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Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
AI Handwritten Letters for Contractors to Increase Engagement using Automation with Arian Radmand
00:43:11
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- [00:00]
Aryan
If you compare the handwritten mail to just traditional direct mail, typically handwritten mail will perform about 11.2 times better than just printed direct mail. Just from like our own studies and from our own sending in general, if you compare it actually to email, typically performs about 30 times better. So huge difference there in terms of hesitation and why somebody wouldn't use this. I would say it's a different product than traditional direct mail.
- [00:28]
Podcast Narrator
Are you looking for valuable business advice to reach that seven figure revenue mark? Do you want actionable tips to properly navigate through every business challenge you encounter along the way? Let Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch be your guide in getting you to the top here at Service Business Mastery. Tune in as they sit down with world renowned authors in business leadership and personal growth who share valuable insights about management, marketing, pricing, human resources and so much more. Let their nuggets of wisdom gold guide you in owning a thriving, profitable and ever growing business. Here are your hosts Tersh and Josh.
- [01:14]
Aryan
I want to give a huge shout.
- [01:15]
Tersh Blissett
Out to Market Storm for sponsoring today's episode.
- [01:17]
Joshua Crouch
You've heard of Google Ads, Facebook ads and SEO, but did you know that there's an entire ecosystem like 80% of the Internet that ads can be served on that you've barely heard about?
- [01:25]
Tersh Blissett
That's where Market Storm operates.
- [01:27]
Joshua Crouch
They leverage data science and AI to build customer profiles for your ideal customers and get your ads in front of prospects before they are ready to hire a pro, planting your brand in their minds early and often.
- [01:38]
Tersh Blissett
To chat with a team about how they can help you grow your business, visit Marketstorm AI. If you're a contractor with multiple CSRs, check out this service Business Mastery podcast partner Lace AI Lace uses cutting edge AI to analyze your phone calls, uncover lost revenue opportunities, and empower your CSRs to convert more leads. You can significantly increase revenue without spending extra on marketing or or hiring. By using Lace AI to boost your conversion rates for the first time, you can gain deep insights into customer needs at scale with minimal effort. Elevate your call center to achieve industry leading booking rates and revenue. Visit www.lace.AI to book a demo today. Now back to the show. Yo Joshua, really fast. I want to talk about online scheduling for the trades and how they should be affordable, effective and easy to manage. A really quick second here to share a little bit about the latest group of experts that we've teamed up with Autobot AI. Our team of industry experts has developed Best in Class Scheduling app that seamlessly integrates with your CRM. Every book job goes directly into your software and becomes one of our advanced marketing analytics, which is really cool. We can automatically select the marketing campaign of your choice by based on how the customer came to your site.
- [03:01]
Joshua Crouch
Yeah, Tersh, those industry leading analytics tells you everything that you're going to want to know about your lead. Where they came from, what they did before scheduling and what page they converted on other things. On average about 75% of people who started booking with our app completed. But we'll give you a more granular reporting that shows conversion rates based on marketing source and medium to help improve your marketing efforts.
- [03:22]
Tersh Blissett
So honestly, with no contracts, affordable monthly rates and you really don't have anything to lose. And so it's, it's a great program to try out and if you use SBM when you go to sign up for it, you'll actually save fifteen hundred dollars on the setup fees. Honestly, give it a shot. Tell us what you think. Hello everyone out there in podcast world. Hope you're having a wonderful day. You're listening to or watching Service Business Mastery podcast. I am one of your hosts, Church Blissett, sitting virtually next to my co host Joshua Crouch. And we have Aryan on the show today with Ignite Post and we're going to talk a little bit about AI powered handwritten outreach. This is a really cool concept. The engagement I found personally whenever you have a handwritten letter is massively more open rate versus something just printed off of a printer. I remember several years back when we got this fancy new printer in the office and that thing was expensive so of course we were going to use it and we printed off a ton of mailers. This thing spit them out like nobody's business. But the open rate on the handwritten reminders and we actually would book the reminders, these are prepaid reminders and we couldn't get people to call us back or to book it. But the ones that were handwritten, you know, it felt like a doctor's office. I'm excited to talk with you today and learn a little bit more about Ignite Post and how you got into doing what you're doing. And of course we're going to talk AI because that's what we do. So welcome to the show.
- [04:50]
Aryan
Thanks so much for having me. I'm super excited to dive in.
- [04:52]
Tersh Blissett
Josh, you got anything to add there?
- [04:54]
Joshua Crouch
Yeah, I was just going to add that. So we still do handwritten welcome note, new clients jump on. I used to do those and I handed delegated to Brittany. Now I delegate it to my marketing manager. I've always loved the handwritten Thing, it's just, you know, if you sign up a lot of clients at one time, it's just, it is not the funnest job to do.
- [05:12]
Aryan
And it's often the first thing that, like, slides off your plate when you have a thousand things going on. You're like, this can wait.
- [05:18]
Joshua Crouch
So that's what happened with us is we would get a you influx, especially during busy times of the year for our marketing agency. And then we'd have like 20 of them to do. And then all of a sudden, so we get caught up. Then your hands cramping, you're like. And then you're talking to say, you know, because again, you got to think about what to say. And, you know, as humans, it's weird because, like, psychologically, we don't want to say the same thing over and over and over and over and over again, even though nobody else will know. It's like almost like we got to test ourselves and our ability to, like, think, because otherwise we write the same thing. We're like, this is really boring.
- [05:48]
Aryan
It's to keep yourself engaged as well. And it's funny too, that you mentioned it. So even kind of going back to what Tersh was saying before, the number one thing and the reason why handwritten notes perform so much better than, you know, kind of normal direct mail or printed mail or email is because that's how we're wired as human being. I know we're going to get into and talk about AI and everything, which is definitely awesome, but people, at the end of the day, a lot of times forget that, hey, I'm selling to another person, or I'm, you know, providing a service for other people.
- [06:15]
Joshua Crouch
And.
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Aryan
And as humans, we've evolved over millennia by actually interacting with our environment and experiencing it, touching it, feeling it. That's how early humans learned about the environment they're living in. So these things like screens, you know, computers, that is something that's very, very foreign to us, like, to like our lizard brains, right? So people forget about that a lot of times, and they're just like, oh, this is so convenient. All this digital marketing and everything is like super convenient and easy. But at the end of the day, like, one of the big reasons why just mail performs really well is because engages all of your senses, right? And that's going back to how humans were when, you know, as we first evolved. And so I like to always start there and kind of remind people that, like, this is the way that people are kind of wired to interact with things and understand things. So that's kind of the. One of the biggest advantages that sending something like mail has. And then when you personalize it and go a step further and send, like an actual piece of handwritten mail that connects you with the recipient more, where you can kind of interact, there's tactile feedback. You can run your finger over things and kind of feel like, oh, somebody actually wrote this thing out. And this kind of, you know, connected with me and has written this to me. It kind of adds that whole other element. So a lot of times people forget that.
- [07:29]
Joshua Crouch
I got a quick question for you, because I know they don't teach cursive in too many schools anymore. Does it write in cursive or does it write like. There's probably a generation of people that can't read that.
- [07:37]
Aryan
Exactly. Yeah.
- [07:38]
Joshua Crouch
I mean, the older generation, our generation. I mean, we're taught cursive in school. But I know that most school districts lyrics have gone away from teaching cursive, which is weird. I mean, I guess apparently they're not going to know how to sign their name on checks at some point when they're adults.
- [07:49]
Aryan
They're going to go back to just.
- [07:50]
Joshua Crouch
Writing an X or carry a stamp around with them or something.
- [07:54]
Aryan
Exactly. Yeah. But to answer your question, yes. So we do have cursive handwriting styles that people can use. So Ignite Post is a business, essentially. You know, what we do is we help businesses create magic moments using handwritten notes. So our solution is part hardware, part software. On the hardware side, we have robots that hold real Bic ballpoint pens, and we'll actually write out a handwritten note in a handwriting style. We have a lot to choose from. So we do have some fonts that are in cursive. We also have some that are in Spanish, most are in English. And then we have everything from very, very neat penmanship to borderline chicken scratch. And kind of everywhere in between is.
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Joshua Crouch
The option called chicken scratch.
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Aryan
You know, that's a good point. You know, we should just make a font called chicken Scratch that's just unreadable, which is just a bunch of squiggles. We do have a bunch of different handwriting styles that people can choose from. We also have the ability to actually take your handwriting and mimic it and duplicate it. So if anybody wants their actual handwriting used, we can actually get a sample from you and then make that available. But that's kind of how the service works. So the hardware writes all the notes, and then we have a nice software layer that allows you to either execute campaigns in bulk, so we Have a portal where you can log in and upload a list and kind of blast out campaign in bulk or, or you can grab one of our integrations and kind of plug it into whatever marketing automation tools or CRM system you're using and trigger just in time notes and trigger notes to be sent just when you need them set how long does.
- [09:22]
Tersh Blissett
It take to build them or to write it out?
- [09:25]
Aryan
So it really varies on a lot of different things of, you know, what you're saying in the note, what kind of handwriting style it is. So it, there's no one answer to that. If you're, if we're talking about writing, you know, eight and a half by 11, like you know, full paragraph sheet of paper, it might take a couple minutes. If you're, if you're going to do a five by seven, you know, kind of folded card here, which is kind of one of our standards, something like this, it might take like a minute or so. So it kind of, it just depends. There's so many factors in there.
- [09:55]
Joshua Crouch
And I guess I've seen this more and more. I've seen more people talk about recently because everything has gone digital. Like the, the trend is everybody goes digital. So now everyone, even new companies starting out start with digital in mind and the ways of, you know, getting leads, the, I guess the old way of, you know, referrals, word of mouth, yard signs, some of those other things people are like, yeah, you know, nobody, nobody looks at that stuff, nobody opens it. That's, that's at least the prevailing thought that I see is nobody, nobody goes to the mail, nobody checks that stuff. Or I, I did a blast once and I got like eight calls and I sent like 10000 cards out.
- [10:36]
Tersh Blissett
And it's just 10000 cards in return.
- [10:39]
Joshua Crouch
Yeah, a bunch return because they got a bad list from like Info USA or something like that. Are you, are you seeing people are starting to buck the trend and go backwards? Because I know sometimes those trend, you know, trends come and go and a lot of times the smart operators, at least the ones that I, some of the people I follow, like they're killing it on mail. But they do mail every month too. They don't just, they're not just doing it once and okay, I'll wait until I'm slow again, send another one. They're every month consistently sending things out and getting leads.
- [11:07]
Aryan
Exactly. Yeah. So a couple things. So first of all, I'm not advocating that you like don't do any digital marketing and just kind of do a hard Switch over to mail. In fact, we recommend the opposite. So we designed our service to work in conjunction with the existing marketing that you're doing. So we see the best results. We when you interleave this touch point and you use it as a touch point in kind of a more comprehensive overall strategy. So that's where we see really good results. Where you might, you know, if you're talking about leads, you might reach out and open up with a handwritten card. And then, you know, your follow up, you know, emails and text messages and phone calls aren't just trying to, you know, give somebody the hard sell. It's, you know, hey, Josh, I sent you a handwritten card last week and never heard back from you. You know, what's going on, what the heck? That type of response gets a really, really, that type of interaction gets a really good response. But it's designed to be used in conjunction with digital marketing and your other touch points as well. So that's the first thing I'll say. And then you hit the nail on the head as well, right? So typically in marketing, if you're trying to stand out, if everybody's zigging, you got a zag. So mail is something that, you know, 15, 20 years ago, our mailboxes were exploding and our email inboxes were relatively empty. Now it's completely flipped. Now if you're an email user, you get about an average of about 120 emails in your inbox every day. Most people go through their inbox trying to delete things as fast as possible.
- [12:36]
Tersh Blissett
We have AI bots that'll do that, that just go through the inbox.
- [12:39]
Aryan
And so our inboxes are just massively filled, but then our mailboxes are empty. I think the, the oft quoted stat is we receive a personal letter just once every seven weeks. So that's a, that's a letter that's not like a bill, right. Or like, you know, a mass marketing, you know, direct mail campaign that seems.
- [12:58]
Tersh Blissett
Like more frequent than the mail I get. People must don't like me.
- [13:04]
Aryan
You, I'll send you a handwritten, handwritten letter so you don't feel left out.
- [13:07]
Joshua Crouch
How grand can you get on this? Because I can think like, you know, like, let's say you, you do a new installation and you want to send something that's very personalized about the information that came through the job. Maybe just a little bit about, you know, because sometimes on the phone call and some of the notes you get in there, there's, there's information about like Their dog or their house or something unique about that customer? How granular are people getting with that? And, like. Or how custom are they getting with some of that stuff to really make it, like, wow, somebody literally took the time to write directly to me. They're not just mass sending these to everybody.
- [13:38]
Aryan
So, first of all, just the fact that we're sending somebody an actual real penned note makes it feel super personal anyway. So you actually. It's not like an email or anything where you have to get super, like, in the weeds. Otherwise, people think this is just like a mass thing that you sent. So that's the first thing I'll say is you actually don't need to get too specific. Just the fact that you send someone a really personalized, real penned letter that they can, like, feel like the indentation of, okay, somebody actually sat down and, like, wrote this with an actual writing instrument is already very personal. But now with AI and with some of our integrations, you can really go down as far down the rabbit hole as you really want. So we definitely have folks that have integration set up where, you know, when a job gets completed, if they have different types of jobs, they'll go. They'll actually, like, specifically say, like, okay, hey, this was, you know, like a H vac install, or this was a plumbing job, or this was a, you know, water and sewer job. So they'll be able to categorize that. And then they can actually have AI come up with, like, specifics about the home or any other notes that are in that account. So we definitely have folks that are doing that. I will say overwhelmingly, most people don't get too fancy. They try to kind of keep it simple, and they just like, hey, thanks so much for letting us handle your electrical needs. If you need us again, here's our contact information so you don't have to go too far down the rabbit hole. Just by the nature of it being a personalized, real pen, pen and ink letter. It's very personal, and you get a good response rate. But it's certainly there, and it's certainly very easy to. To make it very personal.
- [15:13]
Tersh Blissett
Do you ever, on purpose, like it, like, misspell things or, like, have like, a. I feel like I've seen them before where I'm like, I'm pretty sure this was written by a machine, but, like, grammatical errors and stuff?
- [15:32]
Joshua Crouch
So that's just because you don't know how to spell. Actually, if it's misspelled, Tersh actually thinks it's spelled right.
- [15:40]
Aryan
So it's totally up to Our customers, we. We don't necessarily do that or like, recommend that you just put in, you know, grammatical errors or misspellings or anything like that, but you can certainly do it. You know, the way that the. The service works is you give us the content that you want written, and then we kind of handle everything from there. So you can control if you're like, you know, if you purposely want to insert some misspellings or, or even use AI for that of like, hey, here's the message I want, but alter it slightly and like, throw a couple of grammatical errors in there. You can totally do that.
- [16:13]
Tersh Blissett
And don't use any EM dashes.
- [16:16]
Aryan
Exactly.
- [16:18]
Joshua Crouch
Or use a lot of them. I've seen people like. And no offense, like, Dan Antonelli was one. He's a little older than we are. He's like, I grew up and use. I regularly use M dashes on purpose. And then of course, I read. I was reading the book I was recently reading. I'm like, man, there's M dashes all throughout this thing. Because it's probably not. It's probably normal in books and publishing. It's probably, like the right way to do it, but nobody actually writes that way when it comes to, like, social media emails, like our normal communication. So now M dashes are like the. The. The most evil thing in the world. Like, everyone's like, get rid of your M dashes, Otherwise everyone's gonna think it's AI.
- [16:55]
Tersh Blissett
There's certain words I always there, and I constantly catch myself. Not like, oh, I shouldn't put that there. Stupid chat. GPT. So, like, what's. What's the biggest reason contractors would be hesitant to do something like this? I mean, it's. For me, I've. Back in the day, whenever I had to hand write those, we did a little notepad that was probably about this big right here. And it was a. It looked like a doctor's reminder. And it would. And we got really good engagement with those.
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Aryan
But they.
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Tersh Blissett
We hand wrote them and we found that if we printed them off on that fancy printer, we didn't get any phone calls. But if we hand wrote them, and I was the one handwriting the guy with dyslexia, and I felt like, like was handwriting all these. These reminders. We got amazing engagement. What would be the hesitation for a contractor to not use this?
- [18:03]
Aryan
Yeah. So with anything, I think the. It's really about how you use it. Right. How you implement it more so than the actual technique. So to. To your point, really quickly, though, I'm not surprised to Hear about that response rate. In fact, if you compare the handwritten mail to just kind of traditional direct mail, typically handwritten mail will perform about 11.2 times better than the just printed direct mail. Just from like our own studies and from our own sending. And just, you know, in general, if you compare it actually to email typically performs about 30 times better. So huge, huge difference there. But you know, to your point in terms of like hesitation and like why somebody wouldn't use this, I would say it's a different product than traditional direct mail. So if you are considering that the, our typical recommendation is to not use this like traditional direct mail. So folks, I wouldn't recommend this to like spray and pray over an entire neighborhood or to kind of do the every door direct mail. That's not really like the best use for, for this tool. It's a more targeted, more personal outreach. So it's kind of, you think of it as when would I actually value sitting down and actually writing out a note to someone? And those are the scenarios and those are the times at which it performs really, really well. So what we're seeing is there's probably four kind of specific scenarios that we recommend contractors set up and those are the kind of the playbooks that we help run when a new customer comes on board. And so, you know, kind of going down the list, we typically start with a post quote follow up. So if you're going to go out and if you leave a quote at a prospective customer's home, that's a great time to follow up with a handwritten note because you've already spent the time to go out and quote them. So following it up with a, with a quick handwritten note that says, hey Josh, thanks so much for letting us provide you with a quote. We've done a ton of these jobs before. Really looking forward to working with you. Here's my contact information. If you need anything, I'll reach out in a few days with that type of experience. So we do this with all, a lot of the Mr. Rooter, Mr. Electric locations all across the Midwest. Just by adding that experience afterwards, they saw about a 10% bump in jobs. One, just because it differentiates you in the market. Right, all things considered. Because most people when they go to get a quote, right, they're going to probably get it quoted out by a couple different contractors. So all things considered, everything's kind of in the same price range. Who are you going to go with? Are you going to go with like the folks that just kind of like show up and hand you a quote or the ones that follow up and say, hey, I really appreciate the time. Here's my contact information. Reach out if you have any questions and I would love to do the job. So that's a very easy way.
- [20:45]
Tersh Blissett
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- [21:29]
Joshua Crouch
Today's episode is powered by Ciro Systems.
- [21:32]
Tersh Blissett
Sarah is all about removing the clutter and unnecessary touch points to run your home service business profitably.
- [21:37]
Joshua Crouch
They use AI dispatching to get the right tech to the right call automatically and job time efficiency to ensure your entire team runs like a profit generating machine.
- [21:46]
Tersh Blissett
Get a tech upgrade for your business at Get Sarah Tech Service Business Master History Today's episode is brought to you by one of our show partners, upfrog.
- [21:57]
Joshua Crouch
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- [22:13]
Aryan
Help you grow your business.
- [22:14]
Tersh Blissett
Learn more @UpfrogIO having that personalized letter, I mean it makes you feel a certain way and to think that someone has handwritten it like that makes you feel even more special, you know. And it goes back to the old adage, they don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And so it's just another way of showing people that you care.
- [22:35]
Aryan
So that's kind of the the first major thing that we do. That's the first playbook that we run. The second playbook that we typically set up for contractors is the job completed playbook. So anytime a job gets completed and you can kind of, you know, again set up filters depending on what you want to when you want an actual card to get triggered. But typically after the job gets completed, we trigger a handwritten card that's kind of more of a thank you. But there's a couple very specific things.
- [23:02]
Joshua Crouch
Do you guys integrate with tools like Zapier and make and stuff like that? So that way, like this was what I'm envisioning because I know a lot of contractors have like a chirp a hatch or like we have our own platform where we can send SMS and email. But I'm just wondering because what I'm wondering because a full campaign works best when you hit people from all the mediums because some people answer text, some people don't, some people answer email, most people don't. But you know, but you hit them in three or four different areas, they're going to see it and at least know that you're different than other companies.
- [23:37]
Aryan
Exactly. So yes, to answer your question, we many, many integrations and we have a lot of different ways that you can integrate. But yes, we definitely have a Zapier app so you can trigger us from there. We integrate with service titan HubSpot Klaviyo. Like you name, make you name it a lot of different ways that you can trigger a handwritten card. And that goes back to what we were saying kind of earlier where if you set up a flow where you're kind of interleaved and you hit them with a lot of different types of many different channels, that's where we typically see the, the best results.
- [24:10]
Joshua Crouch
Yeah, and that was my thought is like, you know, because otherwise you're sending like a postcard but you don't have SMS and email or you're sending an SMS but you don't send postcard, you don't send email. Like just all the different things if it lines up where you're sending this and then af, you know, let's say it always takes from the time you triggered, it takes two days to get the postcard to them. You know, on day three you can send a text message that follows up on the postcard or whatever, you know, just lining up so that way you can have a mass. Because church and I talk about customer journey a lot because a lot of people that want to learn automation, especially with AI layered in, they want to improve their customer journey without adding four or five overhead staff members to manually do all of the things that we're talking about because it's just, it's, it's a lot more people to manage. It's not full time work. Then they got to make sure they're doing a good job. And you can read the human's handwriting. Like there's just a lot of Things that management wise it become. And then of course your, your overhead goes way up. When you're paying a forty, fifty, sixty thousand dollar a year salary versus somebody that's, you know, you're paying for like a service that's per card. That's really interesting. That's, that's cool that you guys have the, the triggers and stuff to build these into like these massive workflows.
- [25:24]
Aryan
Anyway, that's, that's where we see the best results. So you know, in that use case for sure, that's exactly the way that we recommend using it. So after the job gets completed, the card gets triggered and then we also have webhooks that we can talk back to whatever system you know, you're, you're triggering this from. So you can actually exactly know, okay, this card was sent on this date. So here's the time that I need to, to wait to follow up with an SMS asking if they got it or an email asking if they got it. So you know, we can get super granular.
- [25:52]
Tersh Blissett
You have the ability to update the system to tell it when you actually sent it.
- [25:58]
Aryan
Exactly.
- [25:59]
Tersh Blissett
They're not like hey, they're probably going to go three days later or whatever.
- [26:03]
Aryan
Correct? Yeah. So it's two way communication. So like you can trigger the card and then when we send it we can talk back and say hey, this card was triggered and then you can update this DRM system. So we've got folks that will like do that. So if they have a sales rep or an account manager or something, they know, oh this card was sent on this date. So I mean like I said, you can go super far down the rabbit hole for sure. You don't have to start there but the ability is there if you want. But on the post job completion that's kind of what we see. Right. So job gets completed automatically, card gets triggered. So you know, one of these cards arrives on the doorstep after the job is completed. But we have identified three specific things that correlate to a better response rate and more business. So number one, the card that gets delivered, the support number needs to be right on the front. So it's like you know, 888, whatever, whatever your support number is, that's number one. Number two, they put a QR code in the bottom corner of the card typically with the referral program. So you know, scan here to get 100 bucks for referring somebody. And then number three is on the inside of the note. You actually refer to it and say hey, thanks so much for letting us complete your Job on the, you know, keep this card handy. On the front is our support number. Reach out if there's ever any issue or let us know. And then if you have other services that you offer. So if you offer, you know, electrical, plumbing, H vac, et cetera, that's a good time to also mention it. And what happens is people actually keep these cards around. So it's not uncommon for people to reach out, you know, 10 months, 11 months after getting the card, saying, hey, like, you know, you're, you were here, you know, 10 months ago. I have this other issue, like, could you come out and give me a quote for it? So it's unlike email or SMS where basically you either get a response pretty much immediately and then it's gone. People actually keep these on their refrigerator, on their, you know, coffee table and they actually will pick up and call like, you know, you told them to. We, we did this for a point broadband, which is a, a broadband installer. And they, they right now are seeing a 3% conversion rate from people just scanning the like refer a friend link and just referring them new business. So people are literally like getting this card, they're putting it on the refrigerator, their coffee table because you told them to. The support numbers on the front and then the little, you know, get a hundred dollars for referring a friend if you scan here and lo and behold, when people are like walking by or like when it's top of mind, they scan it and it's like, oh, someone just moved in across the street. Yeah, I want a hundred bucks. And they scan it and they, they refer somebody. So that's kind of the second playbook that we run. That's super common. The third playbook that we typically run is a six month check in. So after the job gets completed, waiting six months and then triggering one of these notes as just a nice touch point because nobody does it, right? It's very, very rare that you get that kind of, you know, check in. Typically what people do is they filter. So they don't do it for every single job. It's jobs above a certain kind of threshold. But it's a really nice touch point. It sets you apart from everybody else. And it's a specifically targeted checkpoint to get them into a service subscription or a maintenance plan that you have, right? Kind of using a, like, hey, you just made this investment or you just, you know, completed this job. We also offer service plans to make sure that you protect your investment. That's a great time to get people, you know, who were happy and like they remembered, yeah, I did this, like, six months ago. But, yeah, I'm not protected. I haven't signed up for the maintenance plan yet. Now's a good time to jump into it. So that's kind of the third playbook that we run with folks. With folks when they sign up with us. And then the fourth playbook is actually a churn prevention playbook. So when somebody is in that maintenance plan, typically we'll work with them and we'll say, okay, let's take a look at your data. What's the average length of time that folks are in your plan, in your maintenance subscription before they cancel? So let's say it's, you know, 18 months, and then that's kind of the average turn point. What we'll do is we'll automatically set up an experience where, you know, on month 17, you automatically get a card that says, hey, Josh, thanks so much for being, you know, awesome part of our community here and letting us maintain your Systems. And here's 20% off your next year of service, right? So you immediately jump them over the point where they would have canceled. They don't know that they were at that point, but you do. You automatically jump them over that point, and it immediately increases your lifetime value. And then as you do that each year, you kind of run the data again to kind of see where that average point is, and you can kind of keep extending it and kicking it out and pushing it out.
- [30:55]
Joshua Crouch
Thank you to companycam for supporting today's episode.
- [30:58]
Tersh Blissett
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- [31:01]
Joshua Crouch
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- [31:07]
Tersh Blissett
Try that for free for 14 days and get 25 off of your first two months at companycam.com forward/svm.
- [31:15]
Joshua Crouch
That's really cool. I can definitely see some use case, because I was actually just talking to someone about, like, somebody was asking a question about churn rates on memberships, and. Because there's. I mean, that's such a challenging thing in the trades because people get it because they want the discount that day. And then maybe they're like, it's a good idea. We'll get a tune up later, and all this stuff. And then they. And then they're like, next year, they're like, yeah, I didn't do anything with it, so I'm just gonna cancel instead of. And, well, and then trying to remind them is like, okay, now we got to go through. We got to pick up the phone. We got to start calling everybody because all these are expired and they're going to call in and hope they get their benefits renewed. And plus, it's also nice to remember them to, you know, certain times a year, like we can send a mailer to, hey, it's time to get your tune up. And we, we can pair that with an email and an SMS campaign. So you hit them again multiple times. Because there's no way to say stop to a direct mail card. You cannot dnd yourself from that, that touch point, which email you can block and put in spam. You could do that with text message. But you cannot block somebody from sending a direct mail piece.
- [32:19]
Aryan
And actually going the other way is a super common use case that we see a lot as well. So if someone has opted out of your SMS and you want to get them back into the fold, sending them a mail piece with a QR to scan with like some type of offer or something for them to scan and then say, hey, scan this or text this number and I'll send you, you know, a discount for, you know, whatever is a great way to get them to opt back in. So you go from having a group of folks that you no longer can reach because they have opted out to a way that now you have, you have them back in that channel.
- [32:52]
Tersh Blissett
Have you seen anybody use like lost leaders for like that QR code to scan other than like the referrals? Like, so if they're, they're not going to use it for referrals, but they, they're like, all right, so we, we, these people have unsubscribed or whatever. And if we can get a loss later in here, then they'll resubscribe to that. Have you seen anybody do that?
- [33:19]
Aryan
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of one of the biggest things that we see is kind of bringing dead leads back or like, you know, these folks are not engaging with me with email. I can't reach them via sms. So it's kind of like, hey, we might as well send them something directly that they can't ignore. So that's kind of a huge use case for us.
- [33:38]
Tersh Blissett
Josh, you got any other question?
- [33:39]
Joshua Crouch
I think of all the campaigns that we run for clients through digital means, like, end of, you know, we're coming up on the end of summer when we're recording this in 2025, and all those estimates from summer because, you know, contractors get really busy when it's hot and those estimates stack up and very few people follow up on those at a very good clip. They'll maybe follow up Once or twice. But the salespeople are off to the next estimate. They're just, oh, give me the next one, give me. And all of a sudden it slows down. It's like, oh, we got to go back to all the other estimates and go see if they did anything. Now this could be a nice way to also put in another touch point to just make sure that the customer knows we didn't forget about them, you know. And again, the hand, the handwritten thing, I think is a. Is a really kind of a nice point because it does, it does stand out.
- [34:27]
Tersh Blissett
Handwritten thing, like welcome to the neighborhood for anybody. Like, you could trigger it for when somebody moves into a house.
- [34:34]
Aryan
We can do that. So, like, as part, you know, we talked a lot about the, the handwritten notes that we sent, but actually Ignite Post is a full service suite. So we, we have property data. So if you need to. We can target based on property data. So if you say, okay, I want. This is my service area, but I'm interested in reaching out specifically to homes that are, you know, two bedroom, one bath that are in this geographic area that are assessed for more than, you know, this amount that are residential, not commercial. Like, we can get very, very granular. So we can kind of give you the list, the data list of those addresses to target. So that's one.
- [35:09]
Joshua Crouch
Can you get like age of home and stuff like that too, like when it was built? Yep. Because I'm just thinking like, you know, especially for, you know, we usually talk about H Vac, but like, you know, sometimes electricians want homes that are 40, 50 years old because they got old panels. You know, H Vac would be probably more towards like the 12 to 15ish or maybe 10 to 15 area. Plumbing. Plumbing. I have no idea. Maybe houses that were built on slabs, if they do slab leak repair, because those are always nice jobs. Or maybe older homes that need re. You know, the. Especially if codes in their market or in their municipality have change and they got to upgrade everything to a different code or different material based on changes in laws and stuff like that, they would probably have a better idea what that looks like. So that's, that's good data to have because it's hard to come by.
- [35:52]
Aryan
Oh, yeah, yeah, I know.
- [35:54]
Joshua Crouch
Otherwise you're. Again, we talked about like duct taping. All this stuff we got. Okay, now we got a provider for this data. Then we got a direct mail and then we got to this and then we go that we got all these things. But now we have to figure out how the flow goes so we don't trip on ourselves and send someone something before they needed it or way too late after they've already done something else. So it's nice to be able to trigger that stuff on one place.
- [36:18]
Aryan
So that's kind of one big part of our platform as well. So property data. And then the other thing you could actually do from that is of course, do radius mailers around specific jobs that you've done. So I talked earlier, I don't typically recommend peppering like an entire neighborhood, just kind of blindly. But if you've done a job at, you know, 123 Main street, you can kind of set a radius, you know, like maybe like a 1 mile radius around that home and then reach out and say, hey, you know, we just helped the Joneses at, you know, 123 Main street was in your neighborhood and you know, really liked your home, thought you could use hand. Here's my, my contact information. We've seen a lot of really good success with those types of, you know, radius mailers around a specific job that you've done the other way that you can use the property data aspect of the platform and then you have to.
- [37:02]
Tersh Blissett
Make sure that you did a good job there.
- [37:04]
Aryan
Exactly. Yeah.
- [37:05]
Joshua Crouch
Otherwise you'll be the, you'll be the talk of the neighborhood, just not in a good way.
- [37:09]
Aryan
Exactly. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Make sure you do a good job first and then you can reach out and tell everybody about it. Yeah. If you, if you do a bad job, then, yeah, do nothing. Yeah. And then the kind of. The third piece of our suite, our platform is actually an anonymous visitor identification tool. Because the number one thing I always get asked is, well, how do I know how well this is working? This is an offline form of communication. How do I know what my response rate is? How do I track what my ROI is? How do I do attribution? So as part of our platform, we also have the ability to drop a pixel on a website and identify about 40% of anonymous traffic that goes to that site. So this gives us the ability to, you know, send mailers to a group of folks, drop the pixel on a site, and then even if somebody doesn't take the call to action, they don't call, they don't scan the QR code, but they visit your site. We can actually say, well, hey, here are all the visitors that are now on your site or that have visited your site. Here are the folks that were in the campaign. And so you can kind of do that type of Attribution and get an idea of what kind of effect this is having even if people don't take the intended call to action that you leave. So that's kind of like our full service suite so that everything kind of work together. You can use the different technologies by themselves but it's really designed to be work, you know, kind of holistically work together.
- [38:33]
Joshua Crouch
What I'm hearing, and a takeaway for anyone listening to this is when you think direct mail, don't think mass mailers.
- [38:42]
Aryan
Correct. Yeah.
- [38:43]
Joshua Crouch
Think like you would for other campaigns because anything that's personalized and it's related to something that you've done or you are gonna do or something that they've hired you for or something they bought from you in the past. To me that seems like the approach to go or the place to go. I mean that's what we do on the digital side for clients and it always works better. Like our email and SMS open rates and response rates are way higher when we just did work for them and we' sending them a follow up or we're asking for a review. But if we wait six months and then try to reach out to them, a lot of times you get a lot less open and response rate.
- [39:18]
Aryan
Exactly.
- [39:18]
Joshua Crouch
The more detail you can get from those campaigns. Like to your point about the reviews, if you can pull in a job type from the CRM like hey you know, thanks for hiring us for your AC repair. You don't have to go into details but like just use the job type inside of house call service titan Sarah, et cetera, et cetera, something like that where it just makes it a little bit more relevant or put the technician's name inside of there like Tersh. Really enjoyed your visit.
- [39:43]
Aryan
Yes.
- [39:43]
Joshua Crouch
That's the thing with digital and I think a lot of contractors miss the boat on that is all of these things are endpoints that you can typically grab for something. So instead of just sending, would you leave me a Google review? You can put something about Tersh was out there on Friday and for AC repair and like just wow, somebody actually took the time to actually put this together for me.
- [40:05]
Aryan
If you think you did a good job, could you leave us a review? Yeah.
- [40:08]
Joshua Crouch
Correct. The people that are being successful are the ones that aren't just mass mailing all over the place. They're they're being personalized. They're thinking about what those customers have hired them for. They're actually thinking through the journey instead of just like here's some zip codes, send some mailers and half those Homes are apartments and the other half are low income housing. They don't get the results and they're like that. Direct mail's dead. Doesn't work. Ironically, like we talk about direct mail being direct dead. Just like people are talking about SEO is dead now. Everything's always dead. When something new comes out, email's dead. Even though it still works fantastically. Church and I have data to prove that from our own newsletter. I heard from a CMO of a $200 million roofing company that the yellow.
- [40:45]
Aryan
Pages, the actual book, physical book, is yielding good results.
- [40:49]
Joshua Crouch
Still gives him an 8 to 1 return.
- [40:51]
Aryan
Really?
- [40:52]
Joshua Crouch
They're in like 30 states. So marketing is. And I know this is why contractors hate marketing because it is not an exact science. It is a test track. Test track, test track. Once it works, double down on that, triple down on it. Just throw as much money as you can without going broke on it and just see how far you can take it. But it's okay to try other things. It doesn't always have to be just digital or just offline or just word of mouth. You got to test stuff and that means you're going to have to spend some money and it may not work, but if you do it in a smart way, I think that stuff can really pay off.
- [41:22]
Aryan
I agree.
- [41:23]
Tersh Blissett
Oh, man, we appreciate you hanging out with us.
- [41:25]
Joshua Crouch
Yeah, Words. The best place for people to learn more about you guys. And if they want to do a demo of your platform and all that kind of stuff, where should they go?
- [41:31]
Aryan
Yeah, actually, can I give away a freebie to folks, please? Okay, anybody's listening. If anybody wants a free handwritten note sent to them so you can actually for yourself how things work, hit our site, which is ignitepost.com sample fill in your information and one of the robots will write and mail you a sample directly to your door. But the best place, if you want to find out more information, is just our website, ignite post.com if you want a demo, there's a button right on that header and the homepage click on demo and we'll connect with you and take you through some of the playbooks and some of the things that we talked about here. There's also a button for sample. So if you want a free sample, click that and one of the robots will mail you a free sample.
- [42:08]
Joshua Crouch
I'm about to get a thousand cards sent to me. Yes, I just kept clicking.
- [42:12]
Aryan
I refresh, refresh, send, send, send, send, send.
- [42:16]
Joshua Crouch
Yeah, I'm going to put you guys out of business.
- [42:18]
Aryan
I love it.
- [42:18]
Tersh Blissett
We appreciate you hanging out with us and sharing everything. Of course, if anybody has any questions at all, don't hesitate to reach out. Something that you kind of put off. You haven't done it in several years. Give it a shot. See how it does. That being said, I hope you have.
- [42:30]
Joshua Crouch
A wonderful and safe week.
- [42:30]
Tersh Blissett
Until we talk again. Next time, we'll see you.
- [42:32]
Aryan
Thanks for having me.
- [42:43]
Podcast Narrator
Thank you for listening to this episode of Service Business Mastery. Now that you are equipped with essential business advice from this impactful conversation, you are one step closer to becoming the successful owner of your dreams. If this episode has been helpful to your business journey, don't forget to subscribe to the show, leave a rating, and share it with other owners as well. Visit servicebusinessmastery.com to learn more.