Winning Through Marketing - Email Marketing

Email Marketing is our next post in our series of marketing. Aside from our Winning Through Marketing introduction post and our Ultimate Lead Guide series, also check out:

Cold calling
Email marketing
Sales Letters
Networking
Social Media Marketing
Podcasting

Social Media Strategies Deep Dive:

Facebook

As a recap, we find leads, then we market to those leads. That leads to convos and eventually a request for a proposal/bid. That gets us inside the door with a walkthrough and a subsequent proposal and contract. Contracts get signed and you win more clients.

In this post, we're diving into Email Marketing. Ah, email. Any of you remember the days of having no email? Or maybe progressing to AOL's service? Eventually we found our way and services through Microsoft, Google,Yahoo, iCloud, and yes, even AOL, still reigns supreme. According to Zippia, over 347 BILLION emails are sent daily worldwide across 4 billion users. Hubspot states that most marketers send 2-3 emails per day, 25% send one daily, and 12% send only one per week. 77% of marketers saw an increase in sales through email marketing over the last 12 months. According to market research company Litmus, 87% of brands feel that email marketing is critical to their success. Litmus also reports that of every $1 you spend on email marketing, you win back an average of $36. That's an ROI of 3600%!

The above is on a macro level, but let's dive in deeper using Hubspot's stats in a micro level. Most marketers report an e-mail open rate of 46-50%. The average clickthrough rate is 2.6-3%. Clickthrough rate (CTR) is a measurement of how many people opened your email and clicked on at least one link. Your average conversion rate is around 1-2%. That means for every 100 emails you send, you should eventually win 1 new client from that list. This is no different than cold calling or mail marketing. Tuesdays are the best day to send marketing emails. Sundays are the worst. And finally, receiving too many emails is the number one reason why your prospects unsubscribe. 

We leaned in heavily on email marketing. We sent batches of up to 50 at a time and we would test the headlines, pictures, copy, links and more to track what resonated with our potential janitorial clients. You want to be able to split test (also called A/B) test these things and track open and click through rates. Tools like ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, and Constant Contact do a great job in sending and tracking your marketing email. The last thing you want to do is copy and paste again and again and again into your email program like Gmail. Aside from taking forever, Gmail will penalize you for doing so and may not even actually send the email or they'll send it to the user's spam folder. Not good. Also, Gmail (and the others) have adopted new rules in early 2024 aimed to combat spam. In short. Don't spam. Make it easy for people to unsubscribe from whatever you're sending them.

Our cleaning company adopted 5 different methods to sending email (and we target 1 niche at a time).

Simple Sales Email:

1-3 sentences describing the pain points of our targeted niche.
1-2 sentence solution (talks about us, who and where we serve).
2-3 sentences listing out how our USPs (unique selling proposition - what makes us different) will help them and their location.
1 optional sentence name dropping clients we serve near them and/or competitors to them we serve.
1 sentence for a very clear CTA (call to action). What do I want them to do after reading? Click and read the link(s), visit my website, call us for services, etc).
1 sentence as a PS,  after my signature I sometimes have a P.S. of an irresistible offer. We'll offer 25% off your first full month, or something like that. 

Easy peasy. We will include links to our blog on our website with articles relevant to their pain point(s). We'll embed it in the text. Sometimes we'll offer memes or links in pictures going back to our site. 

Would you like a free example? 

Dear SoandSo,

Pollen...It's everywhere. Spring has sprung and that means clouds of sneeze and cough-producing dust will be infiltrating your office with some very clear signs that allergy season has come.

What if there's a solution to your indoor air quality woes? Hi, we're XYZ Cleaning Company right here in the DC Region. We've been around 6 years serving schools, churches, financial institutions, medical facilities, and engineering offices, just like yours, by providing comprehensive janitorial and disinfecting services. 

What makes us different? We focus on technology solutions to measure the level of clean in your facility, and we provide cleaning services with a detailed QC and supervisory system so our company, our teams, and you, the client, are all on the same page, in real-time. 

In fact, we serve other engineering offices near you including Wreck-It Engineering Corp. and Flimsy Facilities, Inc., right there in Arlington. [As an example...I'll create hidden pages on our site profiling our clients, and I'll link that client into the client name in this text so they can click and see what we did for them]

Call us today at XXX-867-5309 to book your free walkthrough, from which we'll provide a comprehensive proposal by which to compare any future cleaning bids at ABC Engineering Company. 

Sincerely,
You.

P.S. Call us by by 3/20 and we'll give you 25% off your first full month of service. Call today!

Email Sequence:

We'll do drip email campaigns. Instead of one and done, we'll send 3-4 over a week. We'll slowly feed information with the first email completely focused on their pain point. Sticking on the pollen theme, we'll talk about call outs due to allergies, increased medical costs, lost revenue due to sick staff, increased healthcare costs, etc. Pain point will be top-heavy in the email but we still will include a clear call to action with no irresistible offer in that first email. In the 2nd email, we'll continue on that theme but we'll introduce our solutions for them and we include the CTA. The 3rd email is a little more with focus on the USPs. We also always include an irresistible offer by this point. Finally, the 4th covers more of those solutions and social proof with a clear CTA and clear irresistible offer. 

The above is a rough guide. There's no formula for this, per se, but we will prepare other emails to appear in their inbox if they didn't read one we sent. We want to keep them in line. Any email program can set this up for you. 

Video Email:

According to Hubspot, the highest converting email is a video email. We've recorded videos and sent one-off emails with a custom video. We've taken a small white board, wrote their name on it, and waved at the camera to use that first couple of seconds as a thumbnail. You can also use other 3rd parties like Bonjoro or BombBomb video to record videos that can help you convert prospects into paying clients. 

I've used two different methods with this. One is a simple introduction no different than my example above. Or I've tracked my contacts on sites like LinkedIn. Whenever I see they have a new acquisition, new promotion, or whatever, I'll send a congratulatory video with no mention of cleaning whatsoever. 


Resources Email:

Who doesn't love a good resource or tip. For prospects who have seen plenty of our sales emails, ads, calls, marketing, etc., we'll send a resources email. We'll include a simple but short email saying they may benefit from this resource or that. The resources we provide are our blog posts that relate to a theme, or even hidden client pages like what we talked about above. My goal is to sell to them but sometimes less is more and all they need is more social proof or more information to decide.

Email Newsletter:

We're lacking in this department. But this is something I'll lean into more in 2024 and beyond. Email newsletters work. According to Hubspot, 81% of all B2B marketers do email newsletters. They're expected by your prospects. It's a great way to share wins within your tribe and to highlight client wins and new blog or social media posts.

There are other ways you can use email, including email automation through your own AI. If you don't have email marketing in place, it's time to lean into it. It's a great way to build your business.