Most business owners don’t realize the true potential of email marketing, while some disregard it entirely, thinking that it’s an obsolete marketing method. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. In this blog, you’ll learn the best ways to harness its true power.
A home cleaning business is difficult to run and even more difficult to promote. You must develop a tailored marketing strategy, and a major component of that is email marketing. However, email marketing isn’t a walk in the park. It’s a fine line to walk on with little room for experimentation.
The basic idea is you have to sell your product and you have one shot or a few seconds to convince a potential customer to open up your email and get impressed by your home cleaning services — that’s a super challenging goal, but one that you can achieve with the right tips in mind.
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It’s all about the visuals
Have you stumbled upon a sales email flooded with words in your email inbox? If so, you likely tossed it into your trash folder without even opening it. That’s where most marketers fail to understand that they have one (and only one) shot at impressing a customer.
If you write a wall of words in your email, it will naturally throw the reader off. In today’s fast-paced world, people don’t have the time to read a sales email they think isn’t relevant to them. That’s why you must sprinkle in some graphics in your email to make your message more digestible to your audience.
One way of doing that is to craft a dynamic and colorful home cleaning flyer, outlining the different types of home cleaning services you offer, any discounts you’re currently providing, and your contact information. We suggest using an online graphic design tool that has several dozens of email templates to choose from and can help you craft stunning posters in a few clicks.
Pay attention to your subject lines
Your subject line is the first thing a potential customer would see before they decide if it’s worth opening your email or not. That’s why your subject line should be catchy and hook the attention of the reader at a glance.
As a rule of thumb, keep subject lines as concise as possible. Also, never mislead the reader into opening your email because that would only make you lose a potential customer (possibly forever).
And lastly, sprinkle in some creativity in your subject title. For example, instead of writing “get your home cleaned at half price,” you could write something like “why waste time cleaning when you can get it done for free?” That’s something that a homeowner would directly relate to because it’s focused on the customer’s pain point — the hassle of cleaning their house when they don’t have the time to do that.
Don’t forget about your call to action
An email without a call to action (CTA) is a dead email. Without a CTA, a potential customer wouldn’t have the needed motivation to look up your website, type it into their browser, and browse your website to find the services they need (unless they’re pretty desperate).
CTA buttons help you make this process easier for the potential customer, so make sure you spread them out throughout your email but not overdo them too much to come off as too sales-y. A CTA button should read something like “Get your 25% discount here” with a hyperlink to your specific landing page. It should give the customer a clear idea of what to do to get your services.
Market segmentation is critical
Every business has a range of different target audiences rather than a single audience. Even iPhones have a segmented audience. For example, there’s an iPhone and the iPhone mini for budget-conscious users. Then there’s the pro series for professionals and high-paying customers who need extra features on their iPhones.
Similarly, you should figure out the different shades of your target audience and categorize them. For example, you could segregate home cleaning clients from office cleaning and other commercial clients. The next step is to craft a separate email for each segment of your audience.
If you send one email to every audience segment, it will only cater to the needs of one segment at most. That’s why it’s necessary to craft a tailored email for each segment so that it particularly suits their needs and tastes. In summary, market segmentation is necessary to maximize the impact of your email marketing campaign.
Follow the 80-20 rule
Most marketers make the mistake of assuming that email marketing is all about marketing. No, it’s actually about building traction around your brand. As a rule, 80% of the content in your email should be value-based and educational, whereas only 20% of it should comprise a sales message.
The advantage you’ll gain by sending out value-based emails to your target audience is it’ll build trust between you and your customers. Whenever they see your email in their inbox, they would be eager to open it instead of being annoyed by “just another sales message” in their inbox — that’s the entire purpose of email marketing.
The marketing part actually comes in towards the end when a strong trust has been developed between you and your audience. The point here is that no one would trust your marketing messages without developing some sort of trust with you.
Some parting thoughts
While the above email marketing strategies are tried and tested by dozens of small home cleaning businesses around the world, you must remember that not every business is the same. You might have a different business model, brand strategy, or customer engagement strategy.
Therefore, there’s no universal formula to email marketing that would make it a success for every business. Try to do a little bit of experimentation before you finalize your email marketing strategy. Make sure you do this experimentation on a small sample before rolling it out to all your potential customers.
