How to Avoid a Major Slump in Your House Cleaning Leads
Every business has its ups and downs and a house cleaning business is no different. The key is to prepare for the dips in advance and when they do happen, they will be much less stressful. One major cause of stress while building a residential cleaning business is a lack of house cleaning leads. In this post, you'll learn how to avoid a slump in leads for your business and some tips on how to generate house cleaning leads.
Understand seasonal dips in your house cleaning leads
House cleaning seems like it would be something that people would utilize all year long, and some do, but the reality is, for most residential cleaning businesses there are some slow months during the year.
For example, right before the holiday season, things tend to pick up. People want to get last-minute one-time cleanings in right before the holidays and family comes over, maybe others buy gift cards as presents, etc.
Then, after the holidays, people are thinking about all the credit card bills about to come in, so they are less likely to hire house cleaning services in January and February. This dip tends to happen every year, but many residential cleaning business owners act as if it has never happened in their business before.
Expect this dip and slow season and prepare for it so it doesn't catch you by surprise. When you have a constant flow of leads coming in throughout the year, and your loyal base of recurring customers it can hold you through the seasonal dips during the year.
Don't wait for a slump to market your house cleaning business
Unfortunately, another common mistake we see cleaning business owners make is that when they are busy with new clients, they back off on marketing in fear that they can't handle the extra business. And then when sales go down, they scramble to fuel their marketing efforts in hopes of quickly gaining new clients to fill the void. Obviously that's better than nothing, but it's a better strategy to continually market your business before the slump happens to avoid it.
One issue with waiting until a slump in the market and then trying to put money into marketing is that it is like running in quicksand. If your normal lead flow is going backward because it is the slow season, increasing your marketing budget will only go so far.
Marketing and advertising your cleaning business works, but it doesn't create instant results. It can help you to start increasing your traffic and combating the dip in business, but it isn't a cure-all that happens overnight.
You should look at marketing and advertising your cleaning business like farming. As you build up content or start running ads, it's like planting seeds that eventually lead to a harvest.
If you plant early, when business is going well, you'll have plenty of leads to harvest during the slow times. However, if you wait until it is the slow season, you'll be waiting until the seeds grow before you can harvest. Bottom line, it's better to start now rather than later.
Set up a lead magnet and quote form "Above the fold"
As a foundation to start generating more house cleaning leads, make sure you have your “Request a Quote” form and phone number easily visible. One concept to use is to place both of those "above the fold".
This means that you have a call to action, or an offer to request a quote or call for a quote, right at the top of the page. You want this to be clearly visible before your visitors have to scroll down the page.
Often we find cleaning company websites either don't have a clear call to action for a prospect to request a quote, or it is buried way down the page so people never see it.
In addition to the request a quote option to get house cleaning leads, you can offer a lead magnet or free giveaway that potential cleaning clients may be interested in. This could be something like a guide on cleaning hacks, or a cost savings guide. Or you could make a first-time client offer to entice them to try out your services.
The lead magnet strategy can help you get house cleaning leads from people in research mode or from those who are comparing your cleaning company to others but aren't yet ready for a free quote.
What does your follow up process look like?
Another thing that can lead to a slump in generating cleaning leads is a weak follow up system. Not everyone that requests a free quote for the first time is ready to buy immediately. Some are just shopping to see what it might cost to have their home cleaned.
If you don't have a follow-up process in place to convert these leads in the future, you are missing out on a lot of potential cleaning clients. One way to follow up more effectively with potential cleaning clients is through email marketing.
By adding your house cleaning leads to your email list, you can send out future content related to house cleaning and even send out the occasional offer to them. The key to this kind of follow up is to not overdo it.
If all you send is special offers and discounts, or emails that only aggressively sell, you can end up turning off your prospects, and those people will no longer open your emails. When you occasionally send out an email with a sales offer, they will have a much higher chance of converting and bringing new clients.
Using your email list for sales sparingly can also be an effective way to fill empty spots for your cleaning technicians if you have a short notice cancellation.
Use a CRM to track your follow up process to increase lead conversion
Does your cleaning business use a customer relationship manager? A customer relationship manager or CRM can be a great way to manage your house cleaning leads.
Often people struggle with follow up because they don't fully document their cleaning leads. When you use a CRM you can track valuable data about what services people are interested in, the size of their home, and more.
With this kind of information, you can send targeted offers to people that will be the most receptive to them. Many times, people simply reach out to a house cleaning lead once and never talk to them again.
If you don't track who you have talked to and where they are at in the sales process, most cleaning leads can fall through the cracks. Have a system for following up and track it through a CRM to help increase your conversion throughout the year.
What are your sales processes and expectations when you generate house cleaning leads?
Another stumbling block we find residential cleaning business owners run into is that their sales process could use some improvement. Generating a cleaning lead is only part of the process.
Expecting that every single house cleaning lead you generate is going to convert into a new client is unrealistic. Just because someone requests a quote from your cleaning company, doesn't guarantee they will buy your services.
Also, when someone requests a quote, it doesn't mean you can ignore any kind of salesmanship during the conversion process. A lead is just that, a lead.
Once you generate a house cleaning lead, your job is to sell them on the benefits of your service not just take their order for services. If your sales process resembles an order taking service, rather than a sales department, you should expect much lower conversion rates, regardless of the quality of the leads.
Too many times we see cleaning business owners blame the quality of the house cleaning leads they generate as to why they are struggling to get conversions and ignore their sales processes and follow up.
If you are serious about generating quality leads and converting them into new cleaning clients, you need proper expectations and an effective sales process.
How much info are you asking for when you are offering a free cleaning quote?
Speaking of quality cleaning leads and the quantity of house cleaning leads you generate, a primary factor for these numbers is the questions you ask before offering a free cleaning quote.
As a general rule, the more questions you ask of someone before you provide them with a quote, the less likely they will be to give you their information. For example, we see a lot of residential cleaning businesses asking for a full address when attempting to generate a lead.
You can certainly do this but understand not as many people will provide that information. You are likely better off just asking for a zip code to determine if the potential cleaning client is in your service area, and then asking for their full address when you have them on the phone.
How much information is necessary for you to deliver an accurate cleaning quote?
A question to ask yourself is what information is absolutely necessary to give a quote and do you need to ask for it upfront, or can you ask for it during the follow-up process? For example, you might want to know if there are pets living in the home. You could ask that before you provide the quote, but if you are going to call the lead anyway, asking that question in person could take a couple of seconds.
However, if you ask for a dozen short one-second questions like this on a form before someone can submit it, they may feel like it's too much of a hassle and just go to another company for a quote.
We have run into some cleaning companies that ask nearly 30 questions before allowing someone to request a quote. It's not a huge surprise then that they aren't generating many cleaning leads requesting a quote.
Overall, the more questions you ask, the more likely it's a higher quality lead, but you'll probably get a lot fewer leads. So, if you want more house cleaning leads, and you aren't afraid to get on the phone with a lead, ask for minimal contact information and get the rest when you follow up.
The minimum you can probably get away with asking for is a name, email, phone number, and zip code. With that, you have the means to follow up and determine if they are in your service area.
Create content to drive traffic to your website and increase leads
Now that you've optimized your request a quote form, created a lead magnet, improved your sales practices, and prioritized follow-up, you should be ready to start driving more traffic to your website. Without an optimized cleaning business website, you'll struggle to generate leads even with increased traffic.
One of the best ways to continue to drive traffic to your website is through content marketing. The basis of content marketing is to write content that helps solve your ideal customer's problems, and that helps them reach their desired results faster through your services.
For a residential cleaning company an example could be something like a blog post on how to choose the best cleaning products for their kitchen. Another type of post could be focused on the proper cleaning methods for carpet.
The goal of these kinds of posts are to attract visitors to your site that may be in research mode, rather than buying mode. The more people that come to your site that are considering hiring a cleaning service, but haven't yet, the more opportunities you have to turn them into house cleaning leads.
Another form of content you should create is cleaning services pages, and location pages. These two kinds of content can help bring in very targeted local traffic to your website, which again can lead to more cleaning leads.
Use a Google My Business page to generate house cleaning leads
Another great method that can help you generate local leads is by advertising your cleaning business with a Google My Business page. You've probably been online and wanted to find some kind of service near your home.
Well, imagine that whenever people do that and search for a cleaning business near them, your cleaning business showed up first. This is what is possible when you properly manage a Google My Business page.
Some basic steps you need to do to optimize your Google My Business page is to first claim it, choose your ideal business category, list your services and hours, and add photos. There is certainly more to optimization than this, but if you do those steps as a bare minimum you should start to get some exposure for your cleaning business with a Google My Business page.
Start doing paid online advertising for your cleaning business
The next step to get more house cleaning leads is to start doing PPC (pay per click) advertising, and/or running Facebook ads for your cleaning business. Understand that there are two kinds of ways to market your residential cleaning business online.
One way to market is with passive marketing, which is the content marketing, on-site SEO, and off-site SEO we mentioned above. The other way to advertise your cleaning business is with paid advertising.
Generating leads with passive marketing is going to take longer, but the content and foundation you build will generate leads on an ongoing basis long-term. The work you do to build a passive marketing system for your cleaning business can help you generate house cleaning leads for years to come. It just doesn't happen overnight.
With paid advertising, you can start to generate leads in a matter of weeks or even days. This sounds amazing, but it does still have a few drawbacks.
Running paid advertising for your cleaning business does have an optimization period. Online advertising involves testing and tracking. Even if you craft the perfect ad, it still takes time to optimize along with real-world data.
Also, a downside to paid advertising is that it is one and done. This means that when you stop putting in advertising dollars, you stop getting leads.
Know when you "break-even at the cart"
When you start running ads to get house cleaning leads, one of the most important metrics you need to know is what is your number to break-even at the cart. What this means knowing what an initial customer sale is worth to you and can you break-even with your ad spend when someone hires your cleaning service.
For example, if you offer a bi-weekly cleaning service and charge $200 for that, can you spend $200 on advertising and get one customer out of it. If you did, you would end up breaking-even at the cart, or before calculating any ongoing repeat business you already made your money back from running ads.
This is actually one of the most important goals you should strive for while running paid ads for your cleaning business. The specific cost per click or cost per lead isn't as important as breaking even or being profitable in your advertising.
Why breaking-even at the cart is so important is that it means you are basically advertising for free. Obviously, this is difficult and, in many cases, this isn't possible, and the first repeat transaction will make your ads profitable, but it should be a goal you strive for.
Know the lifetime customer value of your house cleaning leads
Finally, you want to know what your lifetime value of a customer is. This can be difficult to calculate, but the better idea you have of this the more effective you can be at running paid advertising to generate house cleaning leads.
For example, you may be concerned that your lead costs are rather high, or that enough people aren't converting. This problem is certainly something to focus on improving, but what really constitutes a "high cost per lead"?
When you know your lifetime value of a cleaning client you can get a more realistic idea of how your ads are doing. Let's say, for example, you got a new bi-weekly cleaning client started and they paid you $200 for the first month and the average customer stayed with you for 1 year.
In that case, the lifetime value of that customer would be $200 x 12 months or $2400. This means that you could actually spend on average, up to $2400 to obtain one customer and break-even or be profitable in the long run.
Certainly, the numbers don't work out perfectly every time, and each customer doesn't hit your lifetime value. However, when you take into account the true lifetime value of a customer, you probably could spend more on advertising than you think and still be profitable long-term.
Overall, when you know your metrics and implement the strategies above, you'll set up your cleaning business to generate more house cleaning leads online.
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