The Importance of Marketing Automation for Field Service Success

Research carried out by CSG highlights that good communication is a basic expectation across customers surveyed, and noted that "consistent and proactive communication is a differentiator, whether it’s in person or through technology." 

So, how can Marketing Automation help your Field Service business?

Marketing Automation is just that - sending marketing information to your customers in an automated way. For field service businesses, marketing automation offers a sustainable, comparatively low-cost option for on-going education for customers on products, services, and the unique value your brand offers over your competitors. It's often used in conjunction with phone calls, meetings and site visits, but plays the vital role of spot-on 'followup', helping reduce the administrative overhead at head quarters.

For field service businesses, marketing automation offers a sustainable, comparatively low-cost option for on-going education for customers on products, services, and the unique value your brand offers over your competitors.

Marketing Automation for Field Service generally plays two roles:

• To support the initial sales process by building trust in your brand through automated information sent to customers on your company and services.
• To deliver relevant and timely information on your products and services to your customers to drive up-sell, cross-sell and re-contracting opportunities for your business into the future.

In this article, we'll focus on the two most effective means of marketing automation: Email and SMS.

Email Marketing Automation

Email Marketing Automation is best utilised in tandem with your Field Service solution. Your Field Service system's purpose is to provide a segment-able database you can market to, each segment being a specific profile of customer. You may have customers interested in certain products and services, but not interested in others. Creating different campaigns designed for each means staying relevant. Triggering campaigns based on upcoming service renewals, replacements and updates to your services is also going to come in very handy.

Email is still the most commonly used means of communication, and so using it to drive your services, differentiators and renewals can support the rest of your in-person relationship building, which is still very important.

Let's dive into some examples of how marketing automation tends to be used.

Example Customer On-boarding Campaign

Let's look at an example marketing automation workflow around how we automate customer on-boarding emails.

The first trigger is 'when' to send a welcome email. In the example below, this is based on a contact being added to an 'on-boarding list.' This could be based on the 'Account' record in your system being marked as a 'Customer', which tells our marketing system that there are new contacts to send welcome emails to.

Fast forward, and we can trigger SMSes and time-based emails that get sent when we want them to.

Example Contract Renewal Campaign

Let's look at an example marketing automation workflow around how we automate contract renewal:

The above is a simple journey, which looks at the status of a customers account in your field service system, and triggers this campaign based on the customers renewal approaching. You may want to use a series more emails, but the important thing to remember is this, marketing automation is meant to support the sales process, so using account managers in combination with automated emails will get the best results.

Overall, the benefits of marketing automation are clear:

• Drive quality content that's relevant to your customers and solving their problems
• Drive improved cross-sell and up-sell opportunities by nurturing your customers through stories, case studies and useful information
• Improve retention rates by pro-actively reaching out to your customers when they need to renew their contracts, both via email and triggers tasks for your staff to call, well in-advance of renewal dates.

Let's discuss SMS Automation

First and foremost, SMS is the most commonly used channel of communication on the planet. Here are a few reasons you'd want to consider incorporating SMS into your field service communication strategy.

1. Instant Deliverability

SMS is lightning fast, literally putting your message into your customers pockets seconds after you send them. The average time for all mobile service providers and SMS services is often less than 7 seconds from sent to received. Nothing compares to the speed of SMS.

2. High Open Rate

This means your message is GOING to be read. This is important if you are alerting your customer to an issue, a service booking reminder, or just providing an update as to what stage their job is at. Field Service tech running late? Just trigger an SMS.

3. Personal and Convenient

SMS is personal because it's the way we speak to our friends and family. It's also the most convenient way of being kept informed in short, concise messages. 

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