How to Market a Cleaning Business: Email Marketing Tips

Email Drip Marketing Cleans Up

I often say the best thing you can do for a marriage is hire a regular cleaner. A good cleaner twice a month is about the same price as couples therapy and you get a clean place to boot! For cleaning companies, how do you turn one off-customers to regular clients? If you’re looking for ideas of how to market a cleaning business, here are some email marketing tips to attract clients and keep them.

If you’re new to email marketing you might like these two previous posts on email marketing: The Simple Guide to Email Marketing for Field Service Companies, Part 1 and The Simple Guide to Email Marketing for Field Service, Part 2: Automation.

This post is going to expand on the Part 2 Automation post with a dive into email marketing drip campaigns.

Reminder: Email Marketing Basics

The first and most important rule of email marketing is to have implied consent to send someone an email. All around the world there are laws protecting consumers from email spam. If you want to email someone, you have to get their consent first.

For example, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 has clear guidelines about what is ok and what is not, so it’s better to know the rules before you proceed. With customers or subscribers, you have implied consent. Emails to them are considered “relationship messages” under CAN-SPAM.

Beyond Your Dispatch Software

Dispatch software programs that are designed for service businesses have a certain amount of email automation built in. In Vonigo, for example, you can have your software send an auto-generated email at the time of a transaction, such as confirmation of booking email, reminder emails, and post-job follow-up emails.

For marketing emails, the ones that remind customers to make a booking, or advertise a specific offer, you may want more sophistication. That’s where specific email marketing tools and automated “drip” emails come in.

What Are Drip Emails And How Do They Work?

Drip emails are a series of emails written in advance and sent one after another over a period of time. These emails can be informative (cleaning tips are great) or an offer (pre-holiday deep clean!), but they always need to offer something valuable. The keys to a good drip email campaign are the emails themselves and how often you send them. I’ll cover content in a moment, but let’s talk about timing first.

Emails that Have Value

Everyone gets a lot of emails. So many emails that many of them get ignored. This is one of the secrets to drip emails. Since you’re not sending one email and hoping for the best if one or two emails is missed that’s no big deal. You’re sending several emails over the course of the year.

This is why the timing between emails is so important. You don’t want emails to be too close together or people might get annoyed or too far apart and people forget about you.

For this example, we’ll assume that you have a system where someone can request a quote online (that way you have their email address). If someone hasn’t responded to the quote you gave them, reminding them after one or two days with an email would be about right.

Once the work is completed following up the day after with a thank you email and asking for feedback is perfect. The job is done, the experience is fresh in the customer’s mind, and if it went well, the customer should be able to give a good review.

The next emails to continue the conversation should be no less than a month after the work was done. Things like special promotions or cleaning tips. The idea is sending a reminder every month or so to keep you top of mind.

How to Market a Cleaning Business with Email

Your first step is finding an email marketing tool to help you create your emails and manage your email marketing list.

Mailchimp is one of the most popular services around and you can start for free. Mailchimp walks you through uploading your list of customers, designing your email, and sending it out. It also makes sure you have all the legal boxes checked off for sending marketing emails. If you can type, you can use Mailchimp to send professional-looking emails to prospective and existing customers.

Integrate Mailchimp with your cleaning business software to streamline this process with your customer list.

The best part of Mailchimp is that it has automated email campaigns built-in (even when still using it for free). All you need to do is tell Mailchimp what starts sending automated emails, what to send, and when. For a cleaning business, you should have two separate streams. One for prospective customers and one for existing customers.

Here’s how a basic flow works. There are a lot of details I need to skip over for this post, so think of this as the high-level idea. The easiest way for Mailchimp to start an automated email routine (the trigger) is when a new person is added to a list.

You may also want to check out more sophisticated marketing automation platforms like InfusionSoft, Constant Contact, or Hubspot.

After the Quote

After you send someone a quote you add that person to a Mailchimp list (let’s call it Quote Sent). That will be the trigger. If you want to have an email reminder about a quote go out two days after you sent a quote, you need to make sure you add the person to your Mailchimp list the day you sent the quote. For this automation, I’d send just one reminder. Any more than that can come across as rude.

The next set of automations come after the work is done. Next, when the work is complete, you can add the customer to an existing customers list. The first email I’d send is a thank you and feedback email. Do this the day after a job is complete. From then on you can have emails go out automatically every month based on the first job.

Keep it Simple

Keep these regular emails short and helpful. Make sure the emails work any time of year. Simple tips, product recommendations, and referral offers are perfect for these emails. You can still send short seasonal emails as well, just make sure you don’t send too many emails at once. A couple emails in a month are fine if they both offer something interesting or of value.

We’re only scraping the surface of email marketing and nurtures in this post. For more detail on how to market a cleaning business, there are hundreds of resources on email marketing tips online. They will help you craft the perfect email, but for now, this is enough to help you start. If you want another email marketing resource, here is a list of top email marketing tips for 2018, from indusrty experts.

Want to learn how to grow your cleaning business, using cleaning business software? Book a free, private demo of Vonigo.