The cheapest customer to win is the one you already have

When the diary looks thin, the reflex is to go looking for new customers: boost a post, try an ad, wonder about a leaflet drop. All of that costs money to reach strangers who have never heard of you.

Meanwhile there is a list of people who have paid you, watched you work, and would happily do so again. They are not thinking about you because nobody has reminded them. That list is the cheapest marketing you will ever do, and most small businesses never use it.

Three kinds of past customer

Not all of them want the same message.

The annual ones. Boiler services, gutter clears, spring clean-ups, pest treatments, anything that comes round every year. These customers want the reminder; forgetting is the failure mode. A text a few weeks before it is due (“It is about a year since we serviced the boiler at Elm Street, want me to book it in?”) gets booked more often than anything you will send to a stranger.

The follow-on ones. The job that usually leads to another job. The fence customer who mentioned the gate. The bathroom customer whose kitchen is next. You know who these are; you just did not write it down.

Everyone else. People who used you once for something that will not repeat. They are still worth one short message a couple of times a year, because they know people, and “do you know a good plumber?” is the question that fills a diary.

What to send

Short, personal, one thing. The reminder for the annual customer names the job and the address. The seasonal message to everybody says one useful thing and one offer: “Gutters before the leaves come down. We have a few slots the last week of October.” Nothing that reads like a newsletter, because nobody reads newsletters from their plumber.

The reason it does not happen

The list exists, in your invoices and your phone. It is just not in one place, and the reminder for the Elm Street boiler falls due on a Tuesday when you are underneath somebody else’s.

That is why this is the part of the system that pays for itself fastest once it is running. Every customer you have done a job for is already in it, with the date and the work. The annual reminder goes out on its own. The quiet-week message is one text to everyone, or everyone in an area, in a couple of taps. Anyone who replies lands in your inbox as a normal conversation.

A worked example

Say you have done two hundred jobs in the last two years and forty of those were annual services. If the reminder gets a quarter of them to rebook, that is ten jobs a year from customers who were going to drift to whoever came up first in search. It cost the price of a text.

Your list is bigger or smaller than that. The point is that it is yours, it is already paid for, and it is sitting there.