“If you're not running unsold estimate automations right now, I encourage you to run a report and see how much in revenue you leave on the table with estimates every year. I promise you, it's a very significant number. What we've seen with these campaigns is a stark increase in the average revenue per customer, as well as the average revenue on each ticket.” — Ara Sarkisyan, ServiceTitan Senior Product Manager
Marketing Pro has the potential to be your best employee. “It’s not going to take any sick days,” says Ara Sarkisyan, Senior Product Manager at ServiceTitan. “It’s not going to call out.”
It even works while you sleep, adds Crystal Williams, Owner and Marketing Strategist at Lemon Seed Marketing. “If you're not using Marketing Pro for the automation, you're missing the whole boat,” she says.
Ready to make Marketing Pro work for you? Williams and Sarkisyan shared best practices for email marketing using Marketing Pro at Pantheon 2023. Read on to learn how to:
Build an audience
Build campaigns
Automate campaigns
Determine ROI
Email Marketing Best Practices
First off, understand that email marketing isn’t for customer acquisition.
“We’re talking to people who are already in our database,” Williams says. “You already spent the money to get the new customer, now you've got to stay in front of them and keep cultivating those customers in a way that doesn't bombard them, but creates top-of-mind awareness.”
When creating those email campaigns, focus on segmentation, personalization, and engagement. Segmentation helps you send the right message to the right person at the right time. The most important data to track for segmentation, according to Williams, is age of equipment.
“Age of equipment opens so many doors,” Williams says. “If I sold someone a heating and air conditioning system five years ago, I might not be doing replacement leads, but I should put my maintenance glove in front of them.”
Other ways to segment include tankless vs. tank water heaters, gas systems versus electric systems, and club members vs. nonmembers.
Next, use the email as a branding opportunity. Include brand colors, a logo, a tagline, or anything else that defines your company.
Lastly, make sure your content is engaging. “If everybody keeps unsubscribing, that’s normally a sign that your content’s boring,” Williams says. “That’s just the truth of the matter.”
Not every email needs to try to sell replacement equipment.
“Some of us want to be super salesy in there,” Williams says. “But a lot of times your emails are there just as top-of-mind awareness. You might send somebody 24 emails before they engage with the email and actually make a call, but it's so inexpensive to stay in front of people that you already have.”
The #1 newsletter for the trades.
Email Marketing with Marketing Pro
Williams and Sarkisyan outline four steps to mastering Marketing Pro - Email.
1. Build Your Audience
First, decide who you want to email. Marketing Pro - Email allows you to include and exclude recipients based on data you collect on your audience. Williams and Sarkisyan recommend starting with emailing people who have open estimates.
“If you're not running unsold estimate automations right now, I encourage you to run a report and see how much in revenue you leave on the table with estimates every year,” Sarkisyan says. “I promise you, it's a very significant number. What we've seen with these campaigns is a stark increase in the average revenue per customer, as well as the average revenue on each ticket.”
In the example provided, they exclude sold estimates and customers with the tag, “do not reschedule.” The sold estimate tag helps filter out customers who received multiple estimates, and accepted one.
“By using the exclusion criteria and making sure we have the right inclusion criteria, we can essentially ensure that we're not going to be reaching out to anybody we don't want to,” Sarkisyan says.
2. Create Segments
To maximize email effectiveness, make sure to send the right message to the right people at the right time.
“Don't water down your email campaigns by sending them so blanketly to your market,” Williams says. “It's just not a good way to make the most of it. If anything, you turn more people off to responding because it never really talks to them.”
To enhance segmentation, CSRs and technicians need to collect information from customers and enter it correctly into ServiceTitan.
“ServiceTitan itself is a very smart program,” William says. “You just have to tell it the information. It will dissect the information for you if you tell it the right way. And then when we understand our segments, our campaigns tend to get a lot more engagement. This helps with conversions and customer loyalty.”
3. Automate Campaigns
Once you have your audience and segmentation right where you want it, automate the campaign. Then, people will automatically funnel into the audience and workflow when they meet predetermined criteria.
“There are multiple email platforms that are super cheap, and they're cheap because you get what you pay for,” Williams says. “Marketing Pro is an investment. And to me, the most valuable piece of the investment with Marketing Pro is the automation. Automation is where you make your money.”
Ideas for campaigns to automate include unsold estimates, welcome messages for new subscribers, and membership maintenance reminders.
4. Measure ROI
For ongoing success, review email analytics and tweak campaigns.
“The metrics we have within campaign analytics are meant to tell a story,” Sarkisyan says. “For example, if we send 1,000 emails and we see 990 delivered, we know we don't have a deliverability issue. But if we see a stark drop-off there, then we know something's wrong. If we see we had a bunch of emails delivered successfully, but we didn't get a bunch of opens, two things: Maybe our subject line wasn't performant or maybe we sent at the wrong time and our email got drowned out.”
If open rates are solid, but click-through rates are bad, the problem likely lies with the content. Perhaps the offer wasn’t compelling or the email wasn’t optimized for mobile.
“Every step of progression within the metrics gives us a hint as to where things went wrong,” Sarkisyan adds. “All the way down at the end of the line, if we see click-through rates are good, we're getting a bunch of calls, but we aren't converting, the problem may be how CSRs are handling calls when they come in. It’s very important to track these things after a campaign goes live.”
Test, pivot, and adjust.
“It's set it and forget it when you have the right formula,” Sarkisyan says. “But you have to understand that to get the right formula, to get the right recipe, you're going to have to cook the dish a few times. It’s normal to set it up and see something's not going as you intended it to be. That's marketing.”
