Email Automation for service-based businesses

Email Automation is a great way for service-based businesses to get more bang for their marketing buck. Email Automation allows email marketers to create a series of emails, schedule when they’ll be sent and then sit back to reap the results. It’s one of the most effective ways to use email marketing, and it’s easy too.
For those in the service industries, Email Automation can be particularly useful. Here are three ways service-oriented businesses can take advantage of it:
Send date reminders
For eye doctors, dentists and other health care professionals, reminding patients that they’re due for a checkup, cleaning or appointment is a useful tool for reminding patients to visit regularly. Email Automation can help with this. For example, try segmenting your patient email lists by the months when those patients most recently visited: all the January patients in one list, the February patients in another and so on. Then create an automatic email and schedule it to send several weeks before those patients are due for their six-month or one-year return.
Date reminders are also useful for landscapers, gardeners, event planners, cleaning services, decorators and the like. When important seasons or year-end holidays are approaching, use Email Automation to remind customers you stand ready to assist with their needs. Create an automated series that keeps you top of mind in the weeks or months when your customers are likely thinking about your services. Remind customers that they’ll need you soon, and make it easy for them to get in touch with you.
Stay relevant in the offseason
Many small businesses experience some type of cyclical slowdown at least once a year. Email Automation can fill the gap. Use this time to offer your hibernating customers information they can use. Perhaps tell them how they can extend the duration of a service you’ve previously provided, or offer seasonal safety tips. Even without a hard or soft sell, automated email series can make your brand seem relevant and accessible to customers, so they think of you when they do need your services again.
Sometimes the off season is useful for service businesses in need of, say, a website overhaul. Here Email Automation comes in handy once more, as you can create an automatic campaign to count down the days to your website relaunch, building excitement as it gets closer. Of course, once your new site is live, use another automatic campaign to entice readers to check it out.
Create a sense of urgency
Speaking of countdowns, Email Automation is the perfect way to generate urgency with your readers. With their steady drip-drip-drip of regularly timed emails, automatic campaigns build excitement about a popular new service, advertise the dwindling time remaining in a special promotion, or employ “Are you ready for…?” messaging to spur customer action. Any time-sensitive or seasonal subject can be the center of an automated email campaign.
Automating emails is quick and painless for service-oriented businesses. With a little forethought, and by creating the campaigns up front, service-based businesses in any industry can put Email Automation to worthwhile use.

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Source: Vertical Response