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Volume 19
November 2009
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Greetings!
Welcome to the Clean Team Pro Newsletter. This month, we are going to explore the issue of online marketing. When I first launched this newsletter a year and a half ago, we wrote a feature article on some of the more traditional methods of advertising your cleaning business, such as door hangers and postcards. (You can read that edition of the newsletter here.) While traditional marketing should still be an important component of your advertising strategy, the Internet provides an abundance of opportunities as well. This month's feature article explores six ways to take advantage of those opportunities by reaching out to prospective clients virtually. Also be sure to read the article on Scheduling with Style, with my tried-and-true advice on how to maximize your profits during the busy holiday season by using some creative schedule techniques.
Don't forget: Your questions and suggestions help us to write a better newsletter each month. Please feel free to send me your thoughts at jeff@thecleanteam.com. | |
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6 Simple Ways to Market Your Business Online
 Many small business owners are wary of using the Internet and social networking in order to market their services. It seems like a brave new world that has nothing to do with good old fashioned dusting and vacuuming. Plus, many wonder what the ROI (return on investment) will be after learning all that new technology and pouring money into developing a website.
Fortunately the technology can be quite simple and the cost is minimal. Here is a look at six simple ways to use the Internet to market your cleaning services.
1) Create a website.
If you don't already have a website, now is the time to launch one. Virtually all small business owners will tell you that the best thing they did for their company was to create a website. At a bare minimum, think of your website as an online brochure or even an online business card -- only more dynamic. The initial cost can be as low as $100 or less. In fact, Vistaprint.com is currently offering a free one-month trial of its website design services. (If you continue, the cost starts as low as $5/month). To find out if your desired domain name is available, you can run a free search on a site such as GoDaddy.com. Purchasing that name for a year costs between $2/year and $20/year, depending on the suffix you choose. (Domains ending in .biz are typically less expensive than .com, because .com is more widely recognized.)
2) Take advantage of free communications tools.
Sure, most of you already have email accounts with free services such as Gmail or Yahoo. But free communications tools go far beyond email. You can call your clients using a service such as Skype (which lets you call other Skype users for free or charges you a minimal monthly fee for unlimited calling) or fax them their invoice with faxzero.com (which lets you send free faxes anywhere in the U.S. or Canada). You can even schedule appointments, balance your books, manage your social networking (see #6), and create logos and business cards -- all for free, all online. For help finding the best free web applications for your business, check out this list of the Top 100 Fee Web Apps (the article was written for freelancers, but most of the tools are ideal for small business owners as well).
3) Write a blog or send out an e-newsletter.
Blogs are a great and free (or very inexpensive) way to stay in touch with current clients and to reach out to new ones. If you think you will only have content to post once in a blue moon, the e-newsletter format might be a better solution for you. You can build up a mailing list through an opt-in feature on your website, and by collecting the email addresses of clients. You could even ask clients to recommend friends and family members who might appreciate your newsletter. Just be sure to give readers the option to "opt-out", as you don't want to become an annoying mail box clutterer. A great way to motivate people to "opt-in" is by offering exclusive discounts and other incentives to newsletter subscribers.
To start a blog for free, check out Blogger.com or Wordpress.com. If want your own domain name for the blog (or if you want to piggy-back the blog onto your company's website), you can use the Wordpress.org application for an easy and intuitive blogging interface. Constant Contact is a fairly inexpensive tool for creating newsletters -- and with 400 templates, all of which can be customized, you can easily create a unique look for your e-newsletter. Vistaprint.com also has a new email marketing tool, which starts at $4.99/month.
4) Purchase online ads.
From Google ads to banner ads, the Internet is a rich field for fairly inexpensive advertising. The most ubiquitous -- and least expensive -- option is Google, where you pay-per-click. In other words, you only pay for the ad when someone clicks on it. You also might want to consider sponsored Google ads and Google Maps ads as two great ways to maximize your ROI. If someone searches for "house cleaning" and the name of your city, for example, your business would appear as a sponsored ad on the right hand margin of the Google search results -- putting your company front and center. Likewise, buying an ad on Google Maps allows your company's name, address, phone number and a link to your website to pop up when someone searches for cleaning companies in a specific geographic location. Blog and banner ads tend to be more costly than Google ads, so some careful research is called for. Your best bet? Local blogs and community-centered websites.
5) Take advantage of online referral networks.
Did you know that the Clean Team has a referral network for its customers? We field dozens of calls each month from long-time customers looking for a reliable cleaning company. Make sure that we have the name of your company and your phone number in our database so that you can benefit from this free service. You can also investigate other online referral networks in your city or town. A good place to start is your local Chamber of Commerce, which often hosts networking events and provides a free referral service for members.
6) Explore social networking.
Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter provide numerous marketing opportunities for small businesses. While online vendors tend to benefit the most from social networking, there is no reason you can't promote your cleaning business on these sites as well -- especially since your target audience is likely using them already! You can attract followers and friends by offering exclusive discounts or advance notice about new programs. Meanwhile, remember that providing genuine value-added content -- and not just round-the-clock sales blasts -- is critical for garnering a loyal group of followers. For more on how to use Twitter, check out this article from the New York Times on marketing small businesses with Twitter and this blog post with 27 Twitter Applications for Small Business Owners. For more on using Facebook, read last week's New York Times article on marketing your small business with Facebook.
Do you have some tried-and-true tips for marketing your cleaning business online? Send me an email so that I can share your ideas with our readers in the next newsletter.
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Scheduling with Style
Maximize Profits with Creative Holiday Scheduling
 When you're self-employed, as you are most assuredly and painfully aware, no one pays you when your company isn't open for business. This makes the annual holiday fest from Thanksgiving through New Years a very expensive time of the year -- and the season perhaps a bit less joyful.
It can be a discouraging way to end up the year financially. It's just as discouraging for your employees, since missing work at this time of year can also mean missing out on holiday tips left by clients. On a smaller scale, this pay cut for you and for your housecleaners happens anytime there's a holiday during the year.
To maximize company profit and your housecleaners' paychecks, here are a two suggestions. The one you select depends on how full your schedule is.
Let's take a look at the full- or almost full-schedule method first.
If your schedule were so full that, if every customer you were going to clean on Thanksgiving and the day after Thanksgiving, wanted you to reschedule them and you couldn't accommodate them all, then you would use what we call the "holiday letter" method. We prepare a holiday letter to each customer and have team leaders leave the letter a couple of visits ahead of each holiday. By providing a letter that explains the situation a bit, you can gracefully limit the number of customers that are re-scheduled. Our letter asks the customer to call us (or tell the team leader) if they would like to be re-scheduled. The letter explains that we will re-schedule them if we can, but we might not be able to re-schedule everyone due to work already scheduled on the non-holiday days of the week.
Here's a sample of the kind of thing you might want to say to your customers if your schedule is quite full.
Dear Friend (or Client),
Like many working people, we don't work on major holidays.
The holidays days we don't work are: New Year's Day, President's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day.
When one of these holidays fall on the day we normally clean for you, we will miss that one cleaning visit only and return on our next regularly scheduled cleaning day.
If you can't live without us for that long (it's great to be needed!), please call us or tell your team. We will make every effort to reschedule your cleaning for another day. Since our teams' schedules are quite full, we are able to reschedule only a limited number of cleanings. One rescheduling option may be to send a different team than your normal team. In any event, if you would like us to reschedule a cleaning visit we'll miss because of the upcoming holidays, please give us as much advance notice as you can, and we'll do our best to accommodate your request.
Best wishes and happy holidays!
You may have noticed from the letter above that our company does work the day after Thanksgiving. We do this to maximize revenue obviously, but there is a fair amount of time-consuming phone work associated with working on that day. Many of your clients will be off work themselves on that day and have a houseful of guests, so they may not want you underfoot. Therefore, if you work the day after Thanksgiving, remember: FIRST, call all the people you normally clean on Fridays and confirm that they want you to clean for them on that day. If yes, fine. If not, try to reschedule them to another available day. But, by calling these people first and finding out which ones DON'T want you to clean, you know exactly how many slots you can reschedule from Thanksgiving.
The second method is for those of us who have time in our schedule to re-schedule most everyone in the schedule. In this case, don't take any chances of not getting a customer rescheduled by simply leaving the customer a note. They may forget to call or they may simply toss the note without reading it. (It's kind of an American tradition, I think). Instead, personally call each and every customer and offer to reschedule him or her.
Before calling them, figure out the best substitute cleaning date based on your team's schedule and travel time and have that date ready to offer each customer. If they don't accept it, then you can negotiate. But in my experience, most customers will accept your suggestion for a one-visit change, even if it's not their first choice. But the point is, since you schedule efficiently based on travel all the rest of the year, there's no reason to add any more wasted travel time now that is absolutely unavoidable.
Here's a related, important lesson we learned long ago. Even if you don't have room to reschedule a single client, it's only good customer service to make absolutely sure your clients are aware that you won't be there on one of their regularly scheduled cleaning days. Your customers may be counting on you and may have completely forgotten that it's a holiday! We notify our customers by instructing team leaders to leave a note reminding them of the upcoming visit we will miss due to a holiday. If certain team leaders can't be trusted to remember to leave a note, give those team leaders a form letter to leave that says the same thing -- even though personal letters from team leaders are preferred.
One final point. You may have substantially more room in your schedule than it appears. Have a talk with your housecleaners about an upcoming holiday week schedule and the customers that will be missed and the revenue that will be lost. Even though it may look like their schedule is full, perhaps most, if not all, of your teams (or individual cleaners) would accept working longer days during weeks that have holidays. (Because the housecleaners will not work at all on the holiday during the week, their total hours worked will likely not change - but be sure you are aware if there are any overtime pay ramifications in your state.) We have found this especially true during the Christmas holidays when we could all use some extra money rather than take a cut in pay. And since holiday tips are a part of the formula, you may find that your housecleaners are happy to oblige by working longer hours. As a business owner, that's one of the clearest examples of a win-win situation I can think of.
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Reader Mailbag
A little praise for our rust remover, which is one of my personal favorites as well.
Dear Jeff,
Your Rust Remover is an absolutely
amazing product! I was recently at a home for the first time, where there is a
serious iron problem in their water. Their tub/shower unit was solidly
orange...the worst I have ever
seen. First, I cleaned it with Tile Juice; then rinsed, and applied the Rust Remover. After a couple applications, the rust was COMPLETELY GONE. The
homeowner was speechless, and nearly in tears (happy ones) over how phenomenal
her shower looked.
I can't say enough about this
product---I just wish I'd taken before and after photos to prove
it!!
Thanks so much for your commitment
to the best!
~ Naomi
Do you have a how-to question or a comment to share with me and our readers? Please send me an email!
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Thanks for reading us this month! Come visit us on the web at www.thecleanteampro.com.
Sincerely,
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Jeff Campbell
The Clean Team Catalog |
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