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“Our top priority is that we’re providing a referral-worthy experience.”
—Travis Ringe
The topic for the session on Using HTML to Customize Your Customer Communications was online reviews. Everyone wants them, but it can be difficult to pinpoint how to go about getting them for your business. Utilizing HTML to build visually appealing custom emails in the ServiceTitan platform gives contractors a variety of options to make messaging pop.
ServiceTitan team members Jessi Roman and Tyler Adolph, along with Travis Ringe, President at ProSkill Plumbing Heating and Air — and ServiceTitan's Titan of the Year for 2020 — presented this virtual session during Pantheon 2020, ServiceTitan’s annual conference for the trades. Here are some key takeaways:
1. What Is HTML and why should I be using it for my customer emails?
HTML is code that dictates what is visible on a webpage or email. The benefit of using HTML features when crafting emails is customization. You are able to use tags to add elements to the email that aren’t available otherwise.
“Whenever we want to identify or do something with a paragraph or sentence and we want to have it display a certain way, we use tags in order to do that,” Jessi Roman explains. “We can also use tags to add links and images to customer emails.”
2. Keep your branding on point.
Branding your business is key. The number of times a potential client has to see your brand name or imagery before they recall it is estimated to be around seven times. Make sure that your brand’s imagery, font, colors, and messaging are not changing with every marketing campaign.
“I recommend using hex color codes to maintain consistency in branding,” Roman says. “This color code is a universal web-based code system that is consistent across all different web pages and we’re able to identify that color code and plug it in.”
3. Do your customers know how to give you a review?
Providing great customer service is something to be proud of. A lot of customers don’t know that your business would love a glowing review online or even how to go about giving you one if they did.
One of the best ways to make sure that your happy clients are able to let the world know how much they loved your service is by sending a follow-up email with links to your Google review page.
“We want to really emphasize the ‘thank you’...and make it as easy as possible for the customer to leave a review,” Ringe says. “We got 736 calls last month from our Google maps, which is free, and that’s primarily because of the reviews that we have. I think one of the best investments that we can make right now as a company is to drive reviews from real customers.”
» More about how ProSkill leverages reviews
Note that this method is not recommended for Yelp as they frown upon solicited reviews and track the links that reviews come from. They will typically not post reviews that come from a link in an email.
