As I’m setting up emails to send to customers, I often wonder what emails my competitors are sending.

By competitors I mean other plumbers in general, not necessarily the ones in my geographic market.

I know I could sign up for a dozen email newsletters and I’d start seeing what the competition is doing.

I’ve done this in the past with big-name marketers to learn how they write a compelling email, and I learned a lot.

The downside is that your inbox fills up with marketing emails.

This tends to throw off my daily inbox routine, and it means I usually end up archiving or deleting those emails, so the whole thing ends up being a waste of time.

I knew that I wanted to collect marketing emails from other plumbers, I didn’t want to see them in my inbox, but I wanted to be able to review them at the right time.

Oh, and I wanted to be able to organize and share my email collection with others. So I couldn’t just create a tag/archive filter in Gmail, because I needed to move them out of Gmail.

Here’s what I ended up doing.

I signed up for newsletters

First, I started searching for plumbing companies with newsletter sign-up forms. Once I started looking, I found a bunch of sites that use an agency called Footbridge Media, and their newsletter signup forms ask for a lot of information.

Since I didn’t want to give out an address, I skipped all of these websites (there were many) and went for those who let me sign up with just an email address, or a name and email.

So now I had emails coming in… now to get them out of my inbox.

I set up a basic Gmail filter

First I needed a simple way to tell these emails apart from my other emails. I opted to use the old plus sign trick: every time I signed up for a newsletter, I added a special identifier to my email address.

There are other ways to set up a filter, but this is my favorite.

I moved them out of the inbox

Now that I identified the emails, I just needed to get them out of my mailbox.

I eventually found this blog post that pointed me to a Google Sheets Add-on called Save Emails & Attachments.

Save Emails & Attachments
by Digital Inspiration

The plugin has a walkthrough to help you get set up. The add-on lets you select which filter you’d like to use to collect your emails: I used the filter that I set up in the previous step.

The end result: an automated email swipe file

As I come across additional plumber newsletter forms, I’ll drop my special email address into them. When I’m ready to do something with the emails, I’ll have a folder filled with PDFs that I can review and sort. Tada! Email idea machine.

In the future I’ll organize the emails by topic, type and quality. I’d like to start assembling statistics around the individual campaigns and see how often the average plumbing company sends email newsletters.

I’m also curious to see what type of emails are sent the most. Of course, just because they’re popular doesn’t mean their effective, but it will be interesting nonetheless.

If you’ve solved this problem before, I want to hear how you did it and what you learned.

This year we decided it was time to bring SEO in-house. Last year we hired an internet marketing company to optimize our website, and we were unhappy with their performance. After several meetings and a frustrating lack of improvement, we decided it was time to fire our SEO company.

What went wrong

On Friday we called to break the news.

By Monday the SEO company used their access to our Google My Business account to delete all photos associated with the account – even the logo. Several were stock photos uploaded by the company, but some were photos I had personally uploaded.

They pulled down a testimonial video they made for us. Fortunately, it was a stock video that won’t be missed.

Worst of all, they took down disabled the Yoast SEO plugin, which took down our sitemap. When Google crawlers visited the website and looked for the sitemap, all they got was a 404 “page not found” error. From all I can tell, this could have had major effects on our organic search rankings after a full month.

When I called to get an explanation, they said this was a normal part of the “exit process”. The changes were required to protect their “proprietary information” (like the Yoast SEO plugin, apparently). The manager I spoke with wouldn’t say what changes were made, but reiterated that this is standard operating procedure.

What you can do

In the grand scheme of things, these were little problems, and we were fortunate enough to catch them early. You may not be so lucky.

If you’re thinking it’s time to fire your SEO company, here are a few things to keep in mind.

• Read your entire contract. Ours required us to provide notice of termination 2 months before the renewal date. This could have become a problem if they attempted to enforce these terms.
• Send a Termination of Contract letter. You can find sample formats online. Send it through Certified Mail. This provides you with evidence that you’ve canceled the contract, so that it’s harder for them to play dumb later.
• Ask for specifics (even if they refuse to provide them). Don’t assume that they’ll alert you to changes they’ve made.
• Change your passwords. This will prevent them from accessing your accounts and causing damage.
• Have your new SEO plan ready. Even if you keep them out of your accounts, their internal processes may negatively affect your rankings. Don’t count on termination periods to keep them honest: be ready to hand off to your new SEO company or take over yourself.
• Prepare to lose ranking. Try to make the switch when you can ride out the changes in your organic rankings. It may take several months for them to recover. You may need to invest in some other lead sources or just ride out the storm.

Thankfully, not every experience with an SEO company will end up like mine. There are some great companies who take good care of their customers. However, stories like this are not uncommon. Whether you’re switching SEO companies or you’ve decided to do your own search engine optimization, be alert for shenanigans that could affect your website rankings.

If you’re in a home service business you know that getting reviews is one of the hardest customer interactions, ranking up there with getting a budget number.

With our most recent test, we asked 32 customers and got 11 reviews in 1 month. That’s a 34% review rate!

Here’s how we did it.

We do all of our scheduling through Housecall Pro. Housecall Pro has a lot of cool and useful features, including their automatic email reminders which we used to get a 20% review rate from customers.

That’s fantastic, and I had other Housecall Pro users contact me and ask for the copy I used in that email (you can get it here).

But we knew we could do better. And we did. Last month we tried something that beat the review email… and I can’t take any credit for it.

Housecall recently added the ability to edit and customize the text message notifications that get sent to our customers, both before and after a job.

When I mentioned this new feature to Eric, the operations manager, he got that look in his eye. He had an idea.

Eric edited the text message that gets sent when a job is completed. Now, when our tech leaves a job, the customer gets this message:

This text update alone boosted us from 74 reviews to 85 in a month!

Here’s why this method is so effective:

• It’s personal. It looks like it comes from their service tech, asking for a personal favor.
• It’s automatic. We don’t need to remember to ask every time – this message went out to 32 customers without a second thought from anyone on our team.
• It’s easy. The short link in the message sends customers straight to the Google review page. Just a few clicks and it’s done. Most of the reviews happen within an hour of job completion.

We shared this tip with Nate Brott, who also uses Housecall Pro, and he tried it out. I got a message from him a few days later:

Trying out the text message review link? Let me know how it works for you!

If you’re like most small business owners I know, asking for reviews isn’t fun. What are the best review emails you can send?

Here’s the best review email I’ve ever sent out. You can copy this word-for-word if you like – I won’t tell.

Subject: Small favor

Hello [customer name],

Would you do me a small favor? It will take less than a minute, but it would mean a lot.

Would you write a review of your experience with us? (Here’s the quick link: [put your link here] )

Google Reviews help people like you make decisions every day. They help to explain our service in a way that we can’t do ourselves.

(If you’ve already left a review, thank you so much!)

Here’s how to write a review:

1. Click the link below.
2. Sign into your Google account if asked (you might already be signed in!)
3. Write your review, give us a star rating, and press “post”.

That’s it! It’s quick and easy, and it really does help others to make an informed decision.

Here’s the link to write a review: [put your link here]

Thank you!

This email is automatically sent out to our customers through our scheduling software. I send it one week after we’ve completed the job. I’ll probably run a test to find out if this copy would perform better on a shorter timetable, but right now it’s been bringing plenty of reviews at that 7-day mark.

Keep in mind, the best review emails frame your request as something that benefits your customer. In this case, you’re telling them that they’ll be helping other people like themselves. They get a good feeling from helping their fellow man, and you get a good review.