Episode 76: 5 Ways To Improve Your Emails As a Cleaning Business

Episode 76: 5 Ways To Improve Your Emails As a Cleaning Business

Julie Schoen:
The best way to be consistent is set a goal, like a habit that you can maintain for sending out emails. So even on those days where you're like, oh yeah, it's Tuesday. And I said, I was going to send out an email every Tuesday. If you realize that you start having kind of pushback against that and you think, well, I don't really have much to say today, or I don't really know why I would send this email. So I'm just not going to do it. That's your moment to go and do it. Because if you start getting in the habit of not being consistent, then you'll never be consistent. So set a goal. You can have a million excuses of why you shouldn't do it, but the goal is just to do it. And to overcome those excuses, people need to be reminded multiple times and just building that consistency is a good way.

Announcer:
Grow your cleaning business, make more money, have more time. This is the Profit Cleaners podcast with your host Brandon Condrey and Brandon Schoen.

Brandon Schoen:
Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Profit Cleaners podcast. The only place where you can learn from the top 1% of cleaning business owners from around the world to level up your game, take it to the next level and win guys. Welcome to the show today. I'm your host, Brandon Shane, and we're doing a solo cast today, but I have a very special guest that I want to introduce you guys to.

She's actually been on one of our past podcasts, but we are getting more guests to come on the Profit Cleaners podcast because we are learning from the top 1% after all. So yeah, we're getting that more organized, but today guys, a very exciting episode, we're going to be talking about the five ways to improve your emails as a cleaning business. So we're going to be bringing on a very special guest,

none other than my wife, my beautiful, lovely, amazing, brilliant wife, Julie Shane, and we've been married for 11 years now. We have four kids together and it is amazing. So she has been an integral part of growing our business from the start. Actually she's helped me with so many different businesses over the years. So that's been really exciting,

but we've come a long way. And she is an amazing writer and a very, very gifted at what she does. So we wanted to just give you guys some awesome value here in this episode and talk about how you can be using not just content, but specifically email content that you're writing customers, or maybe people that haven't converted yet to cleaning services and how you could be using those to better nurture your customers,

how to sell more customers, cleaning services and so on. So yeah, just want to introduce the why behind it. And then we're going to have Julie step on here and tell us about the, how, how to do it. So a lot of people ask me, how do you do it, Brandon? How do you run all these businesses and have different kids and running around and juggling it all with everything doing this is how I do it.

Guys. I'm going to introduce the podcast. And then I'm going to go trade off with my wife and watch our youngest son Bodie. Who's almost two years old that later this year, but we just make it work. And this is how you gotta make it work. Guys. You just got to have no excuses, take extreme ownership of everything, make it happen.

Right. That's how I do it. That's how we got to do it as entrepreneurs. We just get it done. That's just part of the skill of being an entrepreneur. So guys, again, back to the topic today, five ways to improve your emails as a cleaning business and actually real quick guys, let's do some housekeeping. If you guys are getting any value out of the show,

I normally say this at the end, but let's just get it out of the way in the beginning. If you're getting any value out of these episodes, if you get any value today out of what you're going to learn, please help us out, share the wealth, share the love, like and subscribe to the show, leave us a review. It really,

really helps us out. Guys, we're not running a bunch of ads to market this show or anything like that. We're just, just organic content, organic growth word of mouth. So please help us out. If this something in this episode even might help you or someone else, you know, another business owner, share it to a friend, let them know,

and we'll continue to move this movement forward and help as many cleaning business owners as possible. Take it to the next level and win. All right guys. So let's get started. So really quick question is why, why should you email your current customers and why should you email prospects? We talk a lot about on the podcast about marketing, acquiring new customers.

And we share a lot of the ways that we do that through a lot of it's pretty innovative, cool marketing that we do. Some of it's more old school guerrilla marketing stuff, but really email. When people think about emailing, I've even heard in the last so many years, email is dead. And a lot of people don't think of email as a viable source of getting customers or nurturing current customers,

but it really is guys. And it's actually something I want you to shift your perspective on as far as how important your email marketing really is and how you can be leveraging it so much more than you probably are. I say this because I know in our business, we actually are improving this part of it. And we're working on emailing our current customers more,

sending out monthly newsletters, things like that. And also like for this spring, we're about to send out a big marketing promotion to all the people that never converted to cleaning customers on our schedule. And so that's another reason, right? There is you should be having almost two lists like a customer list and potential customer list of people that maybe looked at getting services with you had an estimate with you in the past and just never followed through those are great people to remarket to.

So yeah, I'm going to list off a few reasons why you should email your current customers. And then again, we're going to have Julie come on and explain more of the juicy content and the details on that. But number one is upsell. Okay. So you can upsell your customers through your email marketing. You can upsell them extra cleans, extra services.

Heck you could even say, Hey, maybe we can clean your house more often, all sorts of things, right? That you could offer your current customers to get more money coming in. And it's really simple. Sometimes it's just increasing the frequency or adding another product or service that other people would want that our current customers. And that's an easy way to make more money and pulling more revenue right there.

Another reason why is you can sell them. You can send out a referral program, email where you talk about, Hey, did you know we have a referral program? It's a great way to have your existing customers organically tell their friends and family about you and maybe get a reward through some type of referral program that you set up. We have one at Sandia Green Clean,

and if you refer a bi-weekly customer, like our recurring customer, a monthly customer, even your next clean is free. I know sometimes people do a lot less than that, and that's a lot to some people, but think of it this way. One customer is worth thousands of dollars to you every single year. The lifetime value of that customer, if they stay with you for years and years is worth maybe even five or 10 or $20,000,

right? So taking a little bit of a hit on that first clean to get a loyal customer referred to you from someone that believes in your brand and trusts you is going to go a long way. And those people who will likely be loyal to you for a long time and they won't have as much pushback on pricing and things like that because it's a referral from somebody that knows likes and trusts you already.

So referrals are a great reason why you should send out emails like that, let people know. And just in general guys, the reason you should be sending out emails to your current customers is to nurture those relationships, right? To generate more loyalty. If you can impact people through sending a simple email and just on a consistent basis, be telling a story about your brand,

about something good you're doing in the community with your teams, or maybe even like highlight a customer testimonial that someone said that week or something that you're rewarding your teams for. So people want to be part of something that's bigger than themselves, and they like supporting local brands. And so if you can tell that story of your local brand, what you guys are doing to be involved in local in the community,

and again, nurturing those relationships so that you're not just sending emails when something goes wrong, or when you got to do a price increase or something, right? But you also want to be sending other emails that are sharing the good stuff and sharing the stories that are happening in the company and how people are a part of that. Kind of bring them into that story.

It's really a cool way to do it. Julie's going to elaborate way more on some of those ideas that you guys and how you can do that. And then lastly guys, the why you should email your prospects. So these are the people that haven't yet converted to becoming cleaning customers. Maybe they've had an estimate, maybe they've just signed up to your email list or newsletter on your website somehow,

but they're not actually customers yet. We'll get them to convert. So those people, you can be a lot more aggressive on selling them something more or selling your cleaning services, but you can get really creative with coming up with different offers, even like an email campaign that has several emails in it. That will go out over a week's time that says,

Hey, you know, we've got a promotion, we've got some spots to fill in the schedule. We've got 10 spots to fill in the schedule, whatever it is, and put some scarcity in there, build a story around it, send out not just one email. A lot of people think you just send out one email and then they're like, oh,

it didn't work. People are busy. It's a distracted time in the world. People are always distracted, especially when they're on a computer, looking at social media and on a phone and running a business or, or just as a customer in general, they got family life and things going on. So you've got to email them multiple times. So really Julie's going to talk more about that,

but those are just a few reasons why guys, you should be emailing not only existing customers and nurturing that relationship and building that loyalty, but also you should be emailing people that are not customers yet and building that relationship. So they do become customers. Just think of it this way. Guys, if you're sending out an email on an ongoing basis, continuing to build that relationship,

that's an easy way for your customers. Let's say that they have a friend that needs cleaning services. Now they get this email from your company and it's talking about something fun you're doing. Or maybe you do like a fun monthly email newsletter and talked about stuff going on in the business and stuff in the community you're doing well. How easy is it for that customer to forward that email to a friend and say,

Hey Nancy, you know, you were talking about cleaning services. This is my cleaning company. Look how cool they are. Like how much fun they're having. It's just an easy way for your customers to refer that friend. And especially if they know you have a referral program, it's just an easy, organic way to get more customers and get more people sharing your story,

your brand, and doing it organically without you actually having to spend money on advertising and paid traffic. So there it is guys, and there's all sorts of other ways we can get into another episode of how you can be getting access to local email lists. You could be partnering with other local businesses and doing promotions like joint venture, joint partnership promotions to their email lists,

and that you send something out to their list. They send something out to your list and vice versa. I mean, there's all sorts of cool things you can do. And that's another idea that we can get into more, but guys, there's lots of ideas. I'm going to cut it here now. And I'm going to hand it over to my amazing,

wonderful, brilliant wife, Julie, and she is going to get into the how the five ways to improve your emails as a cleaning business. And she's going to go into the detail. So before too much further ado here, let's get into it. Introducing Julie, Shane, Julie, come on over here and talk to the Profit Cleaners and let them know what to do with their emails.

Hi, A free one. I'm so grateful to be back here on the Profit Cleaners podcast. Thank you Brandon, for introducing me. And I'm really excited to get into five simple ways that you can improve the emails that you are going to be sending as a cleaning business. So Brandon went into the why of why it's so important to be sending emails regularly to your list as a cleaning business.

And here are the five ways that you can make those emails better and to make it easier, all of the five ways start with the letter C. So I'll go through them really quick. And then we'll go into more depth of each one. So take notes, or just try to remember these five CS. So the first C is consistency. So be consistent,

which just means mailing out to your list regularly. Of course, and for some people being consistent might be once a month for other businesses. It might be once a week, don't make the goal too hard. You want to have fun when you write your emails. So consistency is the first one. The one is be clickable. So we'll get into that here more,

but making sure that your emails want to get clicked by your customers. The third one is being creative. So how can you add some creativity to your emails, which will help you stand out? It will help you develop better relationships with your customers. And it just makes it more fun for you to write your emails to the fourth. C is conscious.

So be conscious of what you are sending, which can mean everything from looking at your email at least one time before you hit send to check for any major errors or mistakes you might have reading it out loud is another good way of being conscious. And like I said, we'll go back through these because there's even more tips of how you can make sure that you are checking off a few,

like definitely get these done tasks before you click send. And then the fifth one is being custom. So that last C is customized, which is one of my favorite ways. And it's something that the big businesses, your big competition, the franchises out there really can't do. So we'll get into that at the end, but there's a lot that as a smaller cleaning company,

or as someone who is local and listening to this podcast, you can do more and make yourself way more likable. And there's a lot of ripple effects that come from doing that. So let's get into these. Okay. So being consistent, like I said, that's really the key to making sure that your list is used to you sending out emails regularly,

which means that when they see them, they're like, oh yeah, they send me emails. It makes sure that they don't get missed. Because even if you send out an email regularly, not everyone on your list is going to open it all the time. So if you have something important to say, you might need to send a few emails in order to make sure that everybody sees it and gets it.

So being consistent is really important. And the best way to be consistent is, like I said before, set a goal, like a habit that you can maintain for sending out emails. So for me, it might be say that every Monday I send out an email, maybe it's you'd want to send out a monthly newsletter. So you say the first Monday of every month or the first day of every month,

whatever it might be, or maybe you do more and it's every Tuesday and Thursday, but whatever it is, you be consistent. And even on those days where you're like, oh yeah, it's Tuesday. And I said, I was going to send out an email every Tuesday. If you realize that you start having kind of pushback against that. And you think,

well, I don't really have much to say today, or I don't really know why I would send this email. So I'm just not going to do it. That's your moment to go and do it. Because if you start getting in the habit of not being consistent, then you'll never be consistent. So set a goal and no matter what, send something out every day or every week or every month,

whatever your goal is, but be really consistent about it. You can have a million excuses of why you shouldn't do it, but the goal is just to do it and to overcome those excuses and realize, like I said before, if you have something really important to say, and you only send out one email about it, half of your list, isn't going to read that email.

So if you have something big, you're working on, send out an email every week about that, send out an email twice a week about that, to make sure that people see it because people need to be reminded multiple times. And just building that consistency as a good way to make sure that you don't go months and months and months without saying anything to your list,

because that's the other mistake you don't want to make with your emails is not saying anything until you have to say something bad because that's not a good impression. So keep it fun, keep your relationship fun. And then that way, if you do have to announce maybe a price increase or maybe something that broke in their house or something that isn't the most fun,

they're used to getting happy emails and good emails from you too. So be consistent. Number one, super, super key. Hey guys, quick question. Does your cleaning business need more customers? And the answer is of course, yes. So if you're like us and you want more customers, we've created a 10 X marketing bootcamp course to help you guys 10 X your business,

get to that seven figures and beyond, and really commit to your success. So if you're ready to commit, let's tell him where to go head over to Profit Cleaners dot com slash courses. You can get started right away. We'll see you guys on the inside, keep it clean, keep it clean. The second one second. See, be clickable.

So one of the most important parts about being clickable is your subject line. And it's something that a lot of people have a stumbling block with because it is hard to think about what that subject line should be. And so, first of all, just be aware that your subject line matters. And if you're aware, even if it's not the most brilliant subject line,

if you at least put a little bit of thought into it, you know, what's going to be better than if you didn't. So at least being aware that part of being clickable, part of making sure that your email gets opened is making your subject line interesting, or at least important. One of my favorite tips for making great subject lines and an easy way to have ideas whenever you are coming up on that day,

that you're going to send out an email to your list is going into your own inbox. So you can look at your inbox and find those emails that you opened. Not because it's from a friend or not because it's from a company, you were expecting them to email, but because you were interested with what the subject line was. And so I use my inbox and all of the emails that I've opened as inspiration.

Every single time I go to write an email. So the more that you just keep your inbox open on the side and you look through all of the emails that you have come across and decided to open, the more inspiration you have of what makes a good subject line, right? It should be engaging. It should be interesting. It, the more you can add some mystique and be cured,

like make people curious about what do they mean, or maybe ask a question. Those are all really good ways to engage your customers on your list. So we have be consistent, be clickable. The third C is be creative. So this one for people that don't love to write can be challenging and that's okay. You can honestly being consistent. Having a great subject line is really a huge part of being productive and having a lot of success with your emails.

But if you can add some creativity to what your saying, maybe make someone laugh, maybe make them relate to you. This is how email marketing, the people that are really good at it. And the businesses that have a lot of success with it stand out. So you don't ever want to tell such a long story that you lose people. People are busy.

People don't have a ton of time to read through something really, really long. But if you can tell a short story that lets you reveal something interesting about your company, maybe reveal something interesting about yourself. Maybe you share something short that has to do with something that happened to you that day. And then most importantly say weigh it in to what you are wanting to say in your email.

Then the more your people will feel like you care about them. And then they'll think about you more. So for example, in case maybe that wasn't as clear for some of you. I recently, for my writing business, I sent out an email talking about how a guy who was tailgating me all down this road here, and I was going the speed limit.

And he was on my tail the entire time down this little one lane road. And then he like went around me super, super fast and kind of cut me off and I could, another car was coming like an oncoming car. So it was like a risky move. And again, I wasn't going super slow. I was going the speed limit, but he passes me and I'm like,

okay, fine. I'm good with that. But then as I keep going down the road, I realized that he hit a red light and I got to pull up next to him and turn right and pass. Right? And so this was something that happened and it was like this event. So I tell this story in my email and then go on to say,

Hey, in business, sometimes it looks like someone is getting ahead of you, but a lot of times you'll end up passing them or catching up to them as long as you keep going. And so I was able to kind of segue that into my message, right? So the more that you can do things like that. So it's not just you saying,

Hey, I had a sandwich for lunch. And by the ways, schedule a cleaning estimate with me. It's somehow finding a way to tie in what you had for lunch maybe, and then say, it's nice to know, like here, maybe you have the same lunch every single day. And you know what to expect because every single day you eat the same thing and it's consistent and it's a nice way to stay in control.

And then you can say something like if you put me our cleaning business on your schedule, then every single week or every single month you'll know exactly what to expect. And it'll feel like you have this under control, something like that. So the more that you can share some stories. And then as a side note, that email that I sent about the guy passing me,

I got so many replies back to it of people saying that happens to me all the time. Or man, that feels so good. Or if you see that person get pulled over for speeding later, like what a good feeling. And so it started building some repertoire between me and potential customers. So that's what you want to do. That's that creativity part of it,

number four, be conscious. So this means before you hit send you, take a moment. You pause, you look at everything you've just written and you make sure there aren't any errors in it. The best way to check to about what you've written is reading it out loud. You can catch a whole lot of problems or sentences that sound funny, or maybe even parts of the email that you could cut out.

So if you're reading it out loud and you want to skim, or you want to skip something, those parts get cut out. It's just too much. And so read it out loud, look over what you're going to send, be aware of everything you say, but then in order to stay consistent also don't let yourself get caught up. And I'm not sure if this is good,

maybe I'll just save it as a draft. Nope. You look through it. You make sure there isn't anything glaring and then you hit send or schedule or whatever that is. So don't let perfectionism get in the way of you being consistent. But also don't be in such a rush just to check this off your list that you don't take the time to really look at it.

Now, one of the biggest things I'm going to share in this podcast today is this really, really cool tool that can help you a lot when it comes to sending your emails. Because one of the biggest problems, small businesses have big businesses have it too, but a lot of small businesses have this problem and they don't realize that they even have this problem is that their emails are getting sent to spam.

It sucks as someone who writes emails for a lot of different customers and a lot of different businesses. If you spend the time creating an email and then no one ever sees that, because it goes straight to the spam folder, then that's no good. It can also make you feel like people aren't booking with me. I sent them a link to schedule like an estimate or to finalize their payment.

And if all of that stuff is going into spam, then not only are you missing out on potential customers, but they're thinking that you're not following up with them too. So it's a really big problem and really something that you need to be aware of. So what you need to do, and I would recommend doing this before you send out every email,

this site that I'm going to give you, it does have like annual subscription fee. So if you don't want to pay that, you get a few free trial runs of it. So at least do it a few times because it can call out some major problems that you might be having with your emails. But if you can do it with every single email,

because it'll help you make sure that they don't get flagged as spam, but you're going to go to www dot mail. M a I L dash tester, T E S T E r.com. So mail tester.com with a dash in between male and tester. And this gives you basically a score with your emails that will tell you how likely it is for them to get sent to the spam folder.

And a lot of times when a company has never done this and they do this little test, they realize that there's a problem, not just with the content of their email, like if you're using too many exclamation points or if you have maybe an image or a GIF in there, if you're using any of those that it doesn't like, which can flag it as spam,

or if your email is too short, it can get flagged as spam. But what this site can do, that's really cool is it can tell you if your email address itself is causing an issue. So a lot of times when people set up their own email addresses and you want it to look like custom and cool, like hello at whatever your cleaning business might be or whatever your business would be,

or your name at whatever, the way that it gets set up, flags it as spam. And so it doesn't matter what you put in your content of your email, it's going to most likely end up in spam, especially for the customers of yours that have any type of like security or filters on their emails are on their safari or Chrome whatevers. So check this and see,

and make sure that the email that you are sending your customers, the email that is where you are sending emails from, right? Your email address, isn't going to be causing you any problems. And if it does come back and say that there's an issue, and one of the easiest ways to fix it, cause it can be fixed is just to go to wherever your email address is hosted and talk to customer service there and let them know what's going on.

And a lot of times there's just a couple of little boxes that they have to check on their end that will make sure that that isn't a problem. So really good tip, make sure you do that. If that's the only thing you get from this podcast, that's a huge win. Most businesses don't know to do that. So do that. So mail-tester.com

and then the very last, see. So we've done consistent clickable creative and conscious four CS. So our last C is custom and this is the one I said, I was really excited to share with you because it is one of the best ways to not only set yourself apart from the bigger cleaning franchises, but to really get some people in your community in your corner that are going to talk really,

really well about you and in this business and this local cleaning business game that we're in word of mouth marketing is one of the most powerful forms of marketing you can do. So don't overlook this and I have found that some of the best ways to really use your emails and the emails you're deciding to send wisely is to send them to not your entire list.

So you might have a whole list of all of your customers or a whole list of all of your prospects. And you think that every time you are going to send an email, it needs to go to all of these people or part of them or whatever, but you don't need to send every email to every person. And in fact, sometimes sending that special email to just one person on your list can have more of an impact than sending to hundreds of people on your list.

So on those days, when let's say you say, I'm going to send out an email every Tuesday to my list. And on that day, you're like, I don't really have anything to say. I don't know what I want to say to the list. I don't have anything to announce. I, I don't know what to do. Pick a person,

pick a customer, reach out to them, use some specifics, tell them, use their first name mentioned somethings specific, maybe the neighborhood they're in or ask that maybe it was their birthday recently, maybe, you know, they have kids and you want to ask how their kids are doing, do something that's remarkable that no one else would do say, Hey,

I'm the owner of this business. And you've been a customer of ours the last two years. And I just wanted to say, thank you so much. And by the way, you know, I know spring break is coming up and I hope you have something fun planned with your kids. This is what I'm up to. Let me know if you have any questions.

And if you can think of anybody you'd like to share our business with that might also want their home cleans. Like we'd really appreciate that referral. That goes so far. If you just even picked like one person from your list every week, and that was your email marketing campaign, you would do really, really well because no one does that. It's such a great way to really nurture the customers that you have,

make them realize that they matter and make them realize that you're a real person who owns this business. It's my absolute favorite way. Those are my favorite emails to write too. It's fun. Cause you know, there's like that real person on the other end, there's always a real person on the other end reading it, but you can write specifically to that person and it makes your writing that much better too.

So consistent clickable, creative, conscious custom five CS. That's how you win this email game. And if any of you out there are thinking, man, I love the idea of sending emails, but I either have so much on my plate that I don't even know where I would possibly carve out any amount of time to do this. Or if you're like,

I know emails are important, but I hate writing emails, like hate it. Then get in touch with me. So my name is Julie Shane Brandon's wife. I do all sorts of copywriting for Sandia Green, Clean and other cleaning businesses here at Profit Cleaners. So if you would like me to help you write emails or create newsletters, nurture sequences for your customers,

or even just like, be like, Hey Julie, can you please send out an email every week? I have a little bit of time on my schedule now. So looking for a couple more customers and I would love to help out anybody in the Profit Cleaners community. So you can go to my website, Julie shane.com and click on the work with me tab.

And you'll see a couple of the different services that I offer, but it'd be really fun to get to work with any of you that are knowing how important this is, but are having a difficult time, really developing a consistent practice or just enjoying writing in general. So thank you guys for listening. Thanks for joining us today. To get more info,

including show notes, updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff. Head over to Profit Cleaners dot com and remember keep it clean.

Announcer:
Thanks for joining us today. To get more info, including show notes, updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff. Head over to Profitcleaners.com and remember keep it clean.