Your customers want fast responses and 24/7 availability, but as a business owner, it’s just not feasible to be available all the time. However, there are solutions that can help.
Consider this scenario:
Your customer receives an email or text reminding them that payment is due for their most recent lawn service, including a link to your website.
The email also includes a note that it’s prime time to perform a grub control treatment, something that their service tech noted would be beneficial to the health of their lawn the last time they were at the property.
The customer gets the message, clicks the link, goes to your website, logs into their account, pays their outstanding balance, and adds grub treatment to their list of services.
And all of this happens after hours on a weekend.
Your customer paid their bill on their own time, was able to add an additional service that will help their lawn stay healthy, and is happy that everything was taken care of quickly and easily. You received a timely payment for services rendered and secured an upsell, and all of this required almost zero time or effort from you or anyone on your staff. Everybody plays; everybody wins. That’s the beauty of automation.
When you lean into automated marketing and customer self-service, you can keep your business running smoothly—and keep getting paid—round-the-clock.
Why Automated Marketing?
Automated marketing can be a valuable tool for your lawn care business – streamlining your marketing efforts and helping you save time and resources while still effectively engaging with customers and prospects. Having the right programs and processes in place enables you to market with almost zero effort. With automated marketing in place, you can:
- Personalize the customer experience: Use customer data gathered from your CRM to deliver tailored emails, offers, and other communications based on your customers’ actual behavior and preferences to provide more relevant and engaging experiences.
- Effectively target potentials: By analyzing the data and behavior of your current customers, you can create a profile of your “ideal” customer and target your marketing accordingly. This not only helps in attracting likely new customers but also in nurturing loyalty in your current customers by providing them with the right information at the right time.
- Increase conversion rates. Through targeted and personal marketing campaigns, you can guide customers through their journey more efficiently, resulting in higher conversion rates and, ultimately, increased revenue.
- Save time and money. You got into lawn care to provide great lawn care services – not to become a marketing expert. When you have an automated marketing system that helps you create and send effective customer communications WITHOUT hours and hours of effort, you’re not only saving valuable time, you’re saving money.
Finding the right automated marketing platform is kind of like hiring a new employee. You have options, but it needs to be the right fit for your business. Which features will have the biggest impact on your success? Here’s what to look for in an automated marketing solution:
- Robust automation capabilities: You want serious “set it and forget it” functionality so you don’t have to worry about what’s going out and when – you just know it’s going to happen when you want it to.
- Integration with other tools: Consider how well the platform integrates with other marketing tools you may already be using, such as your CRM or job scheduling software.
- Sales team support: An effective platform will assist your sales team in managing leads by providing detailed information on leads generated through various marketing campaigns. This will enable your team to track interactions with various clients, ensuring no potential customer is missed.
- Email campaigns: You can use your automated marketing tool to send various email campaigns to prospects and customers alike – promotions, upsell and cross-sell letters, general customer communications, before and after service emails, and more.
- Customizable templates: Effective templates make content creation easier by allowing you to create and personalize customer communications.
- Real-time analytics and reporting: Look for a platform that provides detailed analytics and reporting features so you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your marketing strategies.
Why Customer Self-Service?
Did you know that 90% of people expect brands or companies to have a self-service support
portal? Most of your customers don’t want to have to make a phone call or mail a check. The easier you make it for them to schedule service, get their questions answered, and pay their bills, the more likely they are to do business with you. When your customers can independently access their lawn care services on your website, it makes life easier for everyone – you’ll see improved customer satisfaction, better efficiency, and further automation of your sales and services. Customer self-service is the way to easier cash flow, better revenue, and happier customers.
A self-serve portal that smooths the way for your customers to pay you will help you avoid the “boom and bust” cash flow issues that can crop up in the off-season by streamlining your payment processes and getting money flowing through your business faster.
- Reduce late or missed payments when customers can pay at their convenience
- Eliminate trips to the bank with paper checks – and avoid having to wait several days for checks to clear
- Accept each customer’s preferred form of payment
- Increase pre-pay and auto-pay
When you give your customers what they want, they’ll keep coming back. A customer portal makes
your company available to your customers on their own time and lets them interact with you the way they want to. It makes your business more customer-friendly, more efficient, and more self-sufficient. And most importantly, it helps improve your cash flow by making payments simpler.
If you’re already using RealGreen’s Service Assistant software to run your business, you’re ahead of the game. Our Automated Marketing Assistant (AMA) and Customer Assistant Websites (CAW) work hand-in-hand to ensure that your virtual office is open all day, every day – plus, they both seamlessly integrate with Service Assistant 5, making customer outreach and prospect marketing simple and ensuring that you always have the most up-to-date information available. It’s like adding another administrator to your office staff.
