As one of the earliest online marketing strategies, email marketing has stood the test of time. A tried and true method that allows you to nurture leads and convert them into loyal customers. This two-part series will help you utilize email marketing to grow your pest control business and wow your customers.
Email Marketing Beginner Tips
59% of marketers identified email as the most effective channel for generating the highest revenue. Are you capitalizing on the benefits of email marketing?
Many pest control companies focus their lead generation efforts on improving their website, local pest control SEO, or pay-per-click campaigns while email falls by the wayside. Some consider “customer retention” emails a waste of time. But here’s the truth: If you’re not utilizing email marketing, you are missing out on huge opportunities.
Ready to reevaluate your inbound marketing strategy? Here are quick steps to help you get up and running.
- Start collecting email addresses. You can’t really do anything we are recommending here without them! Hopefully, you already have a ton. But, use your pest control website, social media channels, and employees to start collecting contacts.
- Segment your lists. There are a million ways you can do this, make sure to choose the way that makes sense for your business. Your segments can be broken down by customer vs. leads, commercial vs. residential lists, services, or physical location. These segments are important and will help you with step 3.
- Send the right people the right message at the right time. You will get more out of your email marketing messages if it feels custom to your audience. Here’s an example:
You are going to run a sale on mosquito services, 10% off if you sign up this month. Instead of blasting this message to everyone in your database. Segment your list and find customers that have purchased this service in the past. Then send a message like this:
“You’re due for a mosquito service! As a returning customer, we are going to offer you an additional 10% off your next service. Call us today!”
This customized message will engage customers more than a generic one that is sent to everyone. It feels personal and provides your customer with a nice, warm “they remembered me” feeling along with the exclusivity of a special offer. If you still want to email everyone, you can. Make a separate more generic email for the rest of your database or try to segment the rest of the list with other offers that may be relevant to them.
- Personalization is key. Sending messages to a segmented group is a great start, the next step is including their their name or the date of their last service to make the message even more customized and engaging. Here’s another example:
Jerry, mosquito season is coming and I noticed your last treatment was back in August. Since it’s time for you to respray, I wanted to make sure you knew about our 10% off promotion. You can get your mosquito treatment for 10% off if you schedule it this month. Give me a call to set it up!
Follow these steps and you’ll be on your way to launching successful pest control email marketing campaigns! If you don’t currently have an email service provider, don’t forget to check out PestPac’s Marketing Automation tool. This new tool makes your job super easy by segmenting your lists using the data you already have in PestPac and executing automated email campaigns.
Now it’s time to evaluate how your campaigns are performing. Are users opening your emails or sending them straight to the Junk Mail folder? You can learn a lot from your email marketing metrics and use this data to improve your messaging.
The cheat sheet below will help you analyze your results and optimize emails for future campaigns.
Delivery Rate for Pest Control
What is it?:
This is the percentage of contacts on your list that actually received the email you sent.
Goal:
Your delivery rate should always be in the high 90s.
What do poor results mean?:
You don’t have a good email list! The email addresses on your list aren’t valid, and therefore not successfully sending.
What you can do:
Clean up your database. Ask your customers to confirm their email addresses when you speak with them. You can also implement a double opt-in process when adding new contacts to your list. This will ensure that you are only getting real email addresses.
Pro Tip:
Looking at hard bounces vs. soft bounces will help you understand your delivery rate better. Soft bounces are a temporary problem, indicating that you have a good email address but their mailbox is full or their servers are down. You should keep these addresses on your email lists. Hard bounces indicate that the email address doesn’t exist or the recipient blocked delivery. These should be removed from your list immediately.
Open Rates for Pest Control
What is it?:
This is the percentage of contacts that opened your email.
Goal:
You should aim for an 18-20% open rate. This is the Industry average for professional services, your open rates should be similar. But, it’s a good idea to track your open rate over-time and calculate your own averages. This will give you a better indication of how you are doing and enable you to benchmark your progress.
What do poor results mean?:
Simply put, you need more engaging subject lines. When crafting emails think about who is receiving them, would the subject line stand out in a crowded inbox? Would you open this email?
What you can do to improve:
Try using personalization in your subject lines or referencing a recent action of behavior your contact took. For example, “Bob- Can you review last week’s service?” should get better results than “Review ABC Pest Company.”
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Click Rates for Pest Control
What is it?:
There are two different types of click rates you should be looking at, Click rate and Click to Open Rate.
- Click Rate: The percentage of total contacts that clicked your email.
- Click to Open rate: The percentage of contacts that opened your email and also clicked through to learn more about the email’s content.
Goal:
Click Rate: 2-3% is the industry average average for professional services. Click to Open Rate: 8-9% is the industry average for professional services. As you do with open rates, make sure to track and benchmark your own results!
What do poor results mean?:
Your click to open rate is the best indicator of how engaging your email content is. If someone opened your email and chose not to click, you didn’t give them a good enough reason to want to click.
What you can do to improve:
Some companies send emails without including a link to a landing page or their website. Make sure you are providing an opportunity for them to click. These opportunities, referred to as “call-to actions”, should be at the beginning of the email and clearly state the action you want them to take. Not everyone will scroll to the bottom of your email! Try testing different buttons and hyperlinked texts to see what works best for the contacts in your database.
Unsubscribe Rate for Pest Control
What is it:
Percentage of people that unsubscribed from your list.
Goal:
Less than 1% of your list.
What do poor results mean?:
Your subscribers don’t want to receive your emails. This can often be a result of sending emails too often or emails that aren’t relevant to your readers.
What you can do to improve:
Try to limit your communications to two emails per week or less. Add a subscription center so you can ask your contacts which type of emails they want to receive. Sending contacts only the messages they want to receive will improve your unsubscribe rates.
Use these tips to refine and optimize your pest control email campaigns. In the market for a new email provider? Check out PestPac’s Marketing Automation tool and learn how you can use the data already within PestPac to execute automated email campaigns.
