Communicate With Your Customers through Email
The next piece to the Internet marketing blueprint for heating and air conditioning companies is communicating with your business followers through email.
Email marketing is arguably the most cost-effective form of advertising today, especially when marketing to a list of current customers or highly interested prospects. In the marketing world, it is commonly stated that the money is in the list and when you build a well-targeted list, you can market to that list that is filled with high-quality business prospects over and over again.
A smart place to start building your email list is with your current customer database of both current and past customers. Because your customers are people who have already experienced your business and have paid you their hard-earned money, they know exactly what the experience and the final product is like with your business.
It is proven that anyone who has purchased a service or product from your business is 6 to 7 times more likely to buy from you again. This concept of targeting current and past customers will be one of the more cost effective marketing strategies that you can do to increase business sales. In other words, you will spend much less money attracting repeat business from your current and past customer list when compared to having to go out and acquire a new customer.
Email marketing is a very powerful communication channel for you to start taking advantage of for your HVAC business as well. Once you get permission to communicate with this targeted group of customers through email, you will establish a simple way to communicate with the most important asset to your business –your buyers list (current, past and future).
Email is an absolutely critical component that will assist your company to staying top-of-mind with your customers and your target market.
To give you an idea of how powerful email marketing can be, the clients that we run email marketing campaigns for on a monthly basis (especially in the heating and air conditioning niche) are averaging anywhere between 25% and 55% open rates on their email sends.
Below are the statistics for 2 HVAC clients that we run monthly eNewsletter campaigns for. The contacts that are on the eNewsletter list include: past & current clients, prospects, vendors and strategic alliances.
| Open Rate | Click Through Rate | |
| Scottsdale Air | 38.4% | 14.8% |
| On Time Air | 30.3% | 7.2% |
Let me break down what these numbers mean and why they are so important.
If your company has an email list of 1,000 people, and your email performs at the same rate as Scottsdale Air with a 38% open rate, that means your email gets 38% of the 1,000 people to open your email. You are able to get 380 people to look at your email and read what your business has to say. That is extremely powerful when partnered with great content and offers that you can share with your email list.
Now I want to take things one-step further.
Let’s say you achieve that 38% open rate on your email. What about the 62% that didn’t open your email?
Even though they didn’t open your email, they still saw an email come from your Heating and Air Conditioning Company, which keeps your company in the back of their minds and they many remember to recommend you to a friend when a friend needs a product or service you can provide.
The reason why email is so powerful is because the typical sales cycle (to get somebody to convert from a prospect to a buyer)
needs at least 7 to 11 touches (contacts) in order to get that person to make buying decisions. And it may even be more; we’ve heard upwards of even 30 to 33 times someone needs to be touched to make a buying decision. But as long as you’re staying top of mind consistently with your target market and those people on your email list, you have a better chance of having them contact you for their HVAC needs.
You want to treat your email list extra special, and we like to actually call this more of a VIP email list for our HVAC customers.
Those people that have subscribed to your email list are the only ones that are eligible to see and learn about your VIP offers and specials. This is an easy way to reward people who subscribe to your list. Nobody else, unless they’re on your email list, will see these special offers and discounts. Everybody wants to be part of a special club, a special group. Well, your special group is your VIP email list, and that’s how you reward these people. You consistently let them know that only they will be getting these specials and offers, and nobody else, which will hopefully – create additional value with being on your list.
The importance of staying top of mind with your business contacts is enormous.
Let me share with you 9 benefits your HVAC business will experience with eNewsletters:
#1. eNewsletters help your business keep customers because you’re staying top-of-mind.
#2. eNewsletters help your business acquire new customers because you’re staying top-of-mind with hot prospects.
#3. eNewsletters help your business build credibility because you’re showing up over and over and over.
#4. eNewsletters help your business stand out from your competition. Typically your competition is not doing much, if any email marketing making it easy for your business to stand out.
#5. eNewsletters help your business enhance its reputation because you get to decide exactly what you want your email list to see, read and hear. It’s 100% your decision, which means you get to control the experience as much as possible.
#6. eNewsletters help your business build up its brand. Again, by branding your eNewsletter template, you’ll get your business name out there even more.
#7. eNewsletters help your business increase its website and social media traffic. As long as you direct your eNewsletter readers to go and visit your social media sites or your website or your blog, they will go.
#8. eNewsletters help your business create an easy sharing opportunity for those people on your VIP email list. Your eNewsletter comes to them in their email inbox and because the information that you provide is super valuable, they have the ability to easily share your emails to their network making them a hero to their network. With most of the email service providers out there like Constant Contact, AWeber, and Infusionsoft, your email list can easily share your emails with their friends over on Facebook and Twitter and the other social media sites as well.
#9. eNewsletters that are exclusive to help your business create a sense of importance and specialness to your email list as they will be the only ones to receive your special offers and discounts.
As you can see, the importance of staying top-of-mind with your business community is enormous. I mentioned before, your current customers are 6 to 7 times more likely to purchase from you again versus trying to acquire a new customer. Don’t let this opportunity to cash in go by the wayside.
6 Deadly Email Marketing Mistakes
#1. No consistency with your email marketing campaign.
Not sending out informative, valuable emails, or eNewsletters on a consistent basis will cause you to become invisible. Not emailing your list only helps your competition stand out more to your target market, taking business away from you because you’re not there.
#2. Only focusing on selling instead of providing valuable resources and good solid info.
Take the same approach of the 80/20 rule, or the 90/10 rule, where you’re providing 80% or 90% of high-quality, valuable content, resources and information.
Designate the remaining 10% to 20% for your company promotion, offer or ask.
#3. Not including links to other business properties online.
eNewsletters are an easy way for you to drive high-quality, targeted traffic to your business social media sites, website and blog. Forgetting to add the proper links within your eNewseltter is a missed opportunity. You can only drive traffic to your website and social media pages by providing links in your actual eNewsletter.
#4. Poor subject lines.
Poor email subject lines will result in poor open rates, and if you have poor open rates on your email marketing campaigns, then very few people will actually open and read what your business has to say. You don’t want that to happen so always remember, step #1 with a successful email marketing campaign is to first get your audience to open the email. Once that happens, then you can make adjustments to improve the experience inside your emails. Tip: keep your subject lines on the shorter side and make sure that they are enticing your target market to open the email to find out the rest of the story.
#5. Image-only newsletters a big no-no.
There’s a common mistake made by business owners left and right who send out emails with one large image / banner. These banner images share everything that the company has to say in the email. The problem with this approach is most of the email recipients will be on email providers like Gmail and Yahoo! and MSN, which do not show images by default. This is a problem.
Your email recipients actually have to click ‘show images’ or ‘display images’ to see what’s on your banner, which may make them frustrated because they have to take one more step or they are confused because they don’t see anything inside their email because images are not displaying and they don’t know it.
So you want to make sure when you include images in your emails, you need to have the most important information in text as well so your email recipients can read all of the information you have to share with them.
#6. Having no contact information in your email.
Confirm you have your company phone number, your company address, your company email address, your company website address, your social media links, anywhere that people can contact your business.
Want to embed this infographic on your website?
