Service Business Marketing: How to Get Customer Email Addresses

By David Crary  

Last week we hosted a webinar to release our new email solution, HindSite Connect. Essentially, HindSite Connect enables HindSite customers to send transactional emails – like appointment confirmation and reminder emails, reschedule notifications, cancellation notifications, service completion emails and mass emails like holiday greetings and customer newsletters. 

On the webinar, there were a number of great questions asked by our customers. But one that kept recurring was: I currently don't have emails addresses for a majority of my customers. How do I get email addresses from them? 

With that in mind, here are five ways to get email addresses for your customers: 

1. Pick up the phone and call them. It's not the most glamorous option available, but simply calling your customers and asking for an email address may be your most successful tactic. Put together a script that tells your customers what you'll do with their email address and how it will benefit them, then simply start dialing.
   
   We did this recently, in fact, with great success. We simply hired a temporary employee and had her call to get the contact information we were looking for. In some cases, she had to make multiple calls to get information, but within a couple weeks she had reached the majority of our customers.

2. Mail a postcard and offer them a discount in exchange for their email address. A customer of ours indicated that they had recently had great success sending a postcard to all their customers asking for an email address. In return, they offered a 5% discount. Again, the key is to explain how you're going to use the email address and how giving you their address will benefit them. Transparency is a must.
   
   If your office staff doesn't have the time to call every customer, starting with a postcard might be the best option. Then, a couple weeks later, reassess how many email addresses you're missing, and start placing phone calls.

3. Leverage social media. If you have an active presence on social media and a lot of your customers follow your social media sites, post a message to your social media platforms to communicate your new email program. Leverage a discount or some other incentive to get your customers to call or email yotheir email address. You may have to post multiple times to your social sites and it's unlikely that you'll reach all – or even a majority – of your customers, but it can help you reach a small portion of your customer base.

4. Train your field personnel to collect them. It's not the quickest way to collect email addresses, but it can certainly help you fill in the blanks. Train your field personnel to ask for email addresses every time they visit a customer. Or, if there are a few customers missing email addresses, add a special work note to remind them to ask for an email address. You can even arm them with postcards you had printed with your discount offer and have them distribute to customers. Over time, this method can help you fill in the blanks for some email addresses you may be missing.

5. Setup your field service software to remind you to collect email addresses every time a customer calls. If you use field service software like HindSite, you can set it to pop up the phone and email information every time you enter a customer record. That way, if a customer calls to schedule an appointment, you can see if they have an email address. If they don't, you can simply ask them for it. Again, it's not going to get you every email address quickly, but is a good method to help you continue to build your customer email database over time.

Email isn't a replacement for face-to-face or phone conversations with your customers, but it can be a great supplementary communication method to communicate important information quickly, clearly and concisely. But you can't do that if you don't have email addresses. So follow the five steps above and you'll start building your customer email database and improve your ability to communicate by email.

Once you've got your email database built, it's time to start sending emails. Wondering what types of emails you should send? Then download our free eBook, The 15 Emails Your Service Business Must Be Sending, today!