If you run a service-based business, you have to approach marketing differently from other business types. After all, your revenue comes from providing consistent, reliable value to your customers, not selling one-and-done products and moving on to the next potential buyer.

That said, some forms of digital marketing can be just as – if not more – effective for a service-based business as they are for purchase-based businesses. Today, let’s break down how you can use email marketing for your service-based business to maximum effect.

Step 1 – Perform Market Research

Your first step should always be to perform in-depth, comprehensive market research. Good market research tells you a few key things:

  • What your target audience members need and want
  • The kinds of approaches your target audience members will respond best to
  • Who your target audience members are in terms of their demographic attributes, like age, sex, etc.

Therefore, if you want your marketing emails to be most effective, you need to do market research so you know who you are sending those emails to. The more research you do, the better your emails will be when you finally put them together.

You can and should use a multitude of approaches, such as SEMRush and similar SEO tools. Don’t hesitate to do other forms of market research, too, like asking people among your target audience what they are looking for prior to starting your email marketing campaign.

Step 2 – Design Marketing Emails

When the time comes to put together your campaign, you should start with your marketing email designs. After all, you can’t send the exact same email to all of your target audience members again and again.

Instead, it’s best to create different marketing emails using email templates from tools like PosterMyWall. With these customizable templates, you’ll be able to craft targeted emails for different purposes, like marketing to new customers, bringing previous customers back into the fold, and more.

What Kinds of Emails Should You Design?

As a service-based business, your email marketing may serve a wide range of purposes. Therefore, you’ll also need to design many different types of emails, including:

  • Welcome emails – Welcome emails are perfect for welcoming new members to your subscription-based or service-based business. These are vital since they serve as a first impression or benchmark against which your new customers can compare your upcoming services and attention
  • Newsletter emails – Newsletter emails are important for providing your long-term or current customers with critical industry or business information, like upcoming deals, market shifts, price increases or decreases, etc.
  • Discount emails – Discount emails are always welcome among your target audience members. If you have an upcoming sale for Black Friday, for example, send out a discount email to all of your current or potential customers (such as your leads) to spread the word quickly and drive revenue during critical business junctures
  • Personalized emails – Personalized emails are great for cultivating long-term relationships with each of your customers. These can include happy birthday emails, reminder emails, and emails with personalized offers based on a customer’s previous purchases or subscriptions. Be sure to use each customer’s first and last name and other personal details when crafting these!
  • Loyalty program emails – If you have a loyalty program, send out dedicated emails to your loyalty program members. This adds a bit of intrinsic value to the program and can inspire those members to stick with your program over time
  • Recall emails – If you want to bring a previous customer back to your service-based business, recall emails – which should include things like recall deals or discounts – can inspire them to make a purchase again or subscribe to your services once more

Step 3 – Begin Sending Emails

After you design all the necessary emails for your campaign, start sending them out to both leads and current customers. As you send out emails, take careful note of any feedback you receive, particularly about the open rate for your emails. The open rate is the rate at which your emails are opened up compared to how many emails you send out.

A high open rate means people are intrigued by the emails’ subject lines and content. A low open rate means you need to go back to the drawing board and improve your emails in one way or another.

If you have a low open rate, try to streamline the subject line or to use engaging words like, “deal”, “discount”, and “hurry”. Just be careful not to use too many of those words at once or your emails might get trapped by spam filters.

Step 4 – Leverage A/B Testing

The more data you get, the more you can leverage A/B testing. In a nutshell, A/B testing means sending out two very similar or nearly identical emails to similar individuals, then recording which of the two email versions performs better.

Run a lot of A/B tests as you launch and continue your email marketing campaign. The right A/B tests can tell you exactly how to tweak and optimize your emails for better results, like a higher open rate, high conversion rates, and better overall customer perception.

Step 5 – Optimize Email Marketing

Continue to optimize your email marketing campaign as time goes on. Because you run a service-based business, you have to continue providing new, innovative, and welcome value to your core consumers. You have to run your email marketing campaign in the same way!

Fortunately, the longer you run your campaign, the more information you’ll have about what your customers want and the kinds of emails they respond best to. Keep track of KPIs like open rate, conversion rate, and more so you can continually optimize and tweak your emails so they are always better than their previous versions.

Conclusion

In the end, your service-based business can benefit massively from the right email marketing strategies and approaches. If you send the right emails to your leads and your current customers, you’ll not only bring new people to your brand consistently; you’ll also keep your current customers and income flowing to your business’s coffers. Try these strategies today!