Voice Search, Email Marketing, CSR & Tech Commissions - Q&A

In this video we're going to talk about email marketing. We're going to talk about how many times should you be following up with your prospects. We're going to talk about how you should structure a commission for technicians and CSRs and what we're seeing in the market. And it's going to be a great value add. This is our Q and A Ask Flash section where we go through people's comments, questions that they've submitted in and give you our feedback. We work with local service businesses, typically 1 million plus in revenue, and we take a consultative approach so we have very good insight into what their current processes are, how we scale business from 3 million to 8 million to 10 million to 20 million and what they're doing. And in this video we're gonna go through and talk about some of these strategies that we're seeing in these businesses and how they are structuring their business. So if you're a local service business and you're looking to grow, this is the channel for you. Be sure to hit like and subscribe so that you can stay up to date with the content that we're posting. Alright, so let's get right into this video. So the first question we have is from Jennifer. Tonight, talk to me about email marketing, who is still doing this regularly and how's it working? All right, so email marketing is a really big pillar when it comes to local service businesses. The reason is we have this prospect profile, Flash customer journey that we utilize. And inside of this there's really three core components which is creating visibility for your business, driving them into leads, hopefully converting them into a sale and then retargeting them. And so over here, staying top of mind through a monthly newsletter is extremely important. The reason is because we have some clients that get 50, 60, 70% open rates on their email newsletters. So that means if you have 10,000 people in your database, you can hit 3, 4, 5,000 of them every single month. And inside of the content that you post, you can do something that's relevant to them in your local market. Maybe a blog post, a social media post and then a special call to action which is like, hey, right now you should be doing this. Here is this call to action. And so we've seen it working very effectively to stay top of mind one so that you can get the business back in the door from that customer. Also you can get referrals in from other people and it's just staying in front of your prospects and your customers. The reason that this is so important and Inside of this, if you ask like who is still doing this? These people already know like and trust you. And so you alleviate that barrier of trying to find a new company that does something. And so you can cross sell all their services. You can talk about the service that you offer and that people should still be using it. So definitely people still do email marketing. I would say typically one to two times a month is good, sometimes even quarterly, depending on the cycle of your business. Like for example with duct cleaning, if you do duct cleaning, you don't want to hit someone up every single month because they don't need it for like three to five years. So maybe do a quarterly newsletter or something like that. The other thing is that you can look at your B2B partners and you can maybe put them into a monthly newsletter that is just like, like with us we have a flash newsletter. That's a marketing newsletter that people can subscribe to. They get one and it's every other week. So it's usually about two per month. And it's more industry specific things that everyone should know in a marketing newsletter. So that's how you can, that's how I would recommend using your email marketing tools. This actually leads to the next question. Andrew says, how many times do you follow up with your customers? I'm worried that two, that the two that is on jobber just isn't enough for some customers. I agree, two is not enough. In my opinion what you want to do is inside of your follow ups. Give them an opportunity to either say like no, I'm good for right now or yes, keep emailing me something to keep the conversation going so you can ask questions inside of those follow ups. The follow ups that we see that are most effective are text messages. Emails work too and voicemail drops work too because people will call you back. But really text messages are good because most people, you know, 95% of people, they get a text and they say okay, let me respond to this or not. And and you don't want to be hitting them over the head and say like hey, have you made a decision? Have you made a decision? But it's more like hey, some people ask this question, here's an answer to that. Maybe you didn't think about this or like hey, did you have any other questions that came up? Right now we have a special going on, something like that that puts them in through a sequence. What we found is that about five to seven follow ups is what it takes. And at that point they can either opt out and say like hey, I'm good for right now. Or they'll get to the point where they tell you like, okay, follow with me on this date. So that's what we would recommend. From a follow up standpoint, there's a bunch of different, like follow up and automation tools that you can utilize Jobber and some other CRMs inside their CRMs they allow you to build automations where you can follow up with customers on certain things. So definitely I would recommend doing more than just two. All right, this, this question actually came up from a prospect meeting that we had. How do, how to do performance pay for CSRs and technicians? And what are you seeing out there? So this, this really, it depends on your business, but holistically there's two sections of this. There's the CSRs and the technicians. And so just if we're looking at this in context for CSRs, typically what we see is more of a team based structure for incentivizing them. The reason being is that if I call into your company and if I speak with that person and then I call back and speak with someone else, who gets the credit? Is it the CSR that booked it or the initial csr? And so that question comes up a lot when you have a team of csrs. And so what we found to be effective is that maybe there's just a goal for CSRS to have. Like, hey, we need to hit 100 bookings this week. And so if we hit that, we get X as a team. It could be a financial, it could be a lunch, it could be a breakfast, something as a CSR team that we're working towards. That way it doesn't matter if you talk to me or talk to them, everyone is going to partake in us winning. And so it could be something as simple as like, hey, you get $2 for every job that you book. Plus as a team, if we hit this, you get this. So something like that works really well. What I would shy away from is a percentage of the job for csrs because at the end of the day the business is really generating the calls and should be generated. And the CSR should really just be kind of scheduling or getting the job to go out and maybe a little bit incentive to get them across the finish line, but not a percentage of the job because ideally it should go to your next phase, which is your techs are out on the job site. The CSRs get them in the door. The techs are the ones that should be upselling services. So a good example for this, like a CSR Schedules a carpet cleaning and they tell them it's going to be like 200 bucks. The technician goes out for the 200 bucks and then they sell them three additional rooms and spot cleaning. So the technician should get incentivized on the upsell, not on just doing the job. Right. They should get an hourly pay plus some type of an upsell bonus. And this could be commission on percentage base or on upsell based. I would recommend doing on a percentage base because then you have the most upside the the salesperson in the home. If they sell $1,000 or $10,000, then they should be compensated accordingly based on a percentage of what they sell. So that's how we're seeing that techs like in the H vac world, you know, 5, 10% that we're seeing, it just all depends on your business. But I would say like 5 or 10% is probably pretty good for the technicians. Cool. And let's see, the next question we have is. Hey guys, quick question. When you have unsold leads come in, do you keep them in your customer base? For instance, if I have a potential customer call for an estimate, but ultimately they choose another company, do you retain the contact info or get rid of it? Absolutely. You keep the contact information because you paid for that lead, regardless if it's for something free, organic, SEO, whatever, you definitely keep the contact. Because inside of this thing, this customer journey, you have the visibility, right? They come in as a lead, whether they call you, fill out a form, whatever, and they might leak out, but. But you can still put them into retargeting bucket because maybe there's other services that you offer, but more importantly, they might pick the service and they might not like the service that they selected the next time they're actually going to go with you. Or maybe there's an incentive that you're doing or a promotion right now that they want to partake in. So absolutely never get rid of your contacts. One caveat to that, if they are annoying, if they're not your target market, if they're just not the right fit, don't clutter your database with that information because you don't want to do work with them anyways. So yes, remove them. But for the most part, you should be keeping all your contacts. And more importantly, even if they just call in, try to get their email address, you can add them into your newsletter because that is really going to be building your brand and the word of mouth out in the market. All right, and then the last one is looking for someone who specializes in voice search. So voice search was really hot like two years ago. And you know, a lot of people now, they still use their smart devices, whether that's on their phone or in their home. They have two home of devices. And what we found is that a lot of the search engine optimization platforms, there's one called Yext, even Yelp, they tie into a lot of these aggregators which like for voice search they tie into specific, like Siri would tie into that. So a lot of times if you're doing your local SEO and you're ranking on Google and that kind of stuff, typically a company is going to automatically go into voice search. There's not really a specific company that does search search engine optimization for voice search because it's all tied together with your search engine optimization. It's just voice search selecting the search engine optimization results. One thing about that though is that eventually in my opinion there's going to be voice search that allows you to schedule online, which there are some tools out there about a year ago that, that we were looking into which would allow you to like, hey, I need an H Vac company to come out and repair this. Who can come the soonest. And then it will schedule the service for them and say like this person can come out at this time and it will schedule the service. That is something definitely that is coming down in my opinion, probably in the next three to five years that that should, that capability should be there. And it's something definitely that we are monitoring because from a marketing technology perspective, companies need these types of initiatives in their business to stay ahead also to grow their business. Cool. So if you got something out of this video, be sure to hit like and subscribe so you can get the more content as we post it. And if you have a question that you want to ask us or get our opinion on something, drop a comment below. And if you want to join our newsletter, just go to flashconsulting.com join. I'll also put a link down below and we'll see you in the next video.