Gone are the days of sales simply flooding in as customers sought out lawn care and landscape services. As sales become more of a time-intensive effort, staying in front of your leads is critical. This is where email automation can provide significant wins for your organization.
Segmented, personalized campaigns have been shown to drive a 760% increase in revenue.
Building Your Email Automation
The first step to creating effective email automation is to consider your customer’s journey. What are their typical initiation points and their most common path to purchase? The four paths to purchase are quick, winding, long or long & winding. If you craft a strong email journey, you can accelerate and streamline your client’s path and eliminate stopping points.
Consider where leads typically stall and where encouragement could help them continue along the process.
You should develop email journeys that align with customer lifecycle stages. By having automated messages that trigger at different stages, they can progress relationships forward.
For instance, if you have prospects subscribe to your newsletter, you can build out a drip campaign that educates and informs them. For those who have already purchased your services, you can upsell related services or provide customized customer support.
Say you installed some hydrangeas for a client. Automating an email to send them pruning tips in the late winter or early spring, providing guidance, can help nurture your relationship with them. You can also inform them that you provide landscape maintenance services if they don’t want to worry about properly pruning their shrubs.
You should also have email automations for lost customers. While these should be done delicately, win-back campaigns with a discount or offering a survey that enters them for a gift card can get these individuals to re-engage with your business.
Simple and Complex Journey Types
If you are just starting out with email automations, keep it simple with a few emails. Some of the simplest automations can be the most effective. Avoid branching paths and stick to minimal dynamic personalized content. A simple email journey should be triggered by basic triggers.
With a welcome email, you could offer 20% off their first lawn application or some other incentive you feel can entice prospects without hurting your bottom line too much. Don’t underestimate the value of acknowledging a new relationship. The average open rate of welcome emails is 50% and can accelerate the path to first purchase.
In the nurture phase, provide a steady drip of useful, informative content. Focus on their pain points and convey your value propositions that alleviate these problems. If a prospect has expressed interest but dropped off, you can send a series of sales consultation follow-up requests.
After finishing a project or earning a client’s business, thank and reward the consumer. This could be an invitation to your loyalty program or let them know of your referral program for new business they drive to your company.
More complex email automations include conditional branches that are driven by the response or non-response to the previous messages. They can also include dynamic content that is personalized by the subscriber. For instance, if during the sign-up process you collected information on what services a client is interested in, you can create more specific emails that go out to these subsets.
Pitfalls to Avoid
Email automation is a powerful tool, but it requires proper planning to avoid mistakes. Before rolling out any email journey, meet with your team to map out the campaign’s workflow, triggers, email frequency and performance metrics.
Some of the common missteps include lacking journey hierarchy, not defining the journey entry or exit conditions well, undefined suppression rules or broken automations.
You can avoid journey hierarchy issues by thinking through different common situations. For instance, what happens if someone is still in the welcome phase and they abandon their cart for lawn care services or plant material?
With the entry and exit rules, determine what triggers can initiate the journey as well as what behaviors qualify for an exit. As you create automations, think about which subscribers or segments should be suppressed. Nothing will make individuals unsubscribe faster than sending irrelevant emails or those that seem out of touch with their specific journey.
Also, establish frequency limits for your email automations. What is the maximum number of email touches per month you’ll send to certain mailing lists?
After creating your email automations, think through different ways to optimize the emails and tests you can run, like the total number of emails sent or the intervals between the messages and the total length of the series.
Make sure you have someone on your team who owns this aspect of the business and pre-test as much as possible before launching. Regularly review your analytics for indicators of what is resonating versus what is a miss with your client base.
