It’s Monday 4th March, One Email sent to 347 people and you’ve booked an extra £371 + VAT for Wednesday 6th March, here’s how…
Here’s what happened on Monday the 4th of March in our own carpet cleaning business, and what we did to ‘fix it’…
Early Monday morning the phone rings, Mary answers and it’s the Contract Manager of a Shopfitting company we clean carpets for after they have done a refit. He says they won’t be ready for us to clean the carpets on Wednesday (just two days away) so they need to cancel Wednesday and rebook. Now, these are a good customer so we don’t charge them a penalty for cancelling (perhaps we should and that’s for another article?) but that now leaves us with a full day free for one guy on Wednesday. But DON’T PANIC! Here’s how you fill that gap, and you don’t need our software to use this idea, but it does help to make it EASY :-). It takes just a few minutes, and it’s free. We use this idea regularly in this situation, and I’ve posted about this before, so this is a real world example of what’s possible and how you can increase your sales with very little effort, because once Wednesday’s gone, it’s gone, so you might as well try to fill it now rather than let it slip by as an unproductive day.
Here’s what we did, and you can do too…
- Using the Easy Emailing facility in GetBookedUp I created a simple filter of all clients in the local DN postcode areas who are on our Short Notice Offer list, there were 347 in total.
- Chose the template email from the built in Email Editor.
- Edited the content to suit the offer for Wednesday 6th March only (20% off EVERYTHING, including Retail Products), explaining we’d had a cancellation and this was first come first served for Wednesday the 6th only.
- Hit “Send and record in the clients Contact Log”
- Started working on something else.
- Phone rings (within 45 MINUTES! of email going out), “Hello, I’ve just got your email about the offer for Wednesday, can you come and do my Suite again please, and this time I’ll have the protection treatment too if the offer is on that aswell.”
- Celebrate with a little dance around the office (not pretty!) that we’ve just started filling Wednesday for about 5 minutes work, RESULT!
- Phone rings later that Monday afternoon, “Hi, I’ve had you email, do you still have any availability on Wednesday please?”
- Celebrate with another little dance as Wednesday is now FULL, and it took only took 10 minutes maximum to achieve.
Okay, you don’t need our software to do this, you can filter whatever database you have and send it by whatever means you have. BUT what’s different about GetBookedUp is that we have an Easy Email system which allows you to filter clients based on various criteria. The built in email editor allows you to compose your own emails and customise them. This email is also recorded in the clients contact log so it’s traceable and you can mark that the client has responded to the email for your analysis. PLUS, because there is no merging or exporting data to an external mailmerged system it’s a breeze!
This is what the Easy Email tool looks like…
So, what are you waiting for? Do you have a quiet day on Monday that you want to fill now? Get this ready to go out now and fill the day.
Regards
Allan.
PS. I know some of you will say “but I don’t have many email addresses.” If I can be frank, just start collecting them NOW and you’ll be able to use this idea in future. Here’s how you can get the email address and it’s so easy ANYONE can do it. When you’ve booked the quotatetion visit or booked a job, when the date has been set just say “Oooh, can I just take an email address to send a quick confirmation out to you?” then shut up, really, shut up and WAIT for a response. in 90%+ of cases they will immediately just give you their email address without pausing, in the other cases they will usually say they don’t have one or they’d rather not. TA DA! you’re instantly collecting email addresses in a none threatening way. Obviously it would be nice if then you can automatically send the confirmation email from the client record (gratuitous plug for GetBookedUp inserted here 🙂 ) and then in that email also include a link back to your website and with details about the benefits of protection treatments, anti allergen treatments etc. Then you’re also now pre selling those additional services before you go to the property, and the client will start to ask you about these, or already be aware of them when you talk about them, so they are presold on the idea of them. You’ll start to book bigger jobs and make more money with these extra services for very little extra effort or cost while you are already there.
PPS. If you managed to get this far well done, the PS tip above will on it’s own earn you more money and perhaps should be a post article on it’s own.