Table of Contents
Summary of Email Marketing
It’s not that we think you don’t know what emails are, but email marketing is a very specific beast that has changed many times over in only the last few years. There are a few types of emails (for starters) and each email must be used according to best practices.
Newsletters
These are the emails you are likely most familiar with. It’s exactly as it sounds: dishing out news via email. The mistake most non-professionals make is they try to sell something using a newsletter. This is not the correct use of this specific type of communication. All you’re doing is offering news, that’s it. No promotions, no deals, none of that. If you think you’re utilizing your email list well by sending out monthly emails that are trying to be funny, educational, and promoting deals all at once, you’re seriously fucking up.
Promotions
When you offer a customer or a lead a deal, or you’re actively soliciting business, you’re sending a promotional email. These emails must be delivered very carefully because there are serious regulations that will land you straight to the spambox if you don’t follow the rules. The trouble is… the rules are hard to find. If you don’t know what these four things are, you’re fucking up your email reputation, and email deliverability:
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
- DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)
- Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC)
- Subdomains
Not sure what any of things mean? Well, then people probably aren’t even receiving your emails.
But wait! The open rate looks good! Open rate? Come on guys/ gals. Open rates are so 2022. They don’t mean shit anymore. With Apple’s iOS15 update, all emails that come in are automatically opened by Apple.
Now GMail thinks: oh look. The email was opened. But nobody clicked on it. Must be spam.
So your open-to-click ratio (the amount of open emails in relation to the users that engaged in that email, AKA clicked on a link) spirals down the tubes even if your open-to-click ratio is actually great.
But with Apple marking every email as open, it removes our ability to track opens and also tells Google that the emails are garbage if the click rate is low (which is will be if ALL the emails are being marked as open, even if they aren’t opened).
Make sense?
Transactional Emails
Transactional emails are what they sound like, transactional. Someone needs to confirm their email address, confirm an estimate, confirm an appointment, and receipts or invoices that go out… all these things are transactional emails and must be sent from the appropriate email address with the appropriate formatting.
See if ever you get marked as spam, you don’t want your estimates ending up in the promotions folder, or even worse, the spam box.
If you’re sending out ALL your emails from the same address, that means if one type of email gets a bad email score, you jeopardize all your other communication, such as appointment confirmations.
Personal Emails
As if you need me to explain this… but what you might not know, as above discussed, is if your promotional emails go to spam, so do your newsletters, so do your transactional emails, and even worse: emails to your mom, dad, co-workers, friends…
If you have not segmented your email marketing, you’re setting yourself up for big problems down the road that become very hard to fix.
It’s like not going to the dentist for seven years and then showing up to learn you have two years of cavities to be filled.
Email Marketing Funnels
Okay so now we arrive at how to tie in all these emails to ONE funnel, ONE machine that will harmoniously work in unison with all forms of communication (including SMS marketing, which is another beast), so that you’re not frantically writing random emails at random times with no schedule or strategy at all.
Email Marketing Strategy
Every email is an asset, and you don’t want throw-away assets. You want assets that you can re-use and build upon. So how do you do this?
Well, for one, you can create emails for different months, different services, and different offers that can withstand the test of (at least a little bit) time.
Another thing you should do is make the most of your transaction emails. These get opened the most–highest CTR as well. So, you’ll want to use those normally boring emails and make them exciting.
I’ll go more into this later on, but for now, just remember that if you have no schedule and no plan, you’re wasting time writing emails.
Email Deliverability
Company A sends out 1,000 emails that land in the inbox, and Company B has a massive list of 10,000 emails after twenty years in business, but every email they send goes to spam, who wins?
The point we’re trying to make here is if you have a large email list but nobody sees the email, does your email list really exist?
Well what happens if you did fuck up, but now you want to fix it all up, is it possible? What a bummer it’d be if all those years in business, all those customers, all those leads, all perfectly aligned in your ServiceTitan export didn’t get ONE single email cause you didn’t follow the rules…
Fixing this ONE PROBLEM could be the difference between a $3,000,000 year and a $5,000,000 year. This one thing could change everything.
Email Marketing Tools
Before you write a subject line, put it through a spam subject line checker and make sure you’re scoring above an A (that means an A+)
When you’re writing your emails, write them in an email spam checker so that all the spam words that set off the alarms alert you that they need to be replaced.
Is your address shown clearly in the footer? Number? An unsubscribe button? Business name? Make sure there aren’t too many links because only spammers send out links (to Gmail), and you’re not a spammer, right?
You have to act as if you’re writing an email to your best bud.
No HTML Emails
This means no templates, no images, no branding; just text. Do you ever send your brother an email with a header, footer, image at the top, and H2 tags to separate topics?
Do you ever ask your friends to click somewhere?
See, all these things must be taken into consideration for EVERY SINGLE EMAIL, and because this is so difficult, make sure the emails are timeless and can be used again and again.
And look, this doesn’t mean you can’t send out relevant info, it just means that if the cost of a heat pump goes up, you only swap out the price. It means that if the cost of oil goes down, you swap out those prices. If new legislation comes up, just add it in; don’t write an entirely new email.
Summary
There’s more to come, and this blog post will be updated consistently till it’s a fleshed-out, ultimate guide to email marketing for HVAC businesses (and really any business owner). But for now, if you’re interested in learning more, feel free to book a call with us and speak to a specialist.
