Email automation is the future of the field service industry. To say you’re familiar with email would be an understatement, but with so many of them flying about, getting customers to read yours can be a real challenge.
We’ll show you how to cut through the noise by crafting content that’s relevant, timely, and tailored for your audience!
Think about your own personal inbox. How many emails do you get every day? And how much of that content do you actively engage with?
Whether you forgot to unsubscribe to that news website, meant to sign up to a magazine subscription, or find yourself at the mercy of ads, you can easily find yourself drowning in spam messages.
The unfortunate side effect of this means you’re likely to miss the messages that matter!
Of course, the same problem can affect your customers and you don’t want to find that your emails are being ignored. So, what can you do? In this blog, we’ll look at some solutions:
- 3 steps to get your email strategy together
- Mastering your email with these best practices
- Learning how to market your emails like a pro
Emails are such a handy way to send and manage marketing messages, purchase orders, invoices, service reminders, and so much more. This is especially true if you choose to boost it with a healthy dose of automation, which can improve your communication and even help prevent your business from missing out on additional profit, too.
3 Steps to Improving Your Email Strategy
There’s a trio of questions you need to ask yourself to figure out whether or not your email automation strategy is working and if you’re getting the most out of the emails you send. Take a look to see if you’re missing out on opportunities and where you can boost your email game:
1. Think About the Emails You Need to Send Every Day
First and foremost, you send emails for different reasons. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to writing them, but knowing what you’re sending and why can help you focus on the most important messages. For example:
- Marketing messages
- News
- Service reminders
- Announcements
- Purchase orders
- Invoices
- Receipts
- Responses to questions from customers and prospects
- Job reports
- Payment reminders
- Updates on when the parts for a job will arrive
There may well be more than that, so it’s an especially good idea to write down all the emails you know you send across all aspects of your business. From there, you can start to formulate a plan.
Don’t be afraid to add a bit of personality, either! You’re a person speaking to people after all—some you may even know personally—so it doesn’t hurt to try and sound friendly.
If you send it in an email, it should be on the list.
2. Consider the Messages You Could (and Should) be Sending Out
Perhaps you’re still sending some messages by mail: ask yourself if that really needs to be the case. You might consider how you can save time, paper, and money by converting post to email. Here’s some typical missing links you may want to digitalize:
- Payment receipts. Instead of your engineers handing customers hand-scrawled receipts, it could be more efficient to use Zapier and ‘zap’ them right to customers inboxes zap receipts right into customers’ inboxes.
- Marketing. You might send marketing messages instead of confining them to your website, where you hope customers and prospects will stumble upon them.
- Reminders. You could replace sending zero appointment and service reminders with emailing automated ones.
- Requests. Instead of asking customers for a review only when you happen to remember, how about having an email go out automatically after every job with a request to rate your business on review sites?
When you’re running a field service business and taking care of day-to-day tasks, it can be hard to keep on top of all the new, more efficient email techniques that keep cropping up. However, taking the time to get them sorted will save you time in the long run; it may be a cliche, but they don’t say “time is money” for no reason.
Are you seeing a trend here? A lot of these business-boosting messages can be handled through field service business email automation, (automation being the key word), which you set up once and never have to think about again. There’s no excuse for not spending a few minutes creating a couple of templates to make your business more efficient.
3. Create Professional Templates to Ensure Consistency
Bad emails can be worse than no emails at all. Look through the last batch you sent out and consider if they have these key elements:
- Your logo on invoices and receipts.
- Timeliness: This refers to replying to emails from customers and prospects within a reasonable amount of time. Experts often insist you respond within the hour, but it’s not always possible to send a detailed response. Automated responses can prove useful here, too.
- An email address with your business domain. A free domain like “gmail.com” may be fine for personal email, but business emails should be bespoke for that extra level of professionalism.
- A professional, automated out-of-office message. Your out of office message doesn’t have to be boring, and you can even use it to generate leads for your field service business.
Master Your Email with These Best Practices
As we said, it’s difficult to give too much detail on every time of email that you send, but preparing emails often comes down to following a few common sense best practices.
Only you know your customers well, so you can use that knowledge to tailor your content. The context of what you’re sending may be beneficial also e.g. a news update you’d like to share could be quite informal in tone, while a job estimate or invoice should be to the point and more formal.
With that in mind, here’s some best practices to follow when sending (and even responding) to email:
- Schedule a certain time during the day when you respond to people, meaning you’re not checking all day when you should be running your business.
- Keep emails short. Shorter emails get faster responses anyway.
Learn how to market your emails like a pro
If you’re looking for a good way to reach your customers and prospects, then you need to get things in order: segment your subscribers, track open and click rates, and much more.
While there are enough studies, data, and information about email marketing to fill a whole shelf full of books, let’s explore some ways to make sure your emails get read—and get the response you want.
Segment Your Subscriber List
If you use an email marketing platform like MailChimp—which has a free plan for businesses (and, even more handily, MailChimp integrates with Commusoft)—you’ll see they let you segment your subscribers so you can send the right messages to the right people. This can cut down on unneeded responses, spam complaints, and other distractions.
For example, with proper segmenting you’ll send emails about a boiler recall only to those customers who actually have the affected brand of boiler, and emails promoting your commercial work only to commercial customers. Most email marketing platforms offer instructions on how to segment, so you’ll get the hang of it quickly.
Entice People to Open
Getting people to open, read, and take action on your emails may be the most written-about topic in the history of marketing. The bad news is, much of this info is out of date and subscribers quickly catch on to (and hit ‘delete’ on) cheesy email formulas like ‘agitating their pain points’ and ‘the mystery headline.’
Segmenting your list and keeping it clean—more on cleaning your list below—go a long way towards getting people to open your emails because you’re sending the right message to an interested audience. Beyond that, our best advice is to keep it simple and speak the truth:
- You don’t need a fancy design. A pro template is nice, and subscribers say they prefer it to plain-text emails. However, a study by Hubspot shows that subscribers actually open and read plain-text emails at a much higher rate. So, if you don’t have the resources to create custom templates for your marketing emails, don’t sweat it.
- Low-key subject lines and email copy can actually perform pretty well. People who subscribe to email lists quickly get burned out on exclamation point-ridden emails, so try standing out from the crowd by giving your readers a welcome breather from the hype.
- Make sure subscribers can quickly and easily unsubscribe from your emails. That means no hidden links in the same colour as the email background, no making subscribers log in to unsubscribe, and no pop-up saying ‘Are you sure?’. Click and done.
- Be sure your emails all have a call to action. In other words, let your readers know what you’d like them to do. Are you giving a talk at the local community center and want your customers to attend? Are you offering a discount on boiler check-ups and want people to schedule one today? Make it clear what they should click on next.
That’s it! You don’t need a complicated design, a click-bait subject line, or a long email that doesn’t get to the point. Often, people appreciate it if you keep everything plain and simple, and support you in maximising sales!
Keep It Clean
Email marketing platforms also offer very detailed statistics on who’s opened your email, who clicked on what, and who’s been ignoring you.
Nothing’s worse than having to pay more for your email platform because you have too many subscribers for the free plan—and then discovering that half of those subscribers never open your emails.
Experts recommend ‘cleaning’ your email list on a regular basis so you’re not sending to addresses that no longer work and people who are just not that into you.
Deleting people from your list is scary, but necessary: why waste your time with messages that aren’t ever going to be read? Smaller can actually be better when it comes to email lists, letting you clearly see who your audience is, and keeps your approach focused.
The Takeaway on Email Automation
Using this mix of best practices and tips can elevate your field service management and content marketing!
It’s a case of working smarter, not harder so that the messages you send are focused and serve a clear purpose. This should always bring value and inform customers, obtain or send essential information, or win more business.
One other point to note is that it can really make an impact if you take the time to work out the best day to send emails. Different days may serve you better than others.
Note: the original article by Linda Formichelli, posted in 2018, has been updated with new insight.
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