Posts tagged "the customer factor"

A Prospect Intro Letter…

Hey All,

I recently was asked by a window cleaner to create an intro letter for him to use as a door opener for prospects who have not requested an estimate from him. What he’s doing is gathering up prospect names/addresses, inserting them into The Customer Factor, and then he’s going to send each of them a personalized intro letter.

Before posting the letter that I created below, I did want to say that this method is one that I did not use, but it may be a method that’s worth testing in your area. Um…maybe if there is enough interest from software owners, I’ll create a prospect import feature so that prospect names/addresses can be imported in bulk. Anyway…just another way to get the word out to your prospects. If you’re interested, here’s the letter:

Have a great day!

Steve

Reestablishing Relationships…and some SEO.

Good Evening Steve,

This is a super important issue for me and something I want to do wisely. I have a customer base of almost 450 clients, a percentage of which are residential clients. Coming to the Customer Factor from a progam like ShineSC that has a very difficult to navigate reminder program, I am even more clearly aware how I have not established solid relationships with my clients.

Honestly its been because there hasnt been any good way to really keep track of who needs to be called when before The Customer Factor and it is EXTREMELY time consuming to do the same things Factor does for you automatically.

With that being said, I want to start immediately with re-establishing strong relationships with my customer base and really would like advise on which way you would suggest. I am thinking about either using Factor to send them all a letter or maybe using Send Out Cards.

Either way, I want to begin now to re-establish those relationships BEFORE I start making courtesy reminder calls that they are due for services here in the Spring. Please let me know your thoughts.

And this is another subject completely, but I really would like to visit with you because of all of your experience in this area. I am completely redesigning my website, from the ground up. I "settled" when I first had it created and ended up with a product I wasn’t happy with.

What is worse, even when I try targeted and specific keywords for my website searches to see how I am ranked in the search engines, I am always listed about the sixth or seventh page. I don’t have to tell you that they are probably not going to browse through six pages of results to find me.

I know the vast majority of searches end after looking through the first page of results. This brings me to my need for your help. I want to set my website up in such a way as to make it EXTREMELY search engine friendly and make it so that more and more potential clients are able to visit my site and are at least given the opportunity to see what we can offer. So I mean this very literally, ANY and ALL help that you can offer to help my website would be much much appreciated. This is highly important to me and since you have lots of knowledge in this area, I know you could really help. Thank you again!

Sincerely,

Nicholas

My Response:

Hi Nicholas,

Good morning. 

If you have not contacted your customers on a regular basis in the past, then my recommendation would be to send them a personalized letter first.  The prob with making a phone call right off the bat is it comes across as too "telemarketerish" if you know what I mean. 

My philosophy over the years has always been to reach out to my customers multiple times and not just when I wanted to do their job.  So I sent out on average of 6 greeting cards per year per customer, with most of the cards just saying general type things like "I hope your summer is going well" to give you an example.

This worked to not only generate immediate referrals and plenty of customer goodwill, but when the time came to follow up for an actual repeat appt. via a phone call, it didn’t seem like I had my hand out just looking to take more money from them.  I really think most service businesses get this part of the process wrong.  Follow up is great and is obviously necessary, but it’s important to plant seeds throughout the months following a job.  It makes the actual callback a whole lot easier for you.  And it makes it very difficult for your customer to take a chance with another window cleaner, no matter if he’s a bit cheaper or not.

Anyway…with all this said, back to your original question, I would send out a personalized letter to your customers using The Customer Factor.  In that letter, mention something like: The last time you’ve been serviced was on <insert token for "last job date" here>, so I’ll be calling you in a few days to follow up with you to see if you need to be serviced again."  Keep in mind that you can use tokens for further personalization like a "job type" token, "job price" token, etc.  It would actually be better to do this only with the customers who currently show on the quick summary screen as customers needing to be tentatively contacted now otherwise you may mistakenly send letters out to customers who you may have just completed jobs for and who aren’t quite ready to be serviced.

For the customers who don’t fall into the category of "tentatively scheduled now", I would start planning some greeting card campaigns.  And yes, that’s where Send Out Cards would come in handy.  They can put it on autopilot for you.  There is some initial work up front in selecting the cards from their card database and inserting the wording into each card, but once this is done, it really is on autopilot.  As a side note, once Send Out Cards is up and running, it’s not necessary to send out any personalized letters from The Customer Factor except the thank you letter after a customer’s initial job is completed.  Some members may also send out personalized "reminder" letters when customers are ready to be serviced again, but I just preferred to pick up the phone and call ‘em.   

I hope the above helps in planning your follow up.  I talk about follow up a lot on this blog and within my manual because it’s the one piece of the puzzle that I think separates the truly successful window cleaners from the not so successful window cleaners.  Oh…and speaking about follow up, the key is to just make sure to try and have both customer categories ("tentatively due" and "callbacks") display "0" on the quick summary screen within The Customer Factor.  If you can do that, then you’re well on your way.  I’ve had conversations with some members who let these numbers build up too much, and this is just leaving money on the table. 

As far as search engine optimization, this is an entire industry in itself. Professional search engine optimization firms charge upwards of $1000 to establish top website rankings for their customers.  So that’ll give you some indication of how involved search engine optimization is.  But I can definitely give you some pointers to get you started.  And feel free to also call me on this for further info.  Again…there is just so much to it. 

First off, I would go to my window cleaning directory and create a premium listing if you haven’t yet.  And when doing so, view the video.  I provide some detailed information on some search engine optimization aspects like meta tags and keywords.  And then reverse engineer the actual webpage (premium listing) you’re creating in the directory. 

Ok…so to back up for a sec, there are 2 ingredients to ranking well in the search engines.  The first is what keywords are used on your web page ("on-page" optimization), and the 2nd is the websites/links you can get pointing to your website.  This is called "off-page" optimization.

Most webmasters put all their energy into on-page optimization and getting their keywords correct, but this is actually only about 15% of the work required for good rankings.  A full 85% of your effort has to be spent on link building.  Sounds complicated, but it’s really not. 

I use ezinearticles.com to submit articles to.  Each article allows for an article resource box where I can link back to my site.  You can also submit a press release.  This is a wise investment. Webwire (http://www.webwire.com/) is a good place to go.  For $19.95, your press release will be distributed to multiple press release services and get you many links back to your site.  There are a whole bunch of different ways to get links like submitting to social bookmarking services, directories, etc.  I can provide you other resources if you’re interested.  But the main thing to take away from this is that getting your website ranked depends on much more than just having the correct keywords on the webpage.

As far as keywords though, what keyword do you want to rank for?  You need to make sure that that keyword is the first phrase in your meta title. If you want to provide me your website address, I’ll take a peek at it.  Most webmasters make the mistake of putting their company name in the meta title which does no good when it comes to trying to rank in the search engines.  Again…reverse engineer the 3 bears window cleaning directory and the premium listing you create for your company, and you’ll walk away with some good ideas.  Currently the directory is ranked #3 for "window cleaning directory" (search with no quotes) in google, so it’s ranked high.

I hope this provides you some initial info. to chew on.  If you have any further questions, let me know.  I’ve been thinking about putting together a video series on how to rank well in the search engines.  But just keep in mind that there are so many variables that go into it.  Another variable of course is competition.  Ex: Ranking for "window cleaning springfield missouri" is a whole lot easier than ranking for "window cleaning".  

Take care for now. 

Regards,

Steve

Note To Everyone: If you have an interest in viewing a tutorial on search engine optimization and how to get your website ranked high in the search engines, let me know. I won’t do it if there’s no interest, but if there is, I’ll be glad to put one together.

If you don’t have any website yet, then it’s important that you get one online as soon as possible. There are prospects right now looking online for window cleaners in your town. It’s just another way to bring in jobs. If you already have a website, great. The next step is making sure it’s not buried on page 20 of the search engine results where no one can find  you.  So let’s get it ranked high. Call me for pointers and/or once again, please let me know if you’d like to receive a tutorial or two on these all important ranking strategies. 

Cold Weather Climates…

Hi Steve:

I’m writing to let you know that I have finally gotten round to starting the business. In fact, I did my first residential job today. It went OK, except for the fact that I underquoted quite a bit, but I’m sure I’ll get better at the process.
 
I do have one big question to ask you. I have heard you give reference several times to the effect of winter and cold weather on window cleaning businesses. You have indicated that it causes business to drop. I’m curious – how strong is the effect? Is it stronger on the residential market than on the commercial market? I’ve very curious. You see, I live in Canberra, Australia. We experience a very long and cold winter here.
 
At present, since I have only just started the business, I still have my full-time job. I am hoping that I can generate enough business so that I can convert my job to part-time and eventually even leave it. But I don’t want to make any false moves, and the effect of winter on the business could prove critical.
 
I look forward to your response.
 
For your interest, I have attached some of my marketing material. You might find my business name and adaptations interesting.
 
Lou

My Response:

Hi Lou,

Good morning and it’s good to hear from you. Congratulations on doing your first job.

Right…there will be the slowness factor that you’ll experience with your first few jobs.  That’s only natural.  So I wouldn’t focus on the fact that you may have underbid.  As a matter of fact, since you’ll pick up speed over time, that same job which you currently think you may have underbid may actually have been bid perfectly once you’re at full speed.  So again the first few jobs will be a bit slow and you’ll make less per hour window cleaning pay vs the national average for window cleaners.  But that’s ok…you’ll reach that average soon for sure.  )

The cold weather does affect the residential market more so than the commercial market.  There is no doubt about it.  Commercial customers will always need your services whether it’s raining, snowing, or whatever because they constantly have customers coming in to their stores.  Residential customers on the other hand may hold off a couple of months until the weather turns a bit nicer.  They are not in as desperate of a need. 

But there are always other services you can provide through really cold months that’ll carry you through.  And this is especially true once you build a decent sized customer base.  You’ll find that customers will turn to you for other services once they begin to trust you.  So although window cleaning may not be at the top of their "to-do" list in the winter, they’ll have other services that are.

I can understand the point about not converting your current job to part time.  Absolutely.  I think you would benefit by reading other posts on my blog about this issue and lots of other issues. I talk about the winter time (and other services to provide), working the biz part time, etc. etc.

I love the marketing materials.  They sure do look familiar.  )  Thanks for sending ‘em.  Take care for now and if you need any other assistance, please let me know.  Take care for now.

Regards,

Steve

A No/Low Cost Marketing Method…

Hey All,

This email came in the the other day from a fellow window cleaner, and it contains a mighty cool marketing idea to implement in your window cleaning business as soon as possible. Enjoy!

Regards,

Steve

Steve,

A friend of mine and I were brainstorming this last week end and I think we have found a way that we will NEVER want to stop flyering!

How many flyers would a person want to put out if they were averaging $30.00 per hour just for putting them out? I talked with a handful of business owners (some I do their windows, some I don’t) and offered to distribute their flyers for them at a rate of $5.00 per hundred. 6 of them said yes immediately!

They said that they could not hire someone at minimum wage to put them out at that rate, which is true. I have door hanger bags that I use for my flyers, and it is not much trouble at all to put a few more in the bag along with mine. I get the bags for about $60.00 for 5000 of them. I think this is a great way to keep a little revenue coming in to pay for my own campaign as well as pay for my time doing it. I thought you might want to pass this idea along to the rest of the gang.Have a great day.

Regards,

Kelly Matteson
Window Pros

My Reply:

Hi Kelly,

Good morning.  I think that’s a great idea for sure.  A great way to save some serious flyer distribution costs or maybe even break even with no costs out of pocket. Love it. There’s nothing quite like marketing for free.    Very cool.  What I would do to carry it a step further is to hire as many people as you can that allows for you to break even which will allow you to get out some tremendous numbers. In other words, I wouldn’t look at distributing flyers for other business owners as a way to make money. I would take whatever money you receive from them and invest it into however many people you can until you reach breakeven. Bottom line…zero out of pocket costs that generate jobs and profits for you. Can’t beat that.

Ex: If you’ve done the math and have 6 fellow service business owners who are interested in using you for distributing their flyers along with your own, and you can get 3, 4, or 5 people pumping ‘em out for you at a breakeven point, then that’s what I’d do most definitely.  You’ll be way ahead of the game for sure.  Obviously time is money as we all know, so in addition to the marketing costs, I’m always looking at any way possible to avoid having to spend the time hoofing it through neighborhoods myself. 

Anyway….just a thought.  And thanks so much for the idea and your email. I’ll post this on the blog so that other window cleaners can see it and possibly benefit from it.  Thanks again.        

If any window cleaner is part of an organization like bni.com or some other networking group in their area, I would think it would be very easy to come up with a few small businesses willing to pay a few bucks to get their flyer distributed.  Everyone is looking for low cost advertising.  Especially in this economic climate.  

Take care for now and have a great day.

Regards,

Steve

More Talk about Direct Mailing…

Steve,

I am in the process of having your marketing materials modified by the source that did yours , with my own contact info. Here’s where I have hit my stumbling block. I’ve never done a direct mailing, I didn’t know if you had any idea of what is the best way of selecting your target addresses to mail to? Income? Property value? I’m trying to figure out what’d be best. I was looking to mail to each potential client 6 times a year minimum so at least every other month. I know massive action is the best way to go, so I’d like to try and get out at least 50,000 postcards or more if I can afford it.

Luke

My Reply:

Hi Luke,

Good morning. Barbara is a great person to pick for doing design and edits, so she’ll treat you good and make sure you’re happy with everything she’s done.

The first thing that I would recommend that you do is go back into chapter 7 again and reread the method of mailing that I did.  Because I didn’t do any specific mailings to homeowners based on income, property value, or any other criteria.  I kept it real simple by doing "carrier route" mailings.  When you mail to a carrier route, you’re mailing to each home in the route.  So the postcard would be addressed to "Postal Patron", not to the individual homeowner.

The key is to do some initial research by driving into various subdivisions and deciding whether they are your ideal prospects. But it’s really easy to decide that though.  As soon as you enter the subdivision, you should have a pretty good idea whether it’s your target market or not.  Then using either a local direct mail house or dick tudor (the person who did all my mailings…info. in manual), you give the mail house a street number, street name, and zip.  From there they can determine what route number the home is in.  So that particular home and all the surrounding homes in the route will receive a postcard.

I had the advantage of being able to walk into dick’s business and see an actual map on the wall of all of the carrier routes in my area.  So I could see for example that "haile plantation" was in route 67.  So I would instruct Dick to mail postcards to route 67 since I knew haile plantation consisted of homes that were in my ideal target market.

Once you’ve done your initial research and you pretty much know what routes are good routes, then it’s just a matter of routinely mailing to those routes.  A couple words of advice though: First, try and mix into your mailings some flyer distributions.  In addition to all the postcard mailings I did, I also distributed flyers every single saturday to various routes.  So the homes were getting hit from all angles.  Pay a couple of kids to do this for you and they’ll be able to pump ‘em out quickly. 

And the second bit of advice would be to not make the mistake of pumping out 50,000 postcards to 50,000 different homes.  You need to take advantage of the repetition factor, so it’s important to space those postcards out and hit homes repeatedly. 

You do mention about "if I can afford it", but the thing to do is to mail to just two to 3 routes at first.  This might be maybe 1500 to 2000 postcards initially (depending on how many homes are in each route).  You’ll get calls from this mailing which will turn into jobs which will provide you the dollars to reinvest. 

Now keep in mind that the first mailing gives you the lowest response.  So those 2 to 3 routes need to be mailed to again about 3 weeks later.  See how this works? So I wouldn’t look at it as 50,000 postcards at once.  I would buy 5000 postcards at a time, mail to a few routes, reinvest some profits back into buying another 5000, and then continue on. 

As a side note, a window cleaner recently mentioned a great printing source to me.  They offer a quality postcard (14pt thickness and UV coating), but their pricing is the best I’ve seen.  It’s http://www.gotprint.com  I was about to say it’s $105 for 5000 postcards.  That’s what it was the last time I checked.  But I just checked today and they have the pricing listed at $99.55 for 5000 postcards, color front/black back.  Unbelievable pricing. There’s not really any price break by buying more cards like 10,000, so I’d simply buy 5000 postcards at a time. 

If you have any questions on this, let me know.  It may even be better with a phone call. 256-546-2446.  But check out Chapter 7 again first though.  The next step is just deciding who to use for the mailing process.  You certainly don’t want to have to buy postal permits and do all this mailing stuff yourself.  So look for a local direct mail house to work with or contact Dick.  Again, his info. is in the manual. Take care and have a great day.

Regards,

Steve

A Marketing Idea to Apply Now!

Hey All,

A few days ago I received an email from a window cleaner asking me for some thoughts on how to drum up business right now to cover his typically slow january/february (he’s in a colder climate). I figured that all window cleaners might benefit from my reply to him, so it’s posted below.

I hope your year is going super so far. We’ll soon be coming up on the busy, busy, busy season. Yippee!! Please let me know if I can assist.  256-546-2446. Take care.

Steve

Hi Aaron,

Steve

Affiliate Programs Now Available…

Hey All,

I thought I’d write a quick blog post announcing that we have recently implemented two affiliate programs, one for my window cleaning "How To" product, How To Start Your Own Residential Window Washing Business, and one for my window cleaning software, The Customer Factor.

For those of you who don’t know what an affiliate program is, it is simply a way for you to earn commissions on products. It doesn’t cost anything to sign up and it’s a great way to make some extra money on top of your window cleaning profits. And since the pricing model for The Customer Factor is monthly or quarterly, I could be paying you each month/quarter on a regular basis.

Here are the two web pages that you need to go to sign up for free and to read more:

Affiliate Program for my "How To" Window Cleaning Program

Affiliate Program for my Window Cleaning Software

Many of my system owners and software users are already in forums discussing the above products, so feel free to join ‘em. ) It’s a great way to earn commissions for basically doing nothing. Just share your unique affiliate link (which is assigned to you when you sign up at the above "Affiliate Program" web pages) with other folks in forums, window cleaning hangouts, or anywhere else that window cleaners might congregate. If they visit your affiliate link(s) and end up buying, you’ve made some moolah! Even if they visit through your affiliate link, don’t buy right away, but then come back later to buy, you still get credit for the sale. Everything is tracked.  Oh…and I pay commissions on the 1st of each month like clockwork. 

Two Final notes:

1. Obviously it’s not in your best interest to sell my window washing "How To" program in your local area. Although competition is healthy, it’s probably not smart to create too much competition for yourself. So it’s best if you share this product with window cleaners who are not in your local area like many of the window cleaners you might run into on forums. Or if you know of a friend or relative in another location who wants to start a profitable business, great.

2. My Window Cleaning Software however is a product that can be sold to anyone in any location. And although I market it primarily to window cleaners since that’s the business I was personally in, any service business owner can benefit from it. I have members who are carpet cleaners, maid services, janitorial services, pressure cleaners, etc. Any service business who deals with customers needing repeat services is a prime candidate for The Customer Factor. And if you’re not a member yourself yet, come on in. The water is fine. )

And check this out…if you become an affiliate for The Customer Factor, make 4 or 5 sales (easy to do), you could literally enjoy a FREE membership to the software, AND I could be paying you each month. Not a bad arrangement, wouldn’t you say? 

So visit the two affiliate program web pages above or below. Read about how much commission is offered for each product, why it pays to be an affiliate, etc. etc. It takes just a couple of minutes to sign up and it’s FREE! Here are the 2 web pages again where you can check out the affiliate programs:

Affiliate Program for my "How To" Window Cleaning Program

Affiliate Program for my Window Cleaning Software

Have a great day.

Steve  

A “Announcement” Letter To Use…

(Below is a window cleaner’s reply to my previous reply to him)

Thanks for the advice Steve,

Going about sending a letter makes me realize I need to take better care of and be in more contact with my customers.

I am so much better these days, but when I first started I was 26 and was not so focussed on customer satisfaction past being paid for the job.

I wish I had kept better track of all those clients, and had taken better care of the ones I had, being more diligent on following up and making sure they were satisfied.

Lots of people just dont call me, Im wondering if I should drop them from my list and only focus on my clients that I know love me and build from there.

My feeling is to send one card to everyone, and one next spring, and then drop it and really focus on building a happy clientele base, and staying in contact with them.

Could you give me an idea as to what to say in offering gutter cleaning (an existing service), I also though to say something about an exterior touch up, to plant the idea to prepare for the holidays.

My sales skills arent so strong, so any advice would be appreciated, maybe a simple template letter note, to get an idea, I think I go to complex when I send letters in the past…

Yeah I worked with a friend who use to be an emyth coach for awhile, and there are a lot of systems for me to implement I know.

Thanks again,
Aaron.

My Response:

Hi Aaron:

Good morning. 

Right…follow up is really critical.  It can make or break a business.  It can be a bit costly and time consuming to always go after new customers.  Keeping current customers is much, much easier and less expensive since the initial marketing expenditure was already done (flyer, postcard, door hanger, etc.) to get them on board the first time.  It’s not too late for you to follow up though.  Do you have any customers in The Customer Factor on the home page who need to be called?  If not, do you have any "frequency alerts" on the home page?  Make sure to fill in some frequency periods so that you can take full advantage of The Customer Factor functionality.  If you have all the frequency periods filled in, the software will do the rest and present you with anyone who needs to be followed up with.

Right…customers won’t necessarily call you.  That’s why I stress "follow up" so much.  People get busy and forget about us.  So a nice courtesy call is just the thing they need.  So I definitely wouldn’t "drop them".  Just because they haven’t called you doesn’t mean they don’t like you and your service.  Again, they may have just "forgotten", got busy, etc. etc. 

As far as "what to say in offering gutter cleaning"…are you referring to a letter?  If so, it’s real easy.  No sales skill involved.  Just a simple straight forward letter to your current customer base announcing that you now do gutter cleaning (or exterior touch up).  Like this:

Dear Mrs. Customer (personalize this):

Aaron
<your company name>

That’s all.  Just a simple letter.  I used variations of this, so my letters were never the same.  But the above would work well.  I would prepare it in The Customer Factor and send it out.  But I would still follow up with a phone call though.  Nothing quite like a phone call to prompt a customer to take action.  

I hope this helps.  If you focus on the follow up process, I can promise you that you’ll see more jobs and more profits coming your way.  Take care for now.

Regards,

Steve