How to Collect E-Mails & Market Your Business

[Mrs.SpeedySteamer]

3 years ago I asked the forum "who does e-mail marketing?" I wonder now how many of you have started e-mail marketing since the original post. If you're looking for a way to collect client e-mails, here is how we did it for our carpet cleaning business.


Simple guide to how to collect e-mails from clients and what to do with those e-mails once you have them. If you aren’t collecting e-mails from your clients it is a good time to start.


How I collected e-mails was very very simple. I offered something of value in return. For example:


“Thank you for booking with Speedy Steamer. Would you like an e-mail confirmation to confirm YOUR carpet cleaning appointment?” Most of the time the answer was “yes.” Once I received their e-mail address I would simply remind them, “You’ll receive an e-mail confirmation within the next hour. Be sure to add Speedy Steamer to your safe e-mail list.” Done! That’s it. By adding us to their safe e-mail list in the beginning they were on the path of receiving more e-mails from us.


But you know me, a single paragraph answer is not all that I want to provide.


What to do with the e-mails you’ve collected?


Strongly recommend doing three task with the e-mails you’ve collected. Send your confirmation e-mail along with information about your business. A simple confirmation e-mail is good but your goal with the confirmation is to also educate your clients. Therefore, sending a confirmation e-mail that contained a form with the services ordered checked off along with the other services that you offer. All state your furniture moving policies, driveway access request, and pet location request during the cleaning. If you aren’t handing out after cleaning care information at the time of cleaning you can send it during this time as well.

Piece of our Client Check Off List​

Second, after you’ve completed your job. Let the homeowner, manager, person that booked the job know that they will be receiving a “Review Request,” within a day or two. I recommend sending your review request within a day of completed service. If you do follow up calls I recommend mentioning the review request by e-mail at that time instead. Your review request should:

• Thank the client
• Inform them of their value to your business
• Request a review
• Send them to easily complete your reviews

You can use an automated service or complete this task manually. It never hurts to ask. You as a business owner should, always verify after the job is complete that the client is satisfied. Our invoices had two signatures. One to begin the job and one once the job was completed to customer satisfaction. We would always walk through with them after the job was completed. It is that little extra customer service that goes a long way.

Lastly, create a reminder campaign for your client and remind them when it is time for a cleaning. Send them additional information about your other services. Inform them of community events that you’re participating in. We did a fundraiser for a local dog rescue, and were booking two months out.

Well I hope this helps some of you!

Good Luck!

Tiffany

 

[SAA]

Great post. Good education on how to do so for those that may not be sure how to get started.

In the early 80's I had one very busy truck but was not sure what to do or how to build my business. I had a friend who said I needed to stay in contact with my customers. I had not idea what to do.

There was a machine, I think it was called a computer and I bought one, no idea what to do with it. Took a class and wound up buying a book about 4 inches thick and somehow figured out how to load my customers onto the computer and after months of working for hours every night, finally got all of my customers onto the computer (this was unbelievably hard tedious work but I did it). Then the day came that I hooked up a dot matrix printer, did something the book called 'mail merge' and printed out labels for all of my customers. How it worked had to be a miracle, but it did work, in more ways than just printing labels.

Taking this long story and trying to shorten it, it worked, I started mailing every three months to my customers on cards with information on it and reminders of when they last had work completed and so on.

This worked great. Within two years I had 4 trucks running and then I was out doing and learning specialty work. We became profitable and everything was working. I even started to take vacations with my family.

Today, it is so much simpler and less expensive to do as Mrs Speedy Steamer just outlined. Her post is one of those items that is worth 'Gold' and I hope those that read it will appreciate it. If you are not capturing your customers and keeping up with them, you are missing out on one of, if not, the best way of building a steady business. It is a fact, if one spends money with you once, they are very likely to spend money with you again and again, if you make it easy for them to do so.

Great post Mrs Steamer! I hope many will follow your outline in whatever way it works for them.

SAA