Email Marketing for Pest Control

How to Get Started with Pest Control Email Marketing to Make Money

An email worth sending is one that resonates with its recipient. Do not send irrelevant emails to your Pest Control audience and expect paying results. You might end up getting left on ‘read,’ or worse— ‘unread!’ Before spamming them with emails, you must understand your buyer persona (target customer), and know exactly what kind of pest control content they are looking for. That way, you can tailor your email campaigns to match their specific needs and not end up in the trash or unread.

Defining your audience is easy once you create your buyer personas. A buyer persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. This persona is fictional but based on deep research of your existing or desired audience. In pest control, you have more than one buyer persona to describe, and they all won’t resonate with the same email. Keep reading to learn how to properly segment your emails to best reach each one separately and individually.

Once you have your detailed buyer personas, the next step in getting started is knowing the best times to send emails. According to HubSpot research, Tuesday was found to be the most effective day of the week to send an email. The average open rate for Tuesdays was at 20% more than other days. Mondays and Wednesdays tied for 18%, Thursdays was 15% and Friday was the least successful at only 8%. This research was conducted over the course of 10 months and was based on over 20 million emails.

Email Marketing for Pest Control

Use your buyer personas and list segments to develop relevant pest control content for your subscribers and to personalize your emails for their specific needs to ensure your emails are effectively reaching the right people and resonating well with them. For example, mosquito control in the summer, rodent exclusion in the winter, and alternative heat treatment for bed bugs. These types of email campaigns can all be big money makers in the pest control industry.

In the pest control industry, the average email open rates should be around 18-20%. In order for people to even click open your email, you must give them a good reason to want to open it. That starts with a GREAT subject line. One we have used effectively for pest control is “Mosquitoes can transmit disease.” The best way to keep Pest Control customers and prospects engaged with your brand is to offer them a personalized experience with your emails and content. Include personal information about them, such as their first name and the target pest to help them know what they need and provide them with seasonal promotional opportunities.

Personalize your emails with customers’ names and locations so that your subscribers feel as though they are part of the community and not just as people you are selling pest control services to. Personalized emails have higher open rates and 80% of people are more likely to hire your company when they feel they are an important part of your Pest Control company.

The Power of Email Marketing for Pest Control Owners

Pest control is something every residence and business in your market area needs at some point. Ensuring that your Pest Control company is front and center when the need arises is a perfect email marketing strategy. By having a simple, useful, and helpful newsletter, you are there for them each month. Using email to do follow-ups, seasonal promos, and announce new product offerings is cheap, effective, and can be measured in about 72 hours from the time you send it.

Email marketing remains the most effective channel for generating the highest revenue according to 59% of marketers. If you are not capitalizing on this important marketing strategy, you are missing out on a HUGE revenue-growing opportunity!

Over 4 billion people worldwide use email communication, and it has become one of the most effective marketing channels for businesses, both large and small. As of 2020, businesses have generated $36 for every dollar spent on email marketing campaigns. That’s why 73% of marketers list email marketing in their top 3 most effective channels for advertising overall.

Collecting Emails For Pest Control

Now that you know of the immeasurable power of email marketing, you must understand how to send them to the right people. What good is creating great email marketing campaigns with competitive content if you have no one to send them to? This is without question the area that we run into the most trouble within the pest control marketplace. Can you confidently say that you have a good up-to-date email for every customer and every lead you come into contact with every day? Don’t fret, most pest control companies must work this into a daily routine to ensure that they are getting good email and text lists generated from everyone they come into contact with.

Train your staff and your technicians to collect emails and mobile phone numbers from every customer and every lead you talk to every day! This is seeding your field of dreams.

Properly collecting emails from the right prospects and customers gives you the best chance of having successful email marketing campaigns. The goal is to collect emails from pest control prospects who are eager to hear from you. One of the most effective ways is to use lead magnets and opt-in forms.

Lead Magnets

A lead magnet is exactly what it sounds like—it attracts prospects to join your email list, usually by offering them something free in exchange for their information, such as their email addresses. You might offer them content on your website such as a free eBook or infographic about how to prevent bed bugs, information about poisonous and nonpoisonous spiders, when to call an exterminator, etc. If you have a shortage of pest control content, you can repurpose your existing content to create lead magnets until you build more content.

Here's an example of what a simple downloadable infographic (lead magnet) might look like:

Whether you offer your prospects an eBook, infographic, video, or other form of content, it should be digital and downloadable. It can come in the form of a PDF, webpage, video, or some other format that is easy for your new lead to consume.

Opt-in Forms

Your second option for collecting emails for your email list is creating enticing opt-in forms in exchange for personal information. People are very protective of their personal information these days, so only make their first name and email mandatory.

This is where your graphic design skills are put to the test. Create attention-grabbing designs and headers for your forms. They should be branded and stand out from the rest of the page to entice people to sign up.

Of course, the most important thing is to give people the information they are signing up for. This might be information about seasonal pests specifically for their geographic area, how to protect their pets from pests in their area, ways to get rid of pests naturally, etc. You do not want to deceive your prospects and customers with false information or information that goes against what the form represents.

Your opt-in forms should be simple and concise while offering a lot of useful information. This might be the first dealing your prospect has with your Pest Control company. Don’t scare them off with dreadfully long forms.

Check out some examples:

After collecting lots of emails, it’s good to segment or separate them into relevant subcategories. Segmenting is when you separate your large email list into useful groups based on the different unique traits of your subscribers. For example, GPC Customers, One-Shot Customers, Mosquito Seasonal, Lost Customers and Leads/ Non-customers.

By doing this you will avoid sending the wrong content to the wrong people and ultimately ending up with a high unsubscribe rate.

If you service more than one location, you don’t want to send the same content to each location. Instead, create content pertaining to each area, dealing with the unique pest problems specific to each location. Treat your subscribers like humans and create content specific to their individual needs. Do not lump them all into one big one-size-fits-all list. The

more segmented your lists, the more trust you build with prospects and the better chance you have of converting them into customers.

How to Segment Your Email Lists

Before segmenting your lists, you must understand the buyer’s journey and identify which stage your prospects are in when they sign up for your email list. There are one of three stages to consider: The awareness stage (where customers have a list of questions about the topic); the consideration stage (where customers are considering all of the solutions you are providing them); and the decision stage (where you should offer your services as the solution to their problems).

This way, you’ll be able to create content for your lead magnets and opt-in forms that automatically divides them into separate lists when they sign up. Understanding your prospects’ behaviors by the way they interact with your content helps you identify who they are so that you can send the right emails to the right people. For instance, if you notice a prospect or customer is consuming lots of termite content, you will know to email them all the information on termites you have.

Email Automation and Lead Nurturing

After you segment your lists into relevant subgroups, you can begin sending automated emails that are highly targeted to each group.

Email automation, as defined by MailChimp, is another way of reaching the right people with the right message and at the right moment. Examples of this are when a customer receives a welcome email after signing up for your email list, or an automatic thank-you email when they fill out a form on your pest control website in exchange for digital content.

Lead nurturing emails help you build relationships with your leads and ‘nurture’ them along the sales funnel until they hire you for pest control services. These emails work to slowly warm prospects up to the decision to hire you.

Your lead nurturing email sequence is a series of emails your prospects will automatically receive once they opt-in to your list via an opt-in form or lead magnet. Once they opt-in, your prospects should receive valuable and relevant pest control content with your expert insight.

Targeted Email Campaigns for Pest Control

Targeted email marketing is another way of ensuring your email campaigns are making an impact on your subscribers and keeping you out of the spam folder by offering your prospects relevant content. Customers who receive relevant content in their inboxes are more likely to engage with your email campaigns and convert into customers.

Once you begin sending emails to your segmented groups, begin running targeted campaigns that fit each of these groups appropriately. Let’s just say you have a segment for people who have sought information on mosquito problems and diseases in your area. The next step is to invite them via an email campaign to sign up for your seasonal mosquito control program to eliminate mosquitoes from their home or business. This can evolve into two separate future campaigns. One for new mosquito leads and the second for renewals of the previous year’s mosquito control customers.

Targeted campaigns help you build relationships with your subscribers. Consumers appreciate regular high-quality content from your emails when the content is relevant to them. The more you meet their expectations, the higher the trust they will have for you and the more they will engage with your brand by purchasing new products.A

Email Marketing Analysis

Ever wonder if prospects are actually engaging with your emails? Like really engaging, clicking on links and attachments, or even opening your emails? Fortunately, email marketing analytics allow you to track if prospects are opening your emails and how they engage with your content.

With these insights, you’ll be able to enhance your content to resonate with your subscribers. Email analytics let you know which content prospects and customers are interested in so that you can create more of the right content for them to engage with and attract more leads.

With tools such as Google Analytics, you can track several important metrics to get the most insight from your campaigns and measure their effectiveness by tracking open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and others that will help you constantly improve email campaigns.

If you need help creating your email marketing campaigns, you can contact us here at Rhino Pest Control Marketing for information and help getting started.

You can also download our comprehensive guide on Email Marketing for Pest Control for a more in-depth understanding of the process.