Moversville has been working with movers in the U.S. & Canada implementing their email marketing efforts since 2014. After years of email marketing in the moving industry, we’ve come up with the top 10 email marketing tips to consider before implementing your email marketing campaigns.

When it comes to email marketing for your moving company, there are 2 main types that can be implemented in your moving business.

One type is the kind that’s implemented within the sales process. When someone fills out a form on your website and they receive follow up emails to sell & nudge them to book service. This kind of marketing is best set up through your CRM service and is not necessarily what Moversville does for movers.

The other type is email marketing to get more business for your moving company. This type consists of an outreach system to your previous customers and referral contacts that are intended to harvest repeat & referral business and grow your brand awareness in your community.

This is our sweet spot. If you don’t’ have time to read this entire article and figure out how to properly set up an email marketing system that works have Moversville take care of it for you. After all we’ve been email marketing for the moving industry since 2014 and we wrote this article from our expertise.

In this article, we lay out 10 essential tips for setting up and implementing your outbound email marketing campaigns to get more business for your moving company.

1. Know The Laws Where You Live

Depending on where you live, you’ll have to follow certain email marketing laws in order for your marketing to be compliant. If you’re in the United States, you’ll have to be compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act. If you’re in Canada, you’ll have to be compliant with CASL. If you’re in the EU, you’ll have to be compliant with the GDPR.

2. Have A Sizable Email List

If you have less than a few hundred email addresses, taking the time to have a proper email marketing system or paying a 3rd party to do it most likely won’t be worth it.

After doing this for several years for movers, our clients who have success with email marketing are those who have an email list of at least 500 email addresses. Furthermore, our most successful clients are those who have several thousand email addresses.

It’s important to build your email list to as many recipients as possible before starting.

If you have a moving software & CRM, you should be able to easily export your customer list and streamline this whole process.

Moversville recommends going back at least 2-3 years of previous customers. Some of these people are ripe for moving again and depending on how you write your email, from our experience with movers,  it’s very likely you’ll get immediate business right after the first send.

3. Scrub Your Email List

Scrubbing your email list and removing customers who had a bad experience as well as invalid email addresses is super important. Sending to these email addresses will hurt your brand as well as the performance of your campaigns. Without scrubbing your list, your emails may even start landing spam folders.

If you have a large list, always run your email list through an email verification software. These softwares will remove invalid emails and spam trap emails. What’s a spam trap? Spam traps are regular email addresses that if in your list, will signal to the rest of the email addresses that your message is most likely spam. Email verification softwares identify these email addresses and will remove them from your list.

4. Use A Credible Email Marketing Platform

There are tons of email marketing services you can use. The one we recommend is MailChimp. MailChimp has a great delivery system and can integrate with other programs you may use.

5. Always Send An Introductory / Icebreaker Email

Introductory emails are usually plain text style emails that are sent to your email list before you send any further emails.

Sending introductory emails first, positively impacts your campaign’s performance.

They serve as a way to directly ask for more business and create engagement. People are used to promotions in their inbox and most of us see them and delete them right away.

By sending a plain text style email, your recipients are more likely to engage with and read the message.

When you genuinely thank your previous customers for their business and ask if they or anyone they know might need moving services, many of them will actually respond with service requests & referrals.

From our many years of experience, plain text style emails work much better than overly promoted content, coupons, deals etc.

6. Test Your Templates For Mobile Friendliness

Around 50% of emails are opened on mobile devices and that number is only going to go up. It’s super important when creating your emails that they are mobile friendly.

Most email marketing programs have basic templates that are mobile friendly, but if you’re looking to create any kind of dynamic copy, experience with HTML is a must.

7. Triple Check Your Copy

Email marketing isn’t like social media or writing a blog post where you can edit the post after it’s published. With email marketing, once it’s sent, it’s sent.

Make sure you triple check your emails before clicking that intimidating “send” button.

8. Have Enticing Subject Lines

The email inbox can be competitive. And although open rates don’t fully correlate to the success of email marketing, people opening and engaging with your emails keep your brand front of mind.

We generally follow these simple tips when creating subject lines for our mover-customers.

9. Stay Consistent

It’s common for a busy moving company owner or office team member to get busy with other tasks and put email marketing on the back burner. This is a huge mistake.

When email marketing, you’ll generally see an initial spike in leads when you first start, then a slow growth of repeat & referral work as you stay consistent over the lifespan of your efforts.

If you’re not consistent with sending your messages month after month people will start to forget about you and you’ll miss out on repeat & referral business.

10. Consider Outsourcing

If you’re going to outsource email marketing, make sure to go with a company that understands your industry and your goals. Email marketing in the moving industry should include some personal touches between you and your recipient, so make sure your company understands what works for your kind of business.

11. Manage Your List

When you send your emails, it’s likely you’ll get responses from people asking to unsubscribe. It’s also likely you’ll get responses from customers who didn’t have a great experience. It’s very important to stay on top of removing these people from your email list. Marketing to unhappy customers is only going to hurt your business. If you’re outsourcing, make sure your company is doing this for you – it should be part of the service.

12. Segment Your Email List

Segmenting your list is something you should set up before uploading your email list. The two main types of people you should segment for your moving company are previous customers from referral contacts such as realtors, property managers etc.

To segment your list, simply add a column in your .csv excel upload file and name it something like “type” and assign a type to each recipient.

From there, within your email marketing program, you should be able to segment based on what “type” people have. For example, you can set the segment to say: If type equals “Previous Customer”, then that will bring up all of the recipients with the “type” “Previous Customer”.

Segmenting is important in case you want to send any specific messages to your previous customers and any specific messages to your referral contacts. If you’ve segmented beforehand sending the right email to the right people should be simple.

13. Send Engaging Emails On Occasion

You don’t only want to send out emails that are promotional. From the standpoint of the email recipient, if you do this you’ll most likely start to be seen as only in it yourself.

Instead, send engaging plain text style emails from time to time, not necessarily asking for business but just being helpful or wishing them a happy holiday season.

These emails surprisingly get a lot of business for your moving company, even though your not actually selling your service.

Remember – your previous customers already know how good you are, they’ve used you, so sending these emails is that additional cherry on top of letting them know you still care about them. If they know you care about them, they’ll care about you.

14. Keep Adding To Your List

Adding to your list each month is also another super important part of having a successful email marketing program.

Each happy customer you serve is a potential referral advocate. When you forget to put them into your email list, they’ll soon forget about you and forget to drop your name whenever they have a friend, family member or acquaintance who is moving.

15. Use Email Marketing For Other Purposes Besides Directly Getting More Business

A few of our customers here at Moversville have us send out additional emails to their email lists that benefit them in ways other than directly getting them moving leads. For example, a few of our customers, once a year, compete to be listed as the “Top Mover” in their local magazine. They need votes to win the coveted title, so we reach out to their email lists on their behalves and ask their previous customers to vote for them. We’ve helped a few movers win their contest simply by using our email marketing techniques we’ve acquired over the years.

The Takeaway

Email marketing is a crucial element to the long term health of your moving company. If implemented the correct way, while providing your customers with excellent services, email marketing can drastically boost your repeat & referral work.

We hope these tips help you out and of course if you want the complete package, head over to Moversville.com if you’re ready to streamline your moving company into an outbound email marketing program that works for the moving industry.