Let’s get into the meat of using your newsletter. I strongly recommend, as you probably heard me say before, that you use direct mail in order to send your newsletter out. I recommend either using the US Postal Service Click2Mail feature. The service is primarily a self-serve mailing house provided by the US Postal Service in conjunction with a partner that they basically outsource their stuff to.
Here’s how it works. You take your mailing list, you export into some type of Excel spreadsheet or comma separated value or tab separated value, then you upload that entire list of people you want to mail to their web server and it’s at the US Postal Service Click2Mail site.
Once you upload your mailing list, you then upload whatever it is you’re sending out to your mailing list whether that’s a postcard or a single page letter or a newsletter format and you want to do it as a fold-over. You can select a whole variety of different ways to send out messages. I use it a lot with postcards. I’ve also used it to send out a tri-fold newsletter. So you can use it in a variety of ways. But you upload whatever it is that you’re gonna do – you can upload either a Microsoft Word document or you can design it online. Their online design tools are a little bit finnicky sometimes – just something about it doesn’t always work right for me. The uploading of the document works great. You upload your document; you upload your mailing list, and then the service itself will take care of the rest. They will go ahead and put the mailing address on the outside of whatever it is you’re sending, they will go ahead and drop it in the mail with postage on it and then they charge you a flat rate – pretty good rates, fairly cheap. The postage you get a discount on because you’re doing pre-sorted first class mail. So they’ll do that for you. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s cheaper for you to use this than to actually go and if you include the cost of printing it out on your computer and the full price you’re going to pay for postage to the mailing list to get your newsletter out from the US Postal Service Click2Mail site. It’s cheaper to do it that way than to do it in-house.I would not be surprised at all.
The other way to do it is, if you are a not going to use the US Postal Service Click2Mail which is kind of like the self-serve option, you can outsource this whole process to a mailing house. You may not want to do it with five or 10 people on your list, but if you get a big enough mailing list, a mailing house will definitely do it for you. How that would work is you’d bring them your mailing list on a disk or you’d email it to them, and you bring what you want to have included in your newsletter or whatever you’re mailing out to them down to them. They’ll do all the printing; they’ll do all the addressing of them, and they’ll put the postage on. They’ll charge you a fee for doing that. The nice part about this is it’s really hands-off. Once you give them your list, you give them the piece you want to do, they take care of everything else.
Unlike Click2Mail where you’ve actually got to upload your list, you’ve gotta put your newsletter on there and then you’ve gotta click the buttons to merge them all together. The other one is totally hands-off. This one’s a little bit more self-serve, but it’s really easy to use click-to-mail. I would not rule out Click2Mail. I personally use click-to-mail a lot.
I will make a huge note here, please don’t do this yourself. Do not go and print your newsletter out on your printer and sit in front of your television licking stamps and hand-addressing envelopes or whatever you need to do in order to get your newsletter out. It’s so cheap to have someone else do it for you now especially with Click2Mail. Don’t do it yourself. You’re going to do it once or twice and then you’ll never do the newsletter again because it’s so much of a drag, and you’re not going to want to do it. If you do Click2Mail, it’ll be easy, and it will be much better for you. It will be much more effective and you’ll want to do it more.
By the way, you can hire someone. If you don’t want to do the Click2Mail, hire someone else to do it. Hire a high school kid to come in and do that for you.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Learn how to crank up your marketing machine for your handyman business with “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.
Now let’s talk about communicating with your database. Here are some different ways to contact your database.
The first one I’m going to focus on is one that I probably think is the most important for you to get done and that is get your newsletter out. I’m going to talk a lot about newsletters here in the future. However, newsletter is critically important to your success in this business and in any business actually, because you need to stay in regular contact, stay in front of the people that know, like and trust you, develop more of a relationship with people so that they know you more, like you more and trust you more. They’re much more likely to do business when they’re ready to do that with you and also to refer business to you. So newsletters is a key one.
Another way to do it is email. Email does not replace your newsletter. You should not do an e-newsletter or an e-zine in order to replace your physical newsletter. You can do email occasionally from time to time. You can use it as another way to keep in contact with people, but it does not replace your newsletter.
I’ll talk a little bit about social media websites later on. It’s another way for you to stay top-of-mind, to reveal to people your personal side, a lot of your personal activities and also occasionally put in some business stuff. Even though I am using my social media primarily for marketing my business and I am not using it in the personal way that it is designed for, it is much less effective for me to use it only for business and much more effective for people to know, like and trust you and use it for your personal business. I have done that in the past; I have decided, for other reasons, to not share any personal information online. But it is effective for growing and maintaining relationships.
Another way to do it is what’s called a RSS feed which stands for real simple syndication to email. Every time you write a new article or you add content to your website, you can have it set up so that content automatically gets emailed out to your distribution list – the people that are on your email list – once a week or once a day whatever frequency you set up. That is another way for you to contact your database. The thing I like about that one is it’s relatively automatic. You don’t have to keep manually doing it. You can set that up once and it will automatically send itself out. That’s what’s called RSS to email. When you go and set up your website you’ll want to go and configure that to work. There’s actually two major components to it. The first part is the RSS feed, which is part of your website. Then the email component is actually part of your email broadcast service. You just need to connect those together.
You can send out postcards. I talked a little bit earlier about the concept of using postcards to do announcements or invite people to an event. Let’s say you’re having a barbeque, or let’s say you’re having a Thanksgiving party, or maybe you’re trying to do a volunteer thing where you’re delivering pumpkins to certain neighborhoods and you’re looking for volunteers to come out and assist you with that. You could use a postcard in order to just let people know that that’s going on and if they’d like to volunteer and lend a hand to the community they can do that with you. That’s a good way for you to get that message out. You could use email and the postcard to do that, and also in your newsletter, but the postcard could be an extra step. It’s a very cost-effective way to get another contact in there and show them that you’re involved in the community and what is important to you and then remind them that they can do business with you later.
Holiday cards and letters – another really great way. A letter can be just an update about what you’ve got going on in your business and personal life. If you really want to go out and do individual holiday cards, you can do that as well.
The occasional phone calls. Certain lists I’ve had in the past I’ve done voice broadcasts. You can actually have all the telephone numbers uploaded to a service, you can have a recorded message go out. I’ve used this a lot with my rental properties where I would want to let people know about a particular property we had for sale or for rent. You can actually do a voice broadcast out to the people that have inquired about buying a property or renting a property before, and it’s a great way to get the information out very quickly and in quantity to a certain list of people with phone numbers. You can creatively use that in your handyman business. Just be careful about some laws which we’ll talk about later when we talk about voice broadcasts.
Those are some different ways to contact your database. It’s probably not a comprehensive list, but it’s a good way for you to understand the ways that we’re thinking about you contacting your database on a regular basis at least with a newsletter and some of these other methods as well.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. This is just a small part of the comprehensive marketing system for handyman business owners that’s included in “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”. Order it now and get instant access.
Let’s talk about which people to add to your database. I’ve been hinting at this, skirting around this for a while, but basically here’s what it comes down to.
Personal contacts, friends, family, all of those guys get added to your database.
Any business contacts, any vendors, any suppliers, all of those guys get added to your database.
New prospects for marketing. A lot of what we’re going to be talking about in this particular webinar is going to be how to generate new prospects from marketing. All of those guys need to be added to your database.
Plus, any past clients – people that have actually purchased your product or service – all those guys need to be added to your database so that you can get them there.
There are ways to go ahead and memory-jogger lists in order to come up with all 500 personal contacts – your doctor, your dentist, your lawyer, your personal trainer. You’ll come up with just memory-jogger lists of people. That’s very common in the network marketing industry, and if you need something like that, let me know and I’ll put up a page on the website. It’s basically just a list you go down to remind you of people that you already know and that know, like and trust you. You can add them to your database too. Those are the guys most likely to start referring to you, to start using your product or service. You’re using their product or service and know, like and trust them, and they’re more likely to do business with you. You can go through a list to jog your memory, if you want or you can definitely do the strong personal contacts that come to mind – friends and family, business contacts – get them all added and then focus really from here on forward on adding all the new prospects from your marketing, clients to your database.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Putting together your database of contacts is just a small part of the whole marketing system you need in your handyman business. Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for the full story.
Let’s look at some of the data that you’re probably going to want to store in your database. The full name of the prospect (your friends, your family, clients or anything like that you want to store their full name), their mailing address – which is what you’re going to use to mail stuff to. I’m not talking about their email address, you want to get that too. I’m talking about how you would physically put something in the mail to them – an invoice in the mail, a newsletter in the mail, a postcard invitation in the mail. You want to do mailing not e-mailing.
I know we’re in the 21st century and that everyone’s talking about email. Direct mail, you’re going to find, is much more responsive than direct email. I do a lot of email, and I also do a lot of direct mail. I know the numbers; mail is more responsive. You want to get their phone number; you want to get referral information – mention who they were referred by and who they have referred to you.
Reward the people that are referring people to you; you want to always track where they came to you by to reward the person that referred them. But then you also want to encourage them to refer other people.
As an aside, did you know that people who are referred by other people to you are much more likely to refer people to you? So, if you’re a handyman and somebody referred me to you, and I ended up using your product or service and then I later on was thinking about talking to somebody and I said, “I worked with this great handyman; he was referred to me by my friend.” I am more likely to refer people to you as well, because I was referred to you.
You also want to have in your database to store the history of contact and business they’ve conducted with you – if you’ve given them a bid, if you’ve talked to them on the telephone personally, if you happen to see them and they told you some information about their family that you want to remember go ahead and put that down there, or if they told you their birthday you want to make sure you put that on the history of contact and any business that you conducted with them.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Take your handyman business to the next level with our amazing new marketing course: “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.
If you’re overwhelmed by the idea of manually typing in names and addresses or you don’t want to do it, you can take all of your contacts, dump them into an inbox or shoebox so you’re out there networking and you get a business card put that in a shoe box. You talk to someone on the phone and you have an intake sheet, make sure you put down their name, address, telephone number, email address. Stick that into your inbox to be entered into your database. You could have a piece of mail returned to you; you can stick that into your inbox to be removed or updated.
Once a week or once every couple days or whatever is right for you in the volume you’re doing, you hire a high school kid to come in and they can add everyone you had on all those sheets of paper or business cards to your database. They can update the addresses and contact information of anyone that gave you changed information or if you got returned mail or a returned email. They can remove all the guys that they can’t get updated information from.
They can also help you get your mailings out. High school kids are going to be relatively tech savvy. Most high school kids, they would be able to pull out your list of people from your database and then they can use things that we’re going to recommend for actually getting your mailing out. The US Postal Service is what I’m recommending. The US Postal Service will allow you to upload your mailing list, to upload your newsletter and actually get that out. They’ll do all the printing and all the postage for you.
Please don’t try to manually do your newsletter. Don’t print your newsletter out in your computer printer and then hand address names and addresses on there and stick stamps on it. Waste of time. You could be doing much more with your time. It’s so cost-effective now for you to just upload what you want to print to the US Postal Service website, upload the addresses you want to mail to and they will get it out for you. It’s really that easy; it takes 30 minutes whether you’ve got 10 guys in there or 200 guys in there, if you want to do it that way.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Get a complete marketing system for your handyman business with “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.
Let’s jump right into the more technical side of setting up your database for your handyman business. There are lots of different ways to set up a database. There’s a variety of software applications and strategies for setting it up. I’m going to walk you through a relatively basic set up. If you need additional help realize that you can always outsource this either to someone locally – a high school kid that knows how to use some of these programs – you can also outsource it using some of the outsourcing and delegation tools that we’re going to be talking about later or you can also hire us to do some of it for you.
Here’s some of the different software you can use in order to keep a database of people. A lot of people don’t normally think of Excel as a place to store names and numbers and things of that nature, but it can. It’s relatively functional as far as that goes; it’s not fully feature packed for doing that, but you can put someone’s name, address, telephone number, email address all on different fields in an Excel spreadsheet and keep them all there. I don’t recommend it, but if all you’ve got out of this list is Excel and you want to keep your budget low, Excel will work short-term. As you get a much bigger list, you’re going to want to upgrade to something else.
You can use Outlook. Outlook is Microsoft’s product for doing primarily email, contacts, calendar, things to do list, and they have a really nice address book and contact list that you can add people in, put in their name, their telephone number, their mailing address, their email address. You can put in notes about what they’ve got going on and you can use all that in Outlook in order to store their names. Then whenever you need to do an export for a mailing, it’s relatively easy for you to export that into a spreadsheet or a comma separated value field.
By the way, if you’re not understanding what I’m saying, you don’t need to understand the principles in order to turn on a light switch, you don’t need to understand all the technical stuff I’m talking about in order to run a database. You can hire someone else to do the heavy lifting for you at a very low cost. You can outsource locally or you can hire us to do it. Don’t be overwhelmed; just listen and get the ideas.
You could also use ACT, which is another software application for managing contacts, keeping track of schedules and sales processes. It’s a very popular tool for sales people. You can use the address book on the Mac operating system. Mac comes with an address book feature; you can put all your contacts in there and then you can export those.
There’s a whole other bunch of software packages for maintaining databases of people. Go look in your office supply store; they’ve got tons of them in there. You can look online for a lot of different ones. There are lots of ways to do this; those are the main ones you’re probably going to come across.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Setting up your database for your handyman business is just one small piece of the entire puzzle. Get the whole plan with “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course”.
