email marketing for service businesses

Email Marketing For Service Businesses – A Step-by-Step Plan

By: Frank DePino | March 15, 2024

Email marketing for service businesses is considered one of the best forms of digital marketing. It is a cost-effective marketing method that can help you generate leads and drive sales for your service-based business.

Marketing Emails were amongst the first forms of digital marketing, and they are still proven to be successful in promoting your service-based business to this day.

A recent study on Statista showed that the number of email users in 2020 grew to over 4 billion and is predicted to grow to 4.6 billion by 2025.

It shows that the world still relies on using e-mails despite the abundance of other communication channels.

Tapping into this form of marketing can help your business reach new potential clients and build lasting relationships with them.

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How Your Service Business Can Benefit From Email Marketing

Before we get into the details of how to structure your email marketing plan, it’s important to realize the benefits email marketing has to offer.

Some of the things your business stands to gain by utilizing email marketing are listed below:

  • Unmatched ROI (Return On Investment).
  • It is a solid and cost-effective marketing strategy.
  • Allows you to reach an audience that is already engaged with your business, generate repeat sales and increase brand engagement.
  • E-mail marketing also has the potential to pull in new clients.
  • Email segmentation can allow you to deliver messages to a target audience.
  • Increases business revenue.
  • This marketing strategy is easy to set up and maintain, even for small businesses.
  • Email marketing allows you to choose whether you want to reach a global or local audience.
  • It is easy to track and measure the campaign’s success.
The copywriter is preparing an email marketing strategy for services business

How To Make An Email Marketing Plan

Like everything else in life, proper planning always increases the chances of success of your email marketing campaign. 

Sticking to a proper plan helps keep you focused on why, when, and who you’re emailing. It also helps you to figure out what you should be including in your emails for achieving your marketing objectives.

Additionally, you’ll always have a strategy to fall back to even when your list keeps growing exponentially.

Using software to help with your email marketing for service businesses also helps a ton.

Not only does it make mailing a huge list of people a lot easier, but it also helps you follow anti-spam laws and generally makes the job a whole lot less complicated.

So without further ado, let’s jump right into it.

1st Step: Establish What Your Goals Are With Email Marketing

The first and probably the most important step is always figuring out why you want to use marketing emails and what you hope to achieve from them.

Answering this question will clear up a lot. The answer will help you decide your target audience and what kind of emails you want to send them.

Once you have an answer to this question, you will be able to construct a powerful and fruitful marketing strategy.

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2nd Step: Deciding What Audience You Want To Target

After deciding your goals, the next step is to find the target audience you want to reach with your emails.

Targeting your emails towards people who are most likely to need your business offers is one of the most important steps in a successful email marketing campaign.

The better you know your audience, the better performing emails you can write. For example, if your company offers gardening services, your target audience should live in houses with gardens.

It just wouldn’t make sense to include people who live in apartments on your company’s mailing list.

Additionally, email segmentation is something that can help you go deeper and target even more specific audiences.

Segmentation basically allows you to subdivide your email subscribers into smaller groups or “segments” depending on specific criteria.

It allows businesses to make and deliver personalized emails to their loyal subscribers based on their location, purchase history, etc.

It can give marketers the ability to generate emails catering to the specific needs of subscribers on different email lists.

After all, personalized emails have a higher likelihood of being successful than generic ones for all emails.

Segmentation can help in better connecting with your audience, allowing targeted promotions, distinguishing between active and inactive subscribers, improving click rates, and decreasing unsubscriptions rates.

The Mediaboom mail list grows after taking strategic marketing actions

3rd Step Widening Your Mailing List

After deciding on your target audience, the next obvious step is growing that list. No one wants to sign up for an email list if there’s nothing in it for them. That’s where incentives for signing up play a big role.

The incentive you offer strictly depends on what your business has to offer. For example, a company offering gardening services could offer free gardening tips for people who choose to sign up. 

The incentive can be anything from free ebooks, courses, discount coupons, exclusive content, amongst others. The main takeaway is that it should be so enticing that it will drive people to sign up. 

You can add pop-up opt-in forms to your business’s website to allow visitors to sign up to your mailing list. It’s the perfect way to grow your list of contacts in your email marketing for service business strategy.

Additionally, if your business has a social media account already made with a decent following. You can pitch your followers on that platform to subscribe to your email newsletter as well.

This way, you can convert your social media followers into email subscribers as well. The individuals that follow you on social media platforms are already engaged with your business.

It makes them more likely to join in on your email list too.

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4th Step: Deciding What The Content Of Your Emails Is Going To Be About

After finally growing your list of subscribers to a decent number, it’s finally time to start sending out emails. The problem now is deciding what type of content you will include in email marketing for service businesses.

The only way to prevent your subscribers from unsubscribing is by simply designing emails with helpful and relevant content.

At the end of the day, the content you choose to produce depends mostly on the nature of your business and how you want to run your campaign.

For example, financial advisors can use their expertise and knowledge to give tips and guidance related to personal finance.

This type of helpful content is sure to keep your subscribers hooked and turn them into loyal supporters.

The previously discussed 2nd step should help inspire you about the kind of content your audience would prefer to see. If that doesn’t lead you anywhere, the best way to get ideas is by practical experience. 

Conducting competitor research can help inspire you to get ideas for your own business. Simply signing up for their mailing lists can give you insight into the type of emails they write and use. 

The copywriter has set the frequency of sending his newsletter.

5th Step: Figuring Out How Often To Send Emails

Finally, the last hurdle you have to face in setting up your email marketing for service businesses strategy is deciding on a fixed mailing timetable. 

This step is also quite important as sending in emails too often can result in subscribers feeling swamped and annoyed by the content and will more often than not hit unsubscribe.

Likewise, sending in emails too infrequently can result in your subscribers losing interest, or chances are they might go unnoticed.

Limited time and resources can also be a factor in deciding when to send emails. That’s why you’ve got to experiment and see which one works best for your business. 

Setting a timetable that involves sending emails periodically is crucial. You can choose to opt for either daily, weekly, or monthly emails.

Daily Emails

You could choose to send daily emails if you have the time and resources to do so every day. It is perhaps the best way forward to create a meaningful, tight bond with your subscribers and turn them into loyal followers. 

The bad thing about daily emails is that not everyone prefers them. Subscribers can feel annoyed and lose interest because of the constant barrage of emails sent to them daily.

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Weekly Emails

Weekly emails are much more manageable for businesses and bearable for readers. They hit just the right sweet spot between the emails being too annoyingly frequent or hardly ever sent.

If you have the time and resources available, the weekly schedule is a decent timeline to follow for your emails.

Monthly Emails

Monthly emails are another option, given that the information and content they provide are invaluable and useful. They are also way easier to manage than weekly emails, as it takes less of your valuable time to manage.

You could choose to include something of high value to your subscribers, like discounts, to keep them engaged and interested.

The downside of monthly emails, though, is that they can easily go unnoticed in your subscriber’s inboxes. Subscribers also might have lost interest in the business or service due to the apparent lack of engagement.

The marketing managers of the web agency are checking the report to see the performance of their email campaigns.

Bonus Tip #1: Keep Track Of What Works And What Doesn’t

Your email marketing for service business campaigns allows you to keep track of the performance of your strategies.

These analytics can definitely help you figure out what works and what doesn’t. You can use email marketing software to see how many clicks you get, the number of times your email is opened, etc.

You should carefully analyze this data to improve your email marketing plans. A lot of it boils down to trial and error, and over time you’ll start to realize what works best for you.

Once you find this best-performing strategy, keep sticking to it and keep searching for places where you can improve.

Bonus Tip #2: Include Different Types Of Emails

You can choose to include all different sorts of emails to keep your subscribers engaged with your business. Some types of emails you can include in your email marketing for service businesses strategies include:

  • Welcome emails.
  • Limited-time offer emails.
  • Holiday greetings emails.
  • Special events emails.

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10 Website Mistakes Luxury Brands Should Avoid

Does your luxury website include any of these common mistakes? Learn the secrets to driving more traffic to your luxury website, generating more leads, and ultimately increasing sales.

Welcome Emails

After getting a lead, the first thing you should do is to send them a warm and welcoming email.

Every new subscriber should be sent such personalized emails, and the process should be automated, with smart calls to action. 

Limited Time Offer Emails

Limited time offer emails take advantage of such consumer behaviors by instilling a fear of missing out on them.

It can push subscribers to make a fast decision about a desirable purchase.

With such limited-time offers, you need to make sure that your offer reaches as many possible clients ASAP.

And it so happens that email marketing is one of the best channels to help reach many potential clients in the least amount of time.

Customers were thrilled to receive the holiday greeting email

Holiday Greetings Emails

The yearly calendar is full of holidays that you can use in email marketing for service businesses to lead you to success. You can use holiday greeting emails to engage your subscribers and promote your services and products subtly. 

Special Event Emails

You can choose to incorporate special event emails into your marketing strategy as well.

Whether it’s about the release of a new service, giveaways, or special offers, these types of emails are highly effective in engaging your audience, generating new leads, promoting services, and increasing sales. 

With the right type of incentive, you can change your audience from one-time buyers to loyal preachers.

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Conclusion

Email marketing is also one of the most direct channels of communication you can use to engage with your clients.

Therefore, it is an amazing way to get to know your audience and grow your service-based business.

Email marketing can also generate a high return on investment, can help you reach a wide audience, and is surprisingly cost-effective.

According to one source, it can yield an ROI of as high as 42$ for each 1$ spent. 

Modern email marketing campaigns are easy to set up and control and provide a lot of valuable data.

With specialized software, you can track the analytics and performance of your campaigns and find what works and what doesn’t.

At the end of the day, arming your business with a properly set up email marketing campaign and foolproof strategies can help elevate your business to new levels.

Contact now Mediaboom to boost your email marketing!

By: Frank DePino

Frank DePino is Principal and Founder of Mediaboom. Since 2002, Frank has led Mediaboom’s award-winning staff of creative and technical professionals, building the most effective marketing and advertising solutions for its clients.

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