Stop thinking about campaign creation and start thinking about expertise documentation. While your competitors wait forever to craft the perfect email, you win by forwarding the answers from a conversation you just had.
The Midwest Alarm Company Story
I worked with a three-person alarm company with 400+ residential customers. They hadn’t sent an email in 18 months, and an audit revealed that 67% of them had systems more than seven years old.
We started simple, with one email per month. Month one was a security tip about package theft, no sales pitch. Month two outlined new tech that their systems were missing. Month three included a free system health check.
Those 90 days of emails produced results: Eight upgrade calls, a few three-camera system adds, and two panel replacements. In all, the company made $11,400 in upgrade revenue from three emailings that took 20 minutes each.
The owner told me, “I thought customers would unsubscribe; instead, they thanked me for keeping them updated.”
Do the math: 20 minutes monthly on emails can equal roughly $50,000 annually from the list you already own.
Your 24-Hour Action Plan
Your customer list isn’t a burden; it’s a goldmine. Tomorrow morning, answer one question via email. No platform, no design, no complexity. Here’s how:
Tonight (five minutes): Open your phone notes, and write down the number-one question that was asked by two or three customers this week.
Tomorrow morning (25 minutes): Export email addresses from your CRM, Outlook contacts, LinkedIn connections, accounting software, or monitoring platform. Pick the easiest.
Send the following plain-text email from your actual address:
Subject: Quick question - [Customer’s question]?
Hi [First Name],
Three customers asked me this week: [Question]. Here’s what I told them: [Your two-to-three-sentence answer]. If you’re wondering the same thing, reply or call me at [phone].
[Your Name]
It’s the same concept as social media last month, email this month, and more to come: Stop creating…and start documenting.
