Part of a recent webinar we did on Email Marketing for Electrical, Fire & Security companies. This video covers the Email Campaigns we find are most effective for generating new enquiries.
Video transcript:
This video is part of a recent webinar we did on Email Marketing for Electrical, Fire & Security companies. It covers the Email Campaigns we find are most effective for generating new enquiries.
Types of Email Marketing Campaign
There are several types of email campaign we find work best for Electrical, Fire and Security companies. First of all, cold prospecting where a company you’ve never dealt with before, a local company, someone that you know who the person to contact there is, you could send them a completely cold email, introducing your business, telling them more about what you do.
Secondly what we call database reactivation. We find this is very effective because you already have a database of your past customers, people that have used you in the last few years. The chances are you’ve lost touch with some of them and one of the easiest ways of getting a bit more work is to send an email out to all those past customers.
You’re just reminding them who you are. Maybe give them an offer such as a discount on your services or show them something that they can do at the moment that will really help them to give them a reason to contact you now.
When you make an appointment with somebody to go and visit them to give a quote, an appointment confirmation email is great because it reminds them that you are becoming and tells them a bit more about who you are and what you do. You can follow it up after you’ve seen them a quote follow up email that sells your company a bit more, telling them again who you are and what you do. The good things about your business maybe showing a few reviews from local people and companies you’ve worked with.
With all these email campaigns we are focusing on them being automated. So when you arrange an appointment with somebody you don’t need to type out an email every time, instead the software you use sends a message automatically.
Automating Email Sending
Everything I’m going to be showing you is about putting together an email campaign that you click a button and it happens automatically without any thinking about it. When you’ve got a new customer, maybe you’ve installed a CCTV system for them, two or three weeks later it’s very effective to send out a couple of emails to say you hope they are happy with everything and if they have any problems to contact you. And if they are happy would they mind leaving a quick review and give them a link in the email to go to Google and leave a review on your Google profile.
You can also ask them for referrals. In the email you can say if there’s anyone they know that might have an interest in your services would they pass on your details, maybe offer them an Amazon gift voucher and say you’ll give a £25 or £50 gift voucher if they refer anyone who uses you.
Another email campaign we find is very effective is what we call a Lost Customer email campaign. Everybody loses customers. Whether you give a quote and you’re too expensive, or you had a customer for a period of time, and then they decided to go somewhere else because someone offer them a lower price. There’s all those companies that you’ve had some kind of contact within the past and are doing nothing with at the moment.
You’ve got email addresses and names for them and it’s very effective to start sending out an occasional email to them. Reminding them who you are, talking about some of the things you do and good points about your company on the basis that sooner or later their current supplier is likely to make a mistake. Maybe their prices will go up and that old customer will start looking around for alternatives.
If you are there and present in their mind there’s a good chance they’ll contact you and say we dealt with you five years ago, we are not very happy with who we’ve been using since, could we have another chat and see what you can do for us.
Commercial and Domestic Email Campaigns
I tend to separate commercial electrical, fire and security email campaigns from from domestic ones because they have different requirements and motivations. If you think about commercial, the work tends to be higher value, there’s often multiple decision makers and the decision process can take months, even years on some very big jobs.
With an email campaign to commercial customers we’re not looking for a quick decision. There’s no point offering a 10% discount if you decide this month. The types of campaigns we use there are where we want to let them know who our customer is and their service and so on, and just keep them in the front of mind in case a requirement comes along. We call these nurture campaigns.
Where our customer has spoken to a company in the past we want to keep reminding them about our customer. We want to keep telling them about new projects they’ve been working on on the basis it may take a year to make a decision on the thing they’re interested in and we don’t want them to be forgotten about. We want to keep reminding every month or two that our customer is there and doing this good project and that good project, having some good reviews coming in and so on.
Multiple Email Follow Ups
It’s often important to follow up multiple times. For example when you do a quote it needs to be followed up more than once to give you the greatest chance of winning the business. You can do this by writing a new email each time but it’s much more effective if you work on a perfect email that becomes your follow up template. You work out the very best wording that email and use it again and again.
You also automate it so several versions of your follow up email are sent out so your quote or proposal doesn’t get forgotten. The danger is you do a quote for a big job today, next week you’re doing a quote for another job and the week after another job and so on, and you forget about the one that was done today. The customer may not make a decision on it for another six months, but if you’ve got an automated follow up sequence of emails going out then that customer is reminded about you continually. They won’t forget about you when they’re getting other quotes from other people.
Domestic electrical and security work is a bit different. Domestic often is a quick decision. The customer decides they need to get some new lights fitted in the garden, they look around and contact two or three companies for quotes and pick between a combination of pricing and the company they think will do a good job.
They’re going to decide within three or four weeks. The sorts of email campaigns we use for a domestic work tend to be appointment reminders because private people are often worse at keeping appointments. They’ll arrange an appointment for next Tuesday and then won’t be able to make it and won’t contact you to let you know. Email reminders when they book the appointment, a few days later and possibly an hour or two beforehand work very well so they won’t forget about it.
With quote follow up emails we tend so send an email one or two days after the quote is sent saying something like I hope you received the quote, if you have any questions please give me a call. Two or three days after that another email goes out. If you’re interested here or one or two other jobs similar to yours we’ve been doing in the local area. We’re just trying to keep reminding them how good our customer is and show them that they really want the work.
You could pick up the phone and keep on phoning them after you send a quote but you are probably busy doing other things so if you’ve got an automated sequence of emails going out it’s one less thing to worry about. If they are get two or three other quotes the likelihood that they’ll use you is much higher if they keep hearing from you and seeing who much you want to work with them.
Special Offers
Special offer emails work particularly well on the domestic side because people often have electrical or security work that needs doing. When times are tough financially they will put things off. For example if a fuse keeps tripping they’ll delay getting an electrician in and just keep resetting the fuse and plan to get it done in six month when they have some spare money. If an email comes through saying this month we’re giving 10% or 20% off, would you like a free quote for any work you need doing? There’s a little bit more of a motivation for them to say okay I’ll get them to come out have a look and give me a price. Once you’ve had the opportunity to go out and see what the problem is and give a quote you are in a far stronger position to get the work than if you are just leaving it until the customer is completely ready to do something.
Customer Database
The key thing is to have a good database of your customers and people you’ve spoken to in the past. You also need to have it categorised by type so current customers, past customers and so on. You also want to know which were domestic and which commercial. There’s always something you can be saying to them that will be useful.
For example customers that haven’t used you in the last 12 months, maybe because you did a one off job for them. If it was a commercial job you know there’s probably going to be an ongoing need for your services and if you aren’t getting work from them there may be an opportunity you are missing out on.
Your database needs to show the customers you’ve lost. There’s always a chance to get them back. Maybe they used you for maintenance on your fire alarms and someone come along and made a cheaper offer and they decided to move over to them instead.
As well as lost and inactive customers there are the inquiries and quotes that came in but never led to any work that you want in your database.
For most companies there are also local companies that are your niche prospects. So maybe you are particularly good at installing EV Chargers and you decide to target all the local rental companies in your area that are managing blocks of flats on the basis that sooner or later they might start getting EV Chargers fitted into the car parks.
With a good database split into several categories you can target each in a different way. So for current customers the objective is to keep them and you can update them with what you are doing, remind them that if they’ve not used you for a while what you do. If they only use you for fire alarms tell them you can also do CCTV and electrical. Often if someone uses you for say CCTV they won’t realise you can also do access control, intruder alarms and so on.
Email Delivery
There are are three challenges to success with email. The first one is actually reaching somebody’s inbox.
If you send a single email from Outlook or Google’s email it will normally get there. If you start sending 100, 200, 300 emails at a time the spam filters will start looking at them and if everything isn’t done correctly they’ll start marking them a spam.
Reaching someone’s email inbox is the first challenge to email success. The second is getting the message read, getting someone to actually open the email, read it and make some kind of decision based on that. The third one is then getting them to reply to you, either reply to the email or by making a phone call to you. I cover these in more details in the Email Delivery video.
