Is your moving company struggling to retain customers? If so, you’re not alone. Many moving company owners find it challenging to keep clients coming back repeatedly. Unlike clothing and grocery stores, people tend to lose interest in moving companies once they’ve done their job. That can make it tricky to score repeat business for operations like yours.
Email marketing for moving companies is the answer if you’re looking for a simple way to boost your bottom line. You may think email marketing isn’t worth the trouble because few people bother opening promotional messages, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Email marketing has an incredible average return of $36 for every $1 spent. How would your moving company like to get in on action like that?
Below, learn how to turn email into a high-powered tool that’ll score more customers for your business.
Understanding the Moving Company Audience
Before you start crafting emails, it pays to understand your audience.
“It’s people looking for a moving company,” you might say. That’s true, but it’s not quite as cut and dry as that.
Does your business cater to college students or young families? Maybe you advertise to seniors looking to downsize and move to a retirement home. Spend some time thinking about which demographic uses your services most.
Different audiences have different needs, pain points, and preferences. If you don’t understand these, your emails won’t resonate with your target market.
The beauty of digital marketing is that you don’t need to narrow things down to one audience. The best marketing platforms let you segment your messages and send them to several unique demographic markets.
Building a Quality Email List
Even if you write the best emails in the world, it doesn’t matter much without a high-quality list. Unfortunately, you can’t just blast your emails off to any address you can find. You’ll need to ensure subscribers have opted into your list first.
That’s because people who didn’t opt in will simply delete your email, and some might even report your messages as spam.
To encourage signups, you can:
- Offer discounts for subscribers
- Encourage potential customers to sign up in exchange for a freebie, such as a moving checklist
- Create a referral program that rewards customers for sending business your way
- Provide online quotes in exchange for visitors’ email addresses
Crafting the Perfect Email
Effective email marketing for moving companies should include four main components:
- Subject line: Here, you want to grab the reader’s attention without sounding “spammy.” A subject line like “Big discounts on our moving services inside” is okay, while “You won’t believe this FREE deal!!” is not.
- Personalization: Readers want to feel like you’re writing directly to them. Be sure to include their names; if they’ve done business with you before, it’s nice to mention that as a gentle reminder.
- Content: This is the meat of your email. You could discuss current promotions, talk about the benefits of choosing your moving company, or offer informative content, such as how to ensure a stress-free move.
- Call to action: This is the action you want the reader to perform next. That might be booking services with you, calling for a quote, etc.
Automation and Drip Campaigns
You’re missing out if you haven’t heard about automated drip campaigns yet. With drip campaigns, your moving company can turn readers from tire kickers into loyal customers. Plus, they don’t require much work on your end. Simply write your emails and set your marketing software to send them at predetermined times.
Drip campaigns gently and gradually introduce readers to your offerings. You could start with a few informative emails, then switch to a promotional message encouraging readers to schedule moving services with you.
Other ideas to help boost repeat business for moving companies include:
- Seasonal messages at certain times of the year
- Post-move follow-up emails to ensure customers are happy with your service
- A drip sequence for new subscribers
Timing and Frequency
Email marketing for moving companies won’t help much if you don’t send those emails at the best times. If you send your emails in the middle of the night, subscribers are likely to wake up to an inbox full of junk, which means your message sadly gets lost in the pile.
The best time to send emails is subject to debate. Email marketing platforms have studied the subject extensively with mixed results.
Some marketing companies have found that Tuesdays have the highest open rates, whereas Thursdays have been shown to yield the highest revenues. Others discovered that more subscribers open emails on the weekends, likely because they aren’t distracted by work.
The time of day you send emails matters, too. On average, the best time to email subscribers is before 10 a.m. or between 3 and 4 p.m. Those times allow you to reach subscribers before the workday begins and after lunch.
Analyzing and Optimizing
How can you know your emails are working if you don’t track and analyze the results? Luckily for you, nearly all email marketing platforms come with analytics tools that allow you to track critical data, such as open and response rates.
Tracking this data allows you to see what’s working and what could be improved. For instance, you can perform A/B testing to see whether readers prefer one email style over another.
Key metrics to track include:
- Open rate: This tells you how many people opened your email. Industry pros say anything between 15% and 25% is a good open rate.
- Click-through rate: This number depicts how many people clicked through your email to your website or landing page.
- Conversion rate: The conversion rate is the percentage of subscribers who took a certain action, such as calling you or scheduling a service. Try to aim for a conversion rate of 2% to 5%.
- Unsubscribe rate: This tells you how many people unsubscribed from your emails. If it’s too high, you might consider changing your content, subject lines, or the times you send emails.
Staying Compliant
As a U.S. marketer, you must comply with the CAN-SPAM Act, which aims to help consumers deal with unwanted email messages by streamlining promotional communications, among other things. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) could slap you with a hefty penalty if you fail to follow the rules. Each violation could cost you a whopping $50,120, so it’s not something to take lightly!
To avoid FTC fines, ensure compliance by:
- Making it easy for people to unsubscribe
- Clearly telling subscribers how they can opt-out and promptly honoring opt-out requests
- Not using deceptive subject lines
- Telling recipients where you’re located (this can be either your address or a P.O. box)
- Identifying emails as ads if they’re promotional
Dominate the Competition With Moving Marketing Results
If you’re having trouble finding and keeping customers, email marketing for moving companies could be just what you need. Don’t have an email list yet? Now is the perfect time to build one! And if you have an underperforming list, try the above tips to send your open and click-through rates soaring.
To learn more about how to make email marketing work for you, schedule a discovery call with Moving Marketing Results today.
