We know that the summer months get pretty busy, especially for businesses in the service industry. People need their A/Cs fixed to beat the heat, their homes cleaned for family parties, their cars washed, pests controlled and their yards fixed up after the winter, etc. Local businesses spend so much time trying to keep up with the demand during the summer months, that customer engagement often gets pushed to the back burner. Luckily, there are some simple ways to continue engaging through the busy season, in order to keep your loyal customers coming back.

Keep your business busy all year long by regularly engaging with your customers to build a strong connection with them:

Embrace the Automation

Automating your engagement process is an effective way to keep engaging even when you’re too busy to even think about it. FreshLime’s platform creates loyal customers for businesses by sending data-driven, personalized, automated engagements in order to keep your business fresh in the minds of your customers. People don’t want to have to search Google every time they need a carpet cleaner, mechanic or pest control service. Life is easier for your customers when your business is sending them targeted engagements that actually matter to them. FreshLime’s text and email engagements are timed with the perfect frequency and the messages are tailored to your customers to ensure they like what they see. Embracing automation when it comes to customer engagement makes local businesses shine. 

Schedule Email Messages

If you use a service like MailChimp to send out email engagements to your loyal customers, utilize the scheduling feature in order to save time. You can login to most platforms and create your email, add the recipients and then schedule it for the date and time you’d like it to go out all in one sitting. 

If you prefer to send out text engagements, there are ways to schedule text messages to your customers through different platforms, or even directly from your smartphone texting app. Whichever way you prefer to engage with your customers, be sure to automate, or at least schedule, the process in order to save time.

Go Social

Social engagement is effective engagement, after all. Social media platforms, especially Facebook, have made engagement through social so simple by offering scheduling features and automated response features in messaging. Most of your customers are on social media and you should be too. Regularly updating your social pages with valuable content is a strong form of engagement. Write thought-provoking content related to your industry that entices your customers to engage through likes, shares and/or comments. If you notice a customer sent you a message or wrote a comment on your social pages, quickly respond and make it known that you care about their question and you want to help. The best part about social engagement is that it’s free. Alone, it isn’t the most effective way to engage, but paired with email and text engagements, social media goes a very long way. 

When you’re busy working, the last thing you want to do is get home and draft up emails and text messages to send out to your customers in order to bring them back to you. Let FreshLime do the heavy-lifting for you by automating your engagement processes to make life as a business owner a little less stressful.

For more insights on marketing strategy that actually works for small business, connect with Jay Bean, Founder of FreshLime and Small Business Marketing Expert on LinkedIn and Twitter. If any of these tips have helped you or if you have anything to add, please comment below. We’d love to hear from you!