on the head about adding value. Like, yeah, it's great to create an email newsletter, but you want to put yourself in the shoes of your audience of like, what are they going to be doing right now? Do they have kids? Do they have. And then adding the value in there with the fears and objections.

Absolutely. And when you can, you know, when you can send them something that's sort of like up for grabs, then they become addicted to your emails too because it's like, oh, I have to open this. What, you know, what is this company offering?

And that's a great idea.

Yeah. And I mean that's really what you want is people to actually pay attention and open those emails and Be excited.

To get them interesting a little bit more about that. You're creating a sense of I might miss out on a deal if I don't constantly look at all these emails. That's a good idea. How do you do that?

So what again? What I found worked incredibly well for residential cleaning companies is I would offer. So I would say, okay, we have a, you know, I call it like a VIP package. Okay, so it was. We have six months. You get one month free. Your first cleaning is 50% off. And then I would throw something in. So like the first, first person who purchases gets, you know, a three room carpet cleaning. Or if it's around the holidays, I would do like, you know, for Valentine's Day, you can pick a 250, like Victoria's Secret gift card or you know, 250 or something. Like whatever it is, it can be a hundred bucks, 50, you know, whatever. But the first purchaser. So instead, and I know a lot of people like to do if you purchase by, you know, this date. But for me, what I've found works best because then people think, okay, well, I have, you know, a week to think about it or something. But it's like, you know, if I say the first buyer, the first three buyers or something get this bonus, then people are just, oh my gosh, like I want to be one of the first. So they just click, click, click, buy. And you know, before you know it.

Is that when they open a store, the first 500 people get special?

Yeah, exactly.

That's really. I like that idea a lot. Now I'm assuming you're not sending that to people who are already clients.

Yes, actually I would. So. Yeah. So again, I find in the cleaning industry people are always sort of like, oh, you don't have a contract with us. And I always thought, why? Like, why don't you want people to have contracts? Contracts are great. It's not like you can't cancel it and you know, prorate a refund. But why wouldn't you want all your customers on contracts with you? So I would prepay or sorry, pre. People would pre buy like six months. I've even had people pay for 18 months of, you know, cleaning service. And what's really interesting is that people will buy it without ever having used us before before. So people will spend like $15,000 on a year of cleaning services. And we've never even cleaned for them. So it's. People are really looking for a simple solution. And email works really, really well to sell.

I agree. And when we talk about like old customers, past customers, that kind of stuff. Re engaging them through email is so crucial because they might have used you one time knock out a contract, they were selling their house, they just need it clean or lawn care, whatever. And when you actually send them something that is going to motivate them to then act again or even send it to someone else like that, maybe they were out at a party and someone said, I want to get my carpets clean or something else.

Yeah.

Then like, hey, go get, get this thing.

And the other thing I find is such a simple. But you know, when you're actually the name, like who is the name from? So sometimes like you're asking, you know, maybe for a few different quotes or something and then you, you know, you get busy, whatever, you forget. And it's like, hey, what was that window cleaning company called? And so those keywords are really important when you go into your email. Right. Because you want them to find that email and, and take action on that booking.

Yeah.

Email marketing really helps rebrand yourself because how many times have you had someone call and say, yeah, they just give you a credit card or something. They're in. And they're like, who's this again? You're like, you don't know who you're talking to. They're busy. They don't remember the company name.

Yeah.

And then they're definitely remember a week from now when they're talking to their neighbor. Yeah, I forget his name. But they're good though.

Yeah.

But email marketing, every time they get that, they see that inbox, even if they just archive it immediately, they see your name. And that's really, really important for spreading the word.

Yeah. We actually had this situation where a company, after 12 months, they're like, hey, this looks exactly the same of the same thing we've been sending over and over again. Can we switch it up a little bit?

And like, no.

And we're like, no, this is, this is why we do this. Like, we want people to see this and say, oh, this is the same thing. If it looks different, they're going to unsubscribe and say, how did I get on this email list?

Right.

And you actually mentioned a really good point about when you're sending out this email, you can put in there who it's from. It doesn't just have to be from your name or from your company. And you can play around with do they open it more if it's from Adam or from your company's name, for example, and then you can see your open rates yeah, go from there.

The one I like most is name and then parentheses, company name. Depends on how long your name is though. This is a really great conversation. I do want to pause to talk about why we love Jobber so much. Katie, Phil, what are some of the reasons that you like Jobber from a marketing standpoint so much?

Yeah, for. For our customers. I love that you can segment out the audience into different buckets. Like if they haven't engaged with you for the last 12 months, they're bucket over here. If they have engaged you over here. It allows you to kind of customize the emails that you're sending to people.

And for me, it would be about the simplicity. Being able to do everything in one application. One software just makes everything so, so easy because we're so busy. Right. So if we can just make our marketing as, as simple as possible. Right. In Jobber, I think that's just incredible.

Yeah. As soon as it was released, the email marketing tool, I sent out an email to all of our upcoming clients and mentioned that we're coming. And it started the season and got a huge response. A lot of people responded to that, opened it and all that kind of stuff. So it was really, really effective. You need to try Jobber too. New users can get exclusive discount@jobber.com podcastdeal go try it out and start using the marketing tools to make your business more money. Okay, so segmenting, we don't want to just blast out irrelevant emails to people. That's no good. Right. Like email that has nothing to do with people. So how do you go about segmenting and making sure you're sending the right emails to the right people?

Katie, you know, you can have different audiences for sure. So you might have people who have booked you. You might have people who are a regular customer, so they're on a bi weekly or monthly service. And then you have people who have never booked. So you can have very easily, like three different audiences. And then, you know, when you write an email, you just send it, send it to one of those audiences. So you might have a. Yeah, like a promotion that you don't want to send to current customers because maybe it's a really, really good promotion. You don't want them to get upset that they're not getting in on it. So you can target people who haven't purchased from you before.

Yeah. Another really good segmentation that we use for a lot of companies is we'll segment it by their current customers, we'll segment it by their business to business referral partners. And we'll send a separate email newsletter to those people, maybe quarterly. So, so you have a bunch of realtors in an email sequence that you're just touching base so that they can refer you business. Then you have all your customers that you would send them a general newsletter. Then you have your prospects that maybe didn't actually convert into customers that you would send them more targeted specials and promos. Everyone in my opinion should go into a generic newsletter of some sort. But then you can segment them out like that, which that works.

Okay, so generic email, email newsletters go to everyone for the most part, but then you have these other targeted campaigns. Yeah, okay, that makes sense.

And I think just to interject is though a lot of times people get a little overwhelmed right. With, with all these things with the analytics and the segmenting and all this. So I would say to that yes, just if you can just send an email, just even if it's once a week or once a month to everyone and you know, adapt it for everyone's, at least you're doing something.

Yeah, yeah. If I could kind of give you just a simple framework for a newsletter that this is what we do. So first you start with your email subject line. There's free email test subject line testers out there. If you go to Google look up email subject line tester, what that's going to allow you to do is a test and email subject line. It's going to tell you this is 70%, 100%. We use this in our standard operating procedure. So do that. Once you get your subject line then you go into your email. And we typically recommend having four sections. Those four sections that I mentioned before, build out those four sections, very simple. And then maybe a before and after picture or something like that and then just send it out. And maybe short. No. And maybe have a simple call to action in there. There's a one, you might know him, Neil Patel. He's a really big digital marketing guy. He just put out a report that said if you have an email that's under 300 words that actually gets the most clicks. A lot of emails that we see out there is people writing a whole biography and all this words. People don't want that. They want a picture, a simple information here, a quick hitter call to action. Go to this and keep it super tight.

Really quick.

Here's the dirty little secret. No one's reading our email. No, they're getting our emails.

That's the.

They're, they, they're not going to read it. They're going to get them. And if they're going to click the button at the top, they might scroll down, scroll up really fast. Virtually no one's reading it. So the content matters, but it's not. Doesn't matter enough for our listeners to slave over a perfect email market, get it out of there and go do something else.

That's right. I would say think of it as a curation. So if you're posting on your social media account, take the one that got the most likes that month, put that in your email. Whatever review that you're like, this was a glowing review. Put that in your email. If there's a customer that put pictures on your review, put those before and after pictures in your email and then send it out. You're just curating the best content of your company that's been generated already and then you're sending that out with a call to action in there.

Yeah, I do want to ask you guys one more time, just like, one more tip for, like, content. But here we're going to, we're going to get to like, because Jobber makes this pretty easy from a basic standpoint with their marketing tools, because that you can, you can email people who haven't engaged with your company in the last 12 months. You can email coaches, current clients who are coming up. There are a couple different ways in order to segment and do some of these really sophisticated things. You probably need something like mailchimp or something like that. But like, so if you want to get started out, the Jobber tools are great, but do you guys have any other. Before we go, different topic. What do you guys have? Any more content ideas for email, especially for people who've never sent an email? You sit down, you're like, what do I say?

Yeah. So what we would do is we have a content calendar that we would recommend. So just go to like an Excel spreadsheet, Do January, February, March, April, and then just put topics of what you would typically talk about for your company. You could do this for social media too, but then you kind of have an outline of, okay, in February, I want to talk about seeding and lawn care and fertilizer plans. Then when you go to your email, it's not just, well, what do I talk about? It's like, oh, I need to talk about this. Then you take that and you go to chat. Cbt. You plug this in and say, hey, what should I include in my email newsletter? Or three reasons why someone should do this? Three frequently asked questions about this. And then you have a basic outline from where you can start and then you just plug in your stuff from there.

And I think what you said about like 52 emails just makes perfect, perfect sense. You know, just write down 52 topics. You can come up with that chat GPT like you said can help with that, you can come up with that and then there, you know, that informs your content for social media posts, everything.

What I've learned over the years of doing email marketing is there's really two, there's two kinds of. I don't call it newsletter. Internally I do, internally I do but basically it can either be have photos, nice template, all that kind of stuff or it can be two lines. Yep. First name. Hi. Basically an email from the owner. It looks like it's not an email blast. Right. And you start to have done subscribe button. So it's there but small. I make it extremely basic. It's like 50 words or less. Do you guys agree with that?

Yeah. So what we found on that is that when you do those more typical email esque looking one gmail ones that look like that, you typically get the most engagement on those because people don't feel like they're in a funnel or in some spammy thing. They feel like oh, this is actually a real email that I can, you know, communicate with the owner on one that we've seen that works really good. Communicating is like right when the service is done, the next day send an email from the owner that says hey, just checking in, want to make sure that such and such did X, Y.

I do that, I do that very thing.

Yeah. And that works really good and you can automate that, you can build that into your sequence of some sort but it works good. And those emails, you don't want them to look like they've been built out.

Yeah. Katie, what do your emails generally look like? Do you follow a template or have a, a couple different templates or do you basic or both?

For Glsen Academy it would be very text, text based, sort of like what you're saying. So I try to talk to people as much like I would be talking, you know, like this, having a conversation, a consulting session. So very conversational, very friendly and just trying to give them some really good advice on running their business with cleaning, little bit fancier. Definitely. I would have, I love imagery and like beautiful stock images so I do, I do all of that myself. I'm with professional photographers so I have quite a library of of stock photos so I use that and then a call to action for sure. But again, yeah, definitely when it comes to follow ups with a customer in that, you know, customer journey where we're following up to see other services, I would have, you know, maybe a little headshot and like a signature kind of thing. But again it would look very much.

Like a regular email and also matter. Your audience matters a lot. Let's, let's not forget about the, who the audience is. And so you, you know, if you're, if you're Erica Krupin doing poop and scooping in Michigan, where she is, your email marketing is going to look a lot different than if you're emailing corporate commercial accounts for cleaning big skyrocket. So it depends on who you're emailing to. If you're really high end service, whether like more my lawn care business more of like middle, middle America, it's a little more, it's just more basic. And so it depends on who you're emailing to. I think.

Yeah. I'll give you a pro tip on this that you talked about the stock images which you can, you can certainly use those in Canva. If you use Canva, you can go there instead of downloading like a PNG or jpeg, you can make a gif, just change it from PNG to gif. And then what you do is you take your before and after pictures, you put them in there and then you download it as a gif. So then you take that and you put that in your email newsletter. Now you have a cool thing that's interactive on your email. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people don't know you can put the gifs in your email and it changes the game. It's like, wow, this is cool. I can see before and after.

Okay on that. What about videos and email? What do you guys think about that? Maybe loom. What do you guys think?

What we found with video is that typically we would screenshot or use a thumbnail style with a play button on that thumbnail, click on that and then it goes to the actual video where it's hosted. You typically can't add videos into it because it's going to slow down the load and usually can't upload huge files. Which is why the gifs are so nice because it gives you a quick, cool looking thing.

Gotcha.

But yeah, the thumbnails and you got to make sure you have the play button on there because people don't know what to do. Yeah, it's just going to be scrolling and click on.

And again, I do that in Canva. Yeah, yeah, I just hit that little Play button. But then, yeah, then you can direct everyone you know to your website or your YouTube channel or something. That's what you want, right?

Katie, I'm curious about metrics and analytics and, like, what matters? You know, I think a lot of people pay attention to open rates, which I have some mixed feelings about. What do you think about metrics? What should our listeners really be caring about?

I would say open rates matter for sure, but I, you know, again, as a marketer, I feel people get. They maybe expect a little bit too much. Like, I've been a career marketer for 20, 25 years now, and I think people maybe overestimate sometimes how effective things can be. So. I know, and you'll be able to speak to this, but, like, what are the actual open rates? And I've heard that it's basically a dollar for the size of your list. So if you have a list of a thousand people, you should be earning about $1,000 a month off that list, you know, so there's, you know, there's different ways of looking at it. I just, I don't want people to get so again, wrapped up in analytics and worrying about things. I get a lot of questions about, like, search engine optimization and how I do it and all that. And it's like I just, I just write to the person. Like, I really just try and be as valuable and give people the kind of stuff that I would want and it just seems to magically work. So I'm, I do agree with analytics. I love, I love the numbers. Again, definitely paying attention to things like the date and the time. I find with Glsen Academy, most cleaning business owners are not in the office on weekends, so they don't. I don't really send a lot of emails on the weekend. I'll stick to more like Monday, Tuesday. If I run a sale, I usually think to launch it on a Friday. And then I get emails on Monday saying, oh, no, no, I missed your sale or something. Right. So for me, it's always about testing different things and then just seeing what works for you. What did people book? Did people respond to that? Have they booked their appointments? Have they. They purchased, you know, whatever sale or promotion you've got going on, and then you just start figuring the data out yourself as you go along.

Yeah. I'll give you some statistics. From what we've seen, we send all these emails. So typically the average open rate for home services are around 20% open rates. So when you send out an email, you can look at your open rates and Then that's why the email open rate tester would allow you to say, okay, if I change my email supply to this, it's going to help with that. The click through rates typically is around 1 to 2% of the emails that you send out. If you get 3 or 4% click through rate, that's great. That means they're clicking on something that's in the email. A pro tip on emails is when you see your open rate, then you can see all the people that open those emails. So clearly they're interested in whatever your subject line is. What you want to do is take that list of people and have you or your csrs call all those people. And now don't be creepy, don't say like, hey, I saw you open my email. You know, you wanted this thing. But what it allows you to do is have warm conversations because clearly they're interested in those things. So then you can call them and say like, hey, not sure if you saw our email or not. We have this promo going on and I just wanted to see if you're interested in taking advantage of which you know that they opened the email so you know that they probably are somewhat interested in it. Kind of takes your email and then turns into a sales machine. And so to your point about like, how can I actually make money from this? A lot of times what we see with business owners is they're like, well, my list is only 200 people. Most, only 500 people. Those 500 people, if you get 30% open rates, 40% open rates, they can refer you business, they can do business with you. Again, it's not about the list size, it's more about the engagement on the list.

Here's the thing with that. With a business that only has 300 people on their list, probably are only getting five or 10 visits to their website a day anyways. With a click of the button, they can have 300 people looking at their company, which is 10 times 30, 50 times more than what they're getting from Google or Facebook or anything. That's a lot of people.

Yeah.

Start now.

And I'll say one thing about this. A lot of times people look at their follower counts on social media. Well, you don't actually own those those followers. The platforms own the followers. You own those email accounts. No one can say your reach is X, Y and Z on your email list. You get 100% reach when you send out an email. When you post something on Facebook, you don't get 100% reach to all your followers. So you Want to try to capture as many emails as you can so that you own those customers in those lists.

If masters of home service has been a game changer for you and your business, then we want to hear from you. Go, leave us review and tell us what you think. Help us build this community and level up together. I like how like mailchimp, I'm thinking, for example mailchimp will tell you like the best time to send the email. It'll say it's almost never a weekend like you said. Any other tips on when to send and just any other tips on like the, the functionality of doing the thing?

Yeah, I can speak to that. As far as what we've seen with our data is the typical time that you want to send to homeowners is Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10am is the best open rates for us. That's when we do it. That's our standard operating procedure. If we get approval on Monday, we stent we schedule it Tuesday 10aM and what we found is that gets the best open rates the most engagement for sure. To your point, Saturdays, if someone want to get an email at 7am or 8am Maybe that's when they're at home. That's what people think. The problem is that is your CSR there to answer the phone when they call you, are they going to be responding to them on the web form until Monday morning? So that's why it's so important to send it when someone's going to be there to actually interact with them when they actually do take action.

Yeah, I would agree to that. And that's really interesting data. I, I just have always tried like again playing around with things. So sometimes I think okay, I'll send an email to my cleaning customers at noon because everyone's, you know, just starting to go on their lunch break at work. Everyone goes and checks their personal email and so maybe I can like find people now. You know if you're trying to find. A lot of my clients were moms with like young kids. So maybe if I'm trying to reach them I message them at five in the morning because when their baby cries and wakes them up first thing in the morning you might be that first email. I get some emails that are like at 3am every day. I don't know why but again that's a pretty quiet time and I tend to be up a really early riser so that might be I. There's no clutter. I, I see it every single day when I wake up.

Odd.

But you know like, it works. So again, just playing around with that and then seeing what works and going with your own instincts and your own, you know, feedback. Right?

Yeah, this has been great. I. I think we've hit a lot, a lot of things. I want to circle back to the story I told earlier because it hits on something I want to hit on now. The story I told about sending out that wrong email. I was petrified. Oh, my gosh.

I'm.

How do you go about handling negative responses, negative reactions to your email? Maybe you sent out the wrong email at the wrong time, or maybe it's got a bunch of typos in, or who knows, maybe send to the wrong people at the wrong time or maybe get a bunch of unsubscribes. How should our listeners handle that? We've all been there.

Yeah, okay, I'll go first on this, just because. So I purchased a client list when I moved to a small town in Ontario, Canada, a couple of years ago. And a lot of the clients on that list were actually older people. And when I sent out my very first couple emails, I got responses like, not interested. It's like, okay, like, this isn't just for you. You can just unsubscribe. So people will email me back and say, please unsubscribe. You know, it's like, okay, yes, I'll unsubscribe you. I. I honestly think that, you know, being in business, it is so hard. Like, you know, you're selling yourself. You're putting yourself out there all the time. It's almost like being a mini celebrity, right? Like, people are mean to celebrities a lot on social media. They have to deal with a lot celebr. So for me, personally, I don't look at unsubscribes. I try not to worry about any of that because you can take it a little bit personally. And when you make a mistake, it's so hard with email because it's like, do I send another email now to apologize? And now I've flooded their inbox twice. But I think if you can be really real about it and just say, you know, hey, I'm a small business, or, you know, I'm just trying. Just wanted to send this email. Sorry about that. You know, people make mistakes all the time. Someone asked me recently, even about, like, quoting, well, what if my quote's wrong? And I thought, quotes are wrong all the time. Like, cities are deeply in debt because their quotes have, you know, escalated so much from a bridge that was supposed to be built for this. And then she's like, you're right. And I said, yeah, don't be intimidated. Just. Just do it. You know, just be successful. You can do it.

Yeah, yeah.

I would say two things to this. As far as the unsubscribes go, this is why it's so important to be emailing your clients through the sales process and even on prospects and lead nurture, because they get used to getting emails from you in their inbox and they engage with it. So then you'll get better open rates.

Because.

Because they've already interacted with that email address and so it's warmed up, it's primed is what they call it. So that would be something that I would say as far as unsubscribes. We had a customer that we sent an email for. They were doing a fundraiser and it was a donation that they wanted to pump out to all their people. Well, when we sent it, then the donation link went bad and everyone's like, the donation link doesn't work. Donation link doesn't work. And the business owner's like, what's wrong with this thing? So then we just sent an email right after and it said, I messed up in the subject line. And. And then it was a quick message from the owner, Hey, I deeply care about this foundation or this thing. And I actually made a mistake with this. But here's the link. And they crushed it. They got great open rates. Cause it said I messed up, people went in. So I think people have grace with that, but I think a lot of it is priming it. Like, you don't want to just email random people out of the blue. Which is why it's so important to have a cadence of emails and keep it looking the same so people feel confident in what they're looking at and it doesn't seem spammy or.

Yeah, Ray Edwards is a famous copywriter and he does a lot of his emails start with like, that kind of thing. I messed up and. Oh, sue, sorry. A little hack for unsubscribes. We all gotten that email from clients. Unsubscribe me. Okay. You could click the link yourself, but you can just simply scroll down and click the link for them. There's no need to go into the CRM.

You can just.

Very easy in everything, so. Well, this is a great conversation, guys. I appreciate all the tips. I'm going to try to boil it down to three actionable things. Number one is create a limited time offer for the first set of buyers. So instead of making the offer expire in a week or something, which is normal. Say the first 10 people get a certain prize. Something like that.

Yes, and exactly so. And what you can do is maybe you only have 10 of those packages or 10 of those bonuses up for grabs, but all the, you know, the other people who were too late for that offer, you can reach out to them and say, you know, those were snatched up. But I have, I have another offer I can get you. You know, I can give you a slightly less, you know, compelling offer because you still want them to, to act quickly the next time and to know that you're for real when you have limited, with limited offers, that you really only do have a couple available or 10 available or whatever is you said. But you can reach out to them and that can build a really strong relationship with those customers.

I like that. Really appreciate that a lot. Number two is use the subject line tester that Phil mentioned to craft a perfect subject line. Make sure it's not too long, not too short, maybe emoji or two. And also embed the keywords of your service, maybe your lawn care in the email. Because our clients search their email. You want them to find your email there.

You can actually put that information in your preview text and it allows for them to see it in their email. It works really great.

That's awesome. And number three, get a list of all the people who opened your email and then call them and get them on board.

This is an absolute home run. When you're slow and you need to fill your schedule, do this exact thing and you will book jobs.

Awesome. How do you guys find out more about you?

Katie glisten academy.com yeah, you can go.

To flash consulting ph l a s h consulting dot com. We do free marketing audits. You click discuss your business. We sit down for 30 minutes and give you a game plan roadmap to grow your business.

Well, thanks for being here, guys. I really appreciate it. I think the impact that you guys are having matters and so keep it up.

Thank you.

Thanks.

And thank you for listening. I hope you heard something that will make your business more profitable and more efficient and make your emails better. I'm your host, Adam Sylvester. You can find me@adamsilvester.com your clients and your team deserve your very best. So go give it to them.