What is whoopsie spam marketing and should house cleaners use it to grow a cleaning business? Is it a good way to market your maid service?
This marketing ad agency may seem like a good solution for getting more ratings and reviews. But is it too good to be true?
Listen: Whoopsie Spam Marketing for House Cleaners
Watch: Whoopsie Spam Marketing for House Cleaners
Hey there, I’m Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer. You can find this and 400 other answered questions in this series on our YouTube channel.
What is Whoopsie Spam Marketing?
What is whoopsie spam marketing, and should you use it to grow your house cleaning business? What it is, is a marketing ad agency that is contacting lots of different house cleaning companies. This is going global right now, and you need to know about it so that you can protect yourself from falling victim to this bandwagon.
What it is, is they’re contacting house cleaning business owners, and they’re saying, “I can help you get more business.” And as a tactic, they are using targeted email lists where they’re emailing customers rating and review requests. So, this is for a service you have not performed.
So, for example, let’s say you get an email, you open it up, and it says, “Hey, Happy House Cleaning would like for you to give us a rating and review on the recent service we just did. We’re so happy to have you as a customer.” And you scratch your head and you’re like, “Huh? I did not hire Happy House Cleaning to come do my house. This is a mistake. I got this inadvertently.”
What is the Can-Spam Act
Now, the CAN-SPAM Act was initiated back in 2003, 17 years ago, by President George W. Bush which says that the Federal Trade Commission has certain provisions for sending unsolicited mail to people. One of those things is you have to have an inclusion of a way to opt-out, and this is part of the SPAM-CAN Act is that you must have an unsubscribe at the bottom of the email.
So, people click on the unsubscribe and instead of it actually unsubscribing you, it redirects you to the website where the house cleaning company would have all of its ratings, reviews and services for sale. So, it’s like this weird loop.
Then if you call the company and you say, “Hey, I got this email and you asked me for a rating and review and I haven’t had your service yet,” then what happens is the house cleaning company is like, “Whoopsie, we made a mistake, so what we would like to do is we would like to give you a discount of $15 off or $25 off your first cleaning when you use our service as our apology for whoopsie in sending you this marketing email.” That is completely illegal. These people did not, number one, hire your service. Number two, it was not an accident. It is a trick. The trick is, instead of you being able to unsubscribe, you’ve now been redirected to somewhere else where they’re going to sell you something. It is completely illegal.
Why Does Spam Marketing Not Work?
The next thing that you want to pay attention to is why does spam marketing not work? It does not work because the person you are targeting is not looking for house cleaning services.
Now, when a person sits down at their computer and they go online and they go to let’s say Google Business, and they do a search for house cleaning companies, and they are looking for a house cleaning company, they are a warm lead. By the time they get you on the phone, even if they’re price shopping, they are looking for your service.
When you randomly, and blindly email someone out of the blue and just say, “Hey, house cleaning service,” maybe, maybe, one or two of those are going to convert, but the general thesis is no, these are cold leads. These are not people looking for your cleaning service. So, while you may have contacted somebody who is capable of hiring you, chances are all you’ve done is made them mad.
I Get a Lot of Spam Too
Now, I remember over the last couple of weeks, there was lots of spam that hit both my email box, my text box, on my phone, and my physical mailing address from political ads. I don’t know if you are like me, but I must be in that particular demographic where I got bundles of junk mail, and I say junk mail because I never actually read it.
As soon as I identified it as a political thing, it went straight in the trash. I didn’t read either side of it. I was like “Political ad. Boom. In the trash.” The reason being is I voted early. I already pre-voted so all this other political stuff was just junk.
What’s interesting is this, I kept getting spammed over and over on my phone and I kept getting spam emails over and over. So when I would try to opt-out of those, they would send me to the next person on the list and I would get something from a new email or from a new phone number. It’s annoying when you’re not in the market for that particular thing.
Is it a Great Way to Market Your House Cleaning Business?
So, is it a great way to market your house cleaning business? I’m going to say, no. Not at all. Don’t waste your money. Don’t waste your time because it is illegal and, if you’re caught, there are penalties.
So, while you might be saying whoopsie to the customer, try telling that to the Federal Trade Commission, because there are penalties, and you don’t want to find yourself caught up in that trap. I just want you to be aware of it.
Resources
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Guerilla Marketing: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business – http://amzn.to/2BXo81w
The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand Out from the Crowd – http://amzn.to/2CiBl0U
The Complete Guide to Facebook Advertising – http://amzn.to/2ChWwjC
Social Media Marketing 2018: Step by Step Instructions for Advertising Your Business on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Various Other Platforms – http://amzn.to/2HcH8bT
The Pocket Small Business Owner’s Guide to Starting Your Business on a Shoestring – http://amzn.to/2Hfq1WT
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