Leveraging Email Marketing to Propel Commercial Cleaning Business Sales

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to guide potential customers through the typical four-step sales process: awareness, interest, decision, and action/sale.

By implementing targeted strategies, you can nurture leads, highlight your value/expertise, build name recognition, and convert prospects into loyal clients. Here’s how to align email marketing with your sales funnel while maximizing its benefits.

Awareness

Introduce your business by crafting engaging email campaigns that showcase your services and expertise. Share your story, mission, services, and certifications, along with positive customer testimonials/reviews. Content like “Why Professional Cleaning is Essential for Healthy Workspaces” and “How Clean Offices Improve Health and Workplace Safety” grab attention and position your business as a trusted solution.

Interest

To generate interest, segment your email lists based on client types—healthcare, education, government, retail, hospitality, or industrial facilities. Send tailored messages that address specific pain points, such as maintaining clean, high-traffic areas or ensuring compliance with health regulations. Use value-packed content, such as cleaning checklists or case studies, to keep recipients engaged. Don’t forget to show actual customers in your email content, as that often wins us new business.

Decision

Sometimes, the decision-making process can be a rather long journey. Automated email marketing can nurture prospects over time as they evaluate their options and help keep your name in front of them. Use a series of emails to share client testimonials, before-and-after photos, or limited-time offers like discounts on the first cleaning. Avoid being too pushy or “salesy” in these automated messages and focus on informative, helpful content. These efforts help keep your business top-of-mind when the prospect is ready to decide or wants to make a switch from an existing vendor.

Sale

Drive conversions by directing leads to optimized landing pages with compelling calls-to-action, such as “Request a Free Quote” or “Schedule a Consultation.” Ensure the page is easy to navigate, with clear pricing details or service benefits to facilitate quick decisions.

Top 10 benefits of email marketing for cleaning businesses

1. Helps build company name/brand awareness.
2. Helps keep your range of services top-of-mind with your customers.
3. Provides cross-selling opportunities. What other associated services might your customer need that you can provide?
4. Encourages repeat business/purchases. Once you have a customer, you can build and maintain customer loyalty by making repeat purchases an easy online process.
5. Nurtures long-term client relationships, along with opportunities to solicit customer testimonials/reviews. Take the opportunity to learn from your loyal customers as to what you are doing well and what you could be doing better. Loyal customers can be valuable in developing new services, offering additional products and other ideas to help build your business and expand your relationship with them.
6. Drives traffic via hyperlinks to your website or landing pages. This helps search engines like Google to see that your customers find your website a useful resource. This will encourage Google to send more visitors to your website and improve your search engine performance.
7. Offers measurable results through analytics, which helps you learn more about what your customers are interested in. Which pages on your website are most visited? Which are least visited? How many pages do visitors visit? How much time do they spend on your website and any one page? These are all important elements of your overall search engine performance and will affect your visibility in search engines.
8. Saves you time by leveraging email automation functionality. (See below for more details on email automation).
9. Reduces marketing costs since email marketing is very cost-effective.
10. Improves conversion rates with targeted offers and messaging and helps drive customers through a defined sales process.

10 tips on best content to highlight in email marketing

Now that we know that email marketing is essential and will benefit your business, what is the best type of content to include in your email marketing messages?

1. Company Introductions & Overviews
2. Case Studies
3. Product Demos
4. Customer Testimonials and Reviews
5. Explanation of Services
6. Special Offers & Demand Generation
7. Thought Leadership
8. Surveys & Survey Results
9. Industry News
10. Company News

Email autoresponder series (automated email series)

Here are two important data points to understand about automated email:

1. Automated email messages average 70.5% higher open rates and 152% higher click-through rates than “business as usual” marketing messages — Epsilon.
2. 77% of ROI comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns — Data & Marketing Association (DMA).

The reasoning behind these two data points is context. There is context for when emails are automatically sent out from a business or organization.

For example, we might set up an autoresponder series to activate and send out the first email in a series after some specific triggering event, such as a recent purchase, website inquiry, download, or after meeting with a sales prospect.

What is an email autoresponder series?

An autoresponder series is a term for a cohesive series of pre-written emails sent to people over a predetermined timeframe, sharing a similar theme throughout the series. This typically happens after a certain event, like a purchase on your website, they become a customer, they download something from your website, or some other initiating event.

Note that an autoresponder email differs from a newsletter-type email, which is typically an email sent to all or a specific group of subscribers.

Email autoresponder series, particularly the “event-driven” email autoresponder series, is tremendously powerful for several reasons. First, they are usually tied to a specific event, so there is less of an unexpected or unfamiliar nature in this form of communication. Another favorable characteristic of autoresponder emails is that you can take readers through a series of coordinated emails, which provides an opportunity to build a relationship with the reader.

Using the email autoresponder series

A few great uses for email autoresponders come to mind. Just think about what you would like to say to potential customers—if you had the chance—if you knew they had an interest or need in your products or services. What would you want them to know about your company or services?

Here are a few cases where an event-driven autoresponder series would come in useful:

1. Showcasing products/services that are complementary to a recent purchase.
2. Following an inquiry or download, educating customers about your company’s products or services.
3. Onboarding new customers.
4. Providing more information about your services, successes, notable customers, and projects. This is also an opportunity to solicit customer testimonials/reviews and possible referrals.
5. After a salesperson meets with a potential customer.

Sales prospecting and the email autoresponder series: A match made in heaven

As we know, the sales cycle can take time. Successful sales also need a certain level of trust. This is particularly true with large, institutional commercial cleaning clients.

Sales professionals call on many people, have many meetings with prospects, and move on to more meetings. This is the ideal situation for the email autoresponder series. In a situation like this, the email autoresponder series can help maintain contact, provide useful information (perhaps to educate/inform the prospect), and maintain a certain level of visibility with appropriate individuals or contacts within target organizations.

The autoresponder achieves this with little effort on the part of the sales executive, and it occurs slowly over a period of time without becoming overwhelming (and irritating). In the past, this same activity of building relationships with new customers by sending short, informational notes over some time was referred to as “drip marketing.” Today, we can use the automated email autoresponder series to accomplish this faster and at less cost!

Just remember that email marketing is best used for staying connected with important contacts and keeping them informed about your business, services, and successes. Don’t push too hard for a sale via email, as your emails will come to be regarded as spam.

By integrating email marketing into your sales process, your commercial cleaning business can achieve consistent growth, turning potential customers into satisfied clients.

Building your email list

The power of your email marketing is due in large part to the regular collection of new email addresses. Doing this right takes time and effort but will pay off in the long run. Don’t collect emails from the internet. It won’t help you and just puts your emails in the spam category.

Here are a few tips for getting good email addresses for your email marketing:

1. Ask for emails from in-person visitors and all new customers.
2. Have a physical sign-up sheet at the front desk or on online check-out.
3. Collect email addresses during sales transactions.
4. Use personalized CTA (call-to-action) for every blog or landing page.
5. Create a pop-up or slide-in for each page of the website.
6. Create a timed pop-up survey on the website.
7. Use humor or sarcasm in your CTA’s “no, thanks” copy.
8. Describe the value in your CTA. What will your emails include, and why should people sign up for your emails?
9. Pitch your email newsletter on social media and in email signature.
10. Create landing pages with offers.
11. Include a CTA on your “About Us” page on your website.

Email list segmentation

As we know from the statistics mentioned earlier, almost four-fifths (80%) of the return on investment (ROI) of email marketing comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns. Here are several more findings to encourage you to dig into email list segmentation:

1. 2X Open Rates: Proper email list segmentation can double email open rates — MarketingSherpa.
2. 70% of consumers become frustrated when content isn’t tailored to them — Exit Bee.
3. Emails that are relevant to the recipient drive 18X more revenue than general broadcast emails — PipeDrive.

Ultimately, sending targeted emails means fewer unsubscribes, more action, engagement, and higher transaction rates.

There are virtually an unlimited number of ways to segment a contact list, but here are three basic strategies to get you started:

1. Demographic
2. Geographic
3. Behavior

Don’t forget customer status as a list segmentation strategy, e.g., current customers, past customers, new customers, lapsed customers.

Email marketing works for sales success

As we have demonstrated, email marketing is one of the most effective ways to guide potential customers through the typical sales process with limited cost and effort. Therefore, email marketing should not be thought of as just a messaging tool but a key driver of sales success and customer satisfaction.