How to Engage Existing Customers in the Lawn Care Industry

The lawn care industry is a tricky niche to maneuver. The business model flourishes around classic marketing tactics, such as word of mouth. In a modern world, developing lasting relationships with customers requires a broader reach than reviews alone.

At Arborgold, we specialize in lawn care, plant health, and tree distribution businesses and our customers are important to us. To help increase brand awareness, customer engagement is key. Here, we’ve compiled a list of tips to encourage your existing customers to engage more frequently and return for services again and again.

Build a User-Friendly Website

The first step to any successful business in 2020 is creating a user-friendly website. This means a mobile-friendly website, which can be used from any number of devices, including:

• Desktop computer
• Laptop
• Notebook
• Tablet
• Smartphone

Avoiding flash, using a responsive web design that recognizes the device being used, compressing images, and including meta tags and descriptions helps tremendously. The more easily your customers can navigate your website, the more likely they are to use the tools you offer to get in touch.

With the speed of modern technology increasing at a consistent rate, consumers are looking for fast and informative web pages. If your site doesn’t deliver, they’re likely to move onto the next local listing within a minute or less. Test your site regularly to ensure it’s working on all devices and providing concise information on your products and services.

Get on Social Media

Social media is the new word of mouth marketing. Between comments, likes, and shares, consumers see more businesses pop up in their news feeds than they ever witnessed in evening television commercials. A benefit of using social media to connect with your customers is that it humanizes your brand. It puts you in the same place your customers are and allows them to give you their two cents worth without calling the head office or going through administration.

Many landscaping companies supply not only to residential consumers but commercial consumers as well. While creating a social media presence, be sure to build your profile and posts to resemble the company values you want business customers to notice.

Remind Existing Customers You’re There with a Newsletter or Promotional E-mail

A great engagement strategy is to get existing customers excited to prepare their lawns for Spring. A newsletter or promotional email is a great way to remind consumers that your products and services are capable of rejuvenating tired yellow winter lawns and plants into fresh greenery and garden fronts. Spring is the best excuse to encourage homeowners and businesses to take an interest in their gardens, lawns, and exteriors. This is the best time to get planting and schedule regular maintenance before the summer season.

Promotional e-mails are especially great because they often offer the customer a reason to come back. An extra 10% off for returning customers or an exclusive sale to past customers who leave a review on your website allows your shoppers to feel special and incentivizes them to engage. The more reviews your website gets, the more search engines like Google notice your relevancy within your industry. This has the potential to increase your ranking in search engine results, which could, in turn, increase customer notice and engagement.

Host an Event

While technology has created an impactful method of engaging customers, it isn’t the only way to bring back existing customers. Hosting a local event, such as a fundraiser, spring fair or garden party allows you to show off stock, prove your value in the community, and remind customers why you are the best in the business.

Sometimes seeing a company in person helps other businesses and residential consumers view you as a real entity, rather than just some online persona. It makes a difference to note that you are a member of the community and helping others within that community to grow and thrive.

As a bonus, a local event may also attract some new customers, allowing you to engage with people and businesses that may never have reached out otherwise. Be sure to have business cards, gift bags, or some other advertising element on hand so visitors to the event remember you later when they’re looking for lawn care or landscaping services.

Invest in Customer Service Software

Finally, you’re not in this alone. Customer service software can drastically increase your chances of customer engagement and takes care of much of the time-consuming responsibilities of the above suggestions.

At Arborgold, our business management software takes on the heavy lifting involved in customer engagement, leaving you with more time to run your company. Some of the ways we help our clients manage customer service include:

• Proposal generation, complete with CAD drawings, photos, and notes.
• Automated technology in the form of e-mails, text messages, and more.
• Follow-up messages on voicemail, e-mail, and text through automation.

Automation is one of the most beneficial customer engagement tools on the market. It allows you to send messages to your customers without constantly logging on or typing individual e-mails. Rather, the management software allows you to preschedule mail with a programmable contact list, templates, and other valuable tools.

Investing in customer service software saves landscaping and lawn care companies money and time, which could be better spent on other projects. Our unique software adds to this advantage by providing scheduling, record keeping, resource management, crew tracking, optimized reporting, and account integration.

Contact Arborgold Today

If you’re in the lawn care industry and are looking for ways to more actively engage your existing customers, we can help. At Arborgold, we’re proud to be an active member of the Indiana landscaping industry. Working closely with local businesses, we strive to improve the local economy and help companies grow and increase success with our bespoke line of software and online tools.

Interested in learning more about Arborgold, our services, and software and how they can impact your business for the better? Take our tour today and see for yourself the Arborgold advantage!