If you’re in the service industry, then you know that success is directly related to customer satisfaction. Happy customers will recommend your company to people they know; they’ll say good things about you; and they’ll become repeat customers. Good customer service means making each client feel important. You can do that by following up with customers after you meet.

Email campaigns make following up with customers easy. An email campaign sends a sequence of emails at predetermined intervals. Your customer will receive the emails in that campaign sequence automatically. Email campaigns are your secret weapon for customer service ninja awesomeness!

The email campaign feature is coming to PEP Cloud, which makes this an ideal time to share some tips on creating awesome email campaigns. (There are lots of CRM programs available with email campaign capabilities. Even if you’re not using the Painter’s Estimating Program, you can still follow these steps and make fantastic email campaigns.)

Here are 3 steps to creating successful email campaigns:

1. Decide on the target audience.

As a painter, you may want one campaign for customers with exterior jobs and another for interior-job customers. Or you may want a campaign for customers who qualify for a special offer. You can create a more personalized experience for your customers by making email campaigns that target specific audiences.

2. Plan the timeline.

Decide what you want to say to your customers, when you want to say it, and how often you want to contact them.

Let’s say you met a new client today and gave her a proposal for her job. In an ideal world, when do you check in with her? Tomorrow? 2 days from now? Next week? Maybe all of the above. And what kind of message do you have for her on each of those occasions? This is the focus of the planning stage.

When it comes to the timeline, Day 1 usually refers to the day the client is added to the campaign sequence. If that happens to be a Thursday, then Day 2 would be Friday, Day 3 Saturday, etc. When I’m planning a campaign, I imagine Day 1 as a specific day of the week. It helps me get a feel for the timing of the emails.

3. Write the emails.              

Once you’ve planned the timeline, you have to actually write the content of the emails. The text should be generic enough to apply to a variety of different customers. Knowing your target audience will help you figure out what to write. Don’t forget to give each email a subject line!