Do you have a sinking fear that some of your home care clients might dump you?
Yes, your workers have been taking good care of them, as far as you know. There haven’t been too many real complaints from your clients. But is there some dissatisfaction lurking in your mind that might erupt into a real problem?
Don’t you wish that you could keep in better touch with your home care clients? Some way to say, “Here we are. We care about you, and want your feedback”?
You need a system to keep in touch with them. What better way than to feed them a steady stream of emails. Send them helpful, and even entertaining material. Do you do this with enewsletters?
Yes, email marketing is still tops in the world of client relationship management, and in the world of home care services as well.
Not only that, but printed newsletters sent through the regular mail are good, too. Your target audience members are the grown children of senior parents, as well as the senior parents themselves. It’s known in the marketing world that this demographic responds to printed newsletters.
Here are four tips that we here at Savvy Senior Marketing (parent company is TreeFrogClick, Inc.) have discovered after years of experience writing hundreds of email newsletters.
1. Send your home care newsletters regularly
“Getting around to it” seems to be the biggest problem among small businesses when it comes to writing emails. Just schedule a time once or twice each month to bang out a few newsletters. Even one or two newsletters per month is way better than none at all. Services such as Mailchimp are free, and will send up to 12,000 emails a month to a list of up to 2,000 subscribers at no cost.
What if you could use the same newsletters over and over? This is where autoresponders come in handy. An autoresponder, or automated newsletter, is a sequence of newsletters that is triggered when when people join your list. You simply write newsletters and put them in your autoresponder. Thus, the work you put into it keeps on returning results. All the major newsletter services, such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, Aweber, etc., have them. After a few months of newsletters, newcomers will get your automated stream of newsletters without any effort on your part.
2. Make your marketing newsletters personal
Don’t you enjoy getting an email from a friend?
Or someone who writes in a familiar tone of voice?
When one of your clients or prospects receives a newsletter from a person, rather than an impersonal corporation, it has greater appeal. The company president or rep’s name should be the sender, and their name, and even photo, should be at the end of the letter. Tell stories about your clients’ experience, or about your own. Make it relevant to your home care service.
Don’t worry about a banner across the top, or even graphics or photos. Images are OK, but they take time and may take away from the personal touch. It’s the copy, or text, that delivers the message anyway.
3. Don’t make them “salesy”
Your newsletters need to be helpful and at times entertaining, but not pushy. We advise following the 80/20 rule, which says that eighty percent of your copy should be informative, and only twenty percent pushing for a sale. You might want to put a brief one-line pitch for a sale at the end of the letter, or in the PS. Another idea is to send out a big “pitch” letter only now and then – maybe one out of five emails that you send.
It’s all too tempting to talk exclusively about our own service. But think about it from the client’s perspective. Rather than yack on about yourself, why not give tips on safety at home, setting up a communications system for their senior? How about tell them about various community services, such as the library, a community bus system, or Meals on Wheels? This is the kind of newsletter that they will read.
4. Use your home care newsletter as a sales tool
Over time, see who opens your newsletters the most. Some email services have a rating system, such as Mailchimp’s five-star system. Watch to see who opens your emails the most. You will likely find your next client there. And when you call, they are much more willing to talk to you than if you were cold-calling.
Here at TreeFrogClick, we once called a prospect exactly one minute after they opened one of our newsletters. We happened to be looking at their profile, and saw that they just opened our most recent letter. We called them, and they responded, “How about that – I just read your newsletter.”
“Oh, really?” We made a sale of a new client right then and there.
Need to keep in touch with your home care clients? Send a periodic newsletter, whether through email or the US mail.
Best wishes in using email newsletters to reach your home care prospects!
Want to chat about how to make your newsletters more effective? Give us a call at the number on the top of the page, or just contact us.
