How to keep in touch with customers between jobs

You did a good job for someone two years ago. They were delighted. They said they'd definitely be in touch about the other room, and they meant it. Then nothing, and now if you passed them in the street they'd probably struggle to remember your name.

This is the quietest loss in a small business. Not the jobs you didn't win, but the customers you did win and then let go cold — people who already trust you, already know how you work, and would hire you again if you happened to be in their head at the right moment.

Why they forget you when they liked you

It isn't ingratitude. It's that you were the answer to a problem, and once the problem went away, so did the reason to think about you.

Most people hire a tradesperson every few years. In between, the name sits in an email somewhere, unfindable. When the next thing goes wrong they do what everybody does: they search, or they ask a friend, and they end up with three new names because none of the old ones came to mind.

You lose that job to nobody in particular. You lose it to the ordinary way memory works.

Being remembered doesn't mean marketing

Say "keeping in touch" to most small business owners and they picture a newsletter, which they dread and won't do, so nothing happens at all.

That's the wrong picture. Nobody wants a monthly update from their plumber. What they want — and it barely counts as marketing — is to be able to find you when they need you, and to have been reminded you exist once or twice in between.

Two or three light contacts a year is plenty. More than that gets ignored, and being ignored is worse than being absent, because it trains people to skim past your name.

The four contacts worth making

The one straight after the job. Two days later, a short message asking whether everything's fine. Almost nobody does this, and it lands strongly because it's plainly not selling anything. It also catches small problems before they become reviews.

The anniversary of something that needs doing again. If your work has a natural cycle — a service, a check, a seasonal clean — a message at the right time is genuinely useful and reads as competence. "Your boiler service is due next month, want me to book you in?" is the single most effective message in this whole article.

The seasonal heads-up, sent to people it applies to. Before the first frost, before the growing season, before the wet months. Keep it factual and short, and only send it where it's relevant, because the moment it goes to everybody it becomes a mailshot and gets treated as one.

The occasional out-of-the-blue. You were in their area, or you finished something that reminded you of their job. Rare, personal, and worth more than the other three combined.

Keep the list, badly is fine

None of this works without a list, and a list is where most people stop because they imagine setting up proper software.

You don't need it. A note with a name, a number, what you did, when, and anything that needs doing again is enough for a business with a few hundred customers. A spreadsheet is a luxury version. The important thing is that it exists at all and that adding to it takes ten seconds at the end of a job.

If you already invoice through something, the list is probably already there and you just haven't thought of it as one.

What to send, and what makes it bearable

Write to one person. Use their name, mention the actual job, keep it under four lines.

Hi Mark — it's a year since we did the boiler, so it's about due for its service. Happy to come out in the next few weeks if you want, no rush. Hope it's been behaving itself.

Nothing about that is marketing and everything about it is useful. It's also easy to write, which matters more than it should — the reason most owners don't keep in touch is that the message feels hard to compose, so it never gets composed.

Never send anything that opens with "we hope this message finds you well". People can tell instantly when a message was written to a list rather than to them.

Make yourself findable for the moment they do remember

Here's the other half, and it's the half most people skip. Some of your old customers will think of you at the right moment. Then they'll try to find you, fail, and hire someone else.

They've lost your number. The email's buried under two years of other email. They half-remember the name of your business and get it slightly wrong when they search. That's an ordinary Tuesday and it costs you real work.

So make the finding easy. Get your Google listing right so searching your name roughly works. Put a magnet or a card somewhere they'll keep it, if that suits your trade. And make sure that when somebody does find you, the page answers the obvious questions rather than making them ring to find out whether you still do that sort of thing.

That last part is what we built hailera for — you write the answers once, check them yourself, and publish them as an agent so your website and the AI apps people now ask can say what you do, where you go and how soon you're free, without anybody having to catch you on the phone. A plain, current page on your own site does much of it for nothing, so if yours is three years out of date, start there.

Small, regular, unimpressive

The businesses that get repeat work aren't running campaigns. They're sending three or four short messages a year to people they already know, and keeping a list that takes ten seconds a job to maintain.

It's unglamorous and it compounds. After a couple of years you have a few hundred people who've heard from you recently enough to remember your name, and that turns out to be the most reliable source of work there is.

Today: find five customers from the last two years whose work has a natural repeat — a service, a seasonal job, a second room they mentioned. Send one of them a four-line message.

Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.