Erik Bunaes

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 Helps build company name/brand awareness. Helps keep your range of services top-of-mind with your customers. Provides cross-selling opportunities. What other associated services might your customer need that you can provide? Encourages repeat business/purchases. Once you have a customer, you can build and maintain customer loyalty by making repeat purchases an easy online process. 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. 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. 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. Saves you time by leveraging email automation functionality. (See below for more details on email automation). Reduces marketing costs since email marketing is very cost-effective. 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? Company Introductions & Overviews Case Studies Product Demos Customer Testimonials and Reviews Explanation of Services Special Offers & Demand Generation Thought Leadership Surveys & Survey Results Industry News Company News Email autoresponder series (automated email series) Here are two important data points to understand about automated email: Automated email messages average 70.5% higher open rates and 152% higher click-through rates than “business as usual” marketing messages — Epsilon. 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

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Erik Bunaes

President of Endorphin® Digital Marketing

Articles by Erik Bunaes

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