Many people have one strategy for finding new janitorial customers: make phone calls or wait for the phone to ring. Making phone calls to prospective clients is certainly a good strategy for building your sales pipeline. Phone calls, if a contact is reached, allows you to gain valuable information about the status, bid date, and future viability of the prospect. However, once you have left voicemails or even talked with a contact, what now? You can’t keep bombarding them with calls, but you need to keep your company top of mind. So what do you do?
How can you stay in front of a prospect without bugging them? One of the answers, as I see it, is email marketing. For the last ten years or so, email marketing has been a primary way to engage with prospective customers. While it is true that many companies have moved to targeted ads, email marketing remains a powerful mechanism to engage prospective customers in the janitorial industry. Assuming you have the email addresses of your prospect, you just need a simple process.
Develop Content
The first step in creating an effective email marketing campaign is to create good content. You need to create something your prospects will want to read or watch. Ideally, this content is something that can answer a question they may have. For instance, tell them how to maintain tile floors in a cost-effective manner or explain how janitorial pricing works. Through your content, help them see you are knowledgeable and credible. However, don’t push your own company too much. My recommendation is to put this content on your company website and then link to it via your email campaign.
Select an Email Marketing Platform
While email marketing platforms abound, Mailchimp is one of the easiest to use. Load your email addresses, create a standard template using their pre-built options, and insert your content. It is really that easy. If you have less than 2000 email addresses, Mailchimp is free to use. Give it a try!
Develop a Content Schedule
Every internet marketing professional will tell you that having a consistent schedule is critical. Don’t get too aggressive too early and attempt to produce content once per week. You will inevitably taper off and perhaps loose steam altogether. I would start with once per quarter and then move to every other month if you think your content is well-received.
To learn more about internet marketing and how to develop killer email content, consider attending our upcoming Janitorial Sales Strategy Workshop.
