By his own admission, Chris Sentz, Internet marketing specialist for Stanley Steemer, was until this year a novice when it came to email marketing. His company, which specializes in carpet and air-duct cleaning and water-damage restoration, didn't even begin collecting email addresses until about a year and a half ago, and it only launched an enewsletter program in February.
But the sales that resulted from the debut issue of its newsletter paid for the company’s investment in the initiative, and so far this year it has reaped $1 million in sales directly attributable to the email channel.
The company began using email primarily as a transactional and service tool: to send confirmations of appointments and surveys following a service. From there it was a natural extension to begin sending customers and others who had opted in on the Stanley Steemer Website a newsletter every other month.
The newsletter would include tips on cleaning and maintenance as well as the occasional promotion. The content would be pegged around certain events, such as back to school and the Christmas season, as well as be segmented by location. During hurricane season, for instance, customers in the Southeast might receive tips about flood prevention and promotional copy focused on water-damage cleanup.
“They’ve really thought beyond the transaction,” says Mitch Frazier, senior manager of integrated marketing for ExactTarget, whose email solutions Stanley Steemer uses, “by offering tips and a way to interact with the brand by providing compelling content that’s unique not only to their location but also to their interests.”
So far, so (relatively) simple. But there are more than 300 Stanley Steemer locations nationwide, many of them operated by franchisees, and not all of them offer the same range of services. What’s more, each franchisee decides which sort of discounts or other promotions, if any, he wants to offer; “it’s not dictated by corporate,” Sentz says.
Each edition of the enewsletter, then, could have as many as 30 variations to take into account location, services available, and promotions offered. Each newsletter is in effect created a la carte, with the appropriate blocks of content dynamically placed into a template to create a version appropriate for each franchisee.
Even editions that contain no discounts or other promotions have generated revenue. The service-oriented content reaffirms Stanley Steemer’s credibility and authority, Sentz says: “We are the experts, and we have a lot of knowledge that we like to pass on.”
The mix-and-match templates, facilitated by the ExactTarget platform, proved successful enough that during the summer Stanley Steemer increased frequency from every other month to monthly. Around the same time, Sentz was able to hire someone to handle email and social media exclusively, freeing up Sentz to concentrate on other areas of online marketing.
The addition of an employee will enable Stanley Steemer to add another level of segmentation to the targeting of the messages: the customer’s history with the brand. Subscribers who previously called upon Stanley Steemer for carpet cleaning, say, might now receive messages encouraging them to have their air ducts cleaned as well. “Part of what we want to do going forward is to get the word out that we do more than clean carpets,” Sentz says.
The company is also looking to migrate its Facebook and Twitter followers to the email channel, as the latter has proven so profitable. “One KPI will be how many social media friends are turning into email subscribers,” says Sentz.
“I couldn’t imagine you could generate so much business and so much customer satisfaction through email marketing,” he adds. “I thought email marketing was a thing from the past. I was proven wrong.”
