Last Updated on August 21, 2023 by The ZenMaid Team
Over the years, cleaning businesses have adopted new marketing processes to help attract new customers and nurture those relationships. But one area of the industry that has stayed pretty much the same is the process of providing a quote and booking a cleaning appointment.
In the cleaning industry, itโs standard practice to put a form on your website that people fill out in order to receive a quote or estimate. These days, the challenge lies in how to get your customers to that form as quickly as possible.
In this industry, whoever can reach the customer first, and provide a solution, will win the customer. This means streamlining the customer journey with fewer steps. More consumers are demanding real-time options for the services they want and are becoming increasingly frustrated having to wait for a response.
By incorporating more conversational marketing strategies into your maid service, you can create a dialogue between your service and your buyer. These conversations can result in more website visitors requesting quotes, and scheduling cleanings in real-time.
One of the most efficient ways to incorporate conversational marketing into your business is to use chatbots and automated messaging to converse with customers on your website and on social media, in real-time.
In this post, weโll dive deeper into how you can use conversational marketing and chatbots to communicate with your customers in real-time.
What is conversational marketing?
Conversational marketing is a new way to approach communicating with your customers online. Rather than creating transactional forms that customers have to fill out and wait for a response, youโre creating a two-way channel of communication. Conversational marketing helps customers move through your sales process more efficiently, and eliminates the need for people on your staff responding to individual form responses and quote requests.
For cleaning businesses, this translates to using real-time conversation to get information from your customers and provide them with quotes and opportunities to book a cleaning almost instantly.
How chatbots can improve your sales process
In most maid services, the sales process looks something like this:
- A potential customer finds your website and fills out a form.
- Then they get an email confirmation letting them know that you received their email and will provide them with an estimate or return their call soon.
- Their email address and information goes into a CRM, and someone manually qualifies them as a lead.
- Then this person calls or emails the lead with a quote and prompts them to book a cleaning appointment.
While this process still works very well for cleaning businesses, there is an easier way to convert customers with less manual work.
The main problem with this system is that it requires having a person in charge of manually following up and responding to anyone who fills out the form. By adding a chatbot to your website and social media platforms, you create the opportunity for 24/7 customer service and reduce the number of tedious tasks your staff has to do.
This real-time messaging also helps to make sure that fewer leads fall through the cracks and everyone who visits your website has the same opportunity to receive an estimate. It also reduces the time it takes between a lead finding your website and when they can book an appointment.
Hereโs an example of what a chatbot might look like on your website:
You can also create chatbots and automated responses for your social media profiles such as Instagram and Facebook Messenger.
This is what your sales process can look like when implementing conversational marketing strategies using a chatbot on Facebook.
A visitor lands on your Facebook page. Your chatbot asks them if they want an instant quote.
They click a button, and it qualifies them by asking them questions about their home. If they are a qualified lead, the bit will send them an estimate and can even ask them to book an appointment right then. If they still have more questions or have a special request, then someone on your team can manually reach out.
This type of real-time messaging eliminates the time gap between lead capture and qualifications.
When setting up a chatbot you create questions that customers have to answer and set canned responses and prompts to common queries. By creating these conditionals, you can turn that 5 step qualification process into three steps.
The 3-step sales process
Step 1 – Capture
Capture the visitor on your website as a lead by promoting a bot to message them from your site. You can add a warm welcome message, ask what they need help with, or ask a simple yes or no question to get them started. Somewhere in this conversation, you should ask the visitor if they want to receive an estimate for a house cleaning.
Step 2 – Qualify
If a customer asks for a quote, now itโs time to determine whether or not they are a qualified lead. You can instantly qualify them by asking them for their address. In the backend of the chatbot, you can include which areas you service.
This way, as soon as a customer sends their address through the chat, you can let them know if you service their area or not. You can also configure your bot to link to Zillow which can pull square footage information from that address. Then youโll be able to use the square footage information to calculate an estimate.
Step 3 – Connect and Convert
When the lead is hot and engaged, use this opportunity to send them an estimate and move them to the next part of your sales process. You can ask them for their email address in the chat and send them the quote via email, or provide them with an estimate in the chat.
Use a price matrix system based on the information you pull about their home from Zillow and provide an estimate right from this bot. You can create your own system for providing quotes such as using a high-low price range or provide hourly pricing estimates. Before providing instant estimates, make sure that you have a solid understanding of your pricing model to make sure that you donโt underprice your estimate.
If youโre confident with your quoting system, you can prompt them to book a cleaning right from the quote. If you still need to collect additional information to give them a more accurate estimate, let them know that someone will reach out to them shortly, and make it a priority to have someone on your team give them a call.
For instant bookings, sync the bot on your website or social media to your CRM using Zapier and link it to ZenMaid to allow them to book a cleaning right from that conversation.
Final Thoughts
Maid services are being challenged to turn website visitors into booked clients in fewer steps. Static lead forms (like the ones we offer here at ZenMaid) are a great tool for capturing leads from your website. However, thereโs a growing need for a more conversational and real-time approach to automating the quote and booking process.
More and more people are looking for instant solutions and answers to their questions. The more steps it takes from the time someone visits your website until they can book a cleaning, the more likely you are to lose them to one of your competitors.
Using automated messaging to help you collect customer information, and sending quotes in real-time, builds a conversation with your customers. These strategies can work with the forms and systems youโve already built and eliminate the need for manual quotes and lead qualification.
Incorporating more conversational marketing strategies can help you and straff reclaim their time spent on tedious tasks and allow your team to focus on building relationships and closing more deals.
For more details on how to implement a chatbot into your cleaning business this year visit zenmaidbot.com. Youโll learn which tools are best and get a unique 5-step process for implementing a chatbot on your maid service website.ย
About the presenter
Mike Callahan is a Certified Infusionsoft Partner and Certified Customer Acquisition Specialist who has helped over 300 businesses automate their sales and customer acquisition process.ย
He created a turnkey solution that revolutionized his business, Simple Growth Systems, and is now teaching the lessons he learned while growing his company. In this post, youโll learn his key philosophies around how to use conversational marketing tactics to automate your sales and booking process.ย
This talk first aired at the 2020 Maid Service Success Summit.
The Maid Summit is an annual online event that brings together the most successful leaders in the cleaning industry, like Debbie Sardone, Angela Brown, Courtney Wisely, Amy Caris, Chris Schwab and more. Get free access to masterclasses and workshops that will help you to grow, scale and automate your cleaning business so you can get more leads and create more profit. Make sure youโre on our email list to find out how to get free tickets to the next event.
