You Don't Have a Customer List. You Have Five of Them.
David Selva · · 3 min read
Email & SMS Marketing, Pest Control, Segmentation
A quarterly contract customer and a guy who paid once for a wasp nest should never get the same email, and right now they do.
You don't have a customer list. You have about five, and every one of them is getting the same email.
Here is what that looks like in a pest control business. Sitting in one export: a homeowner on a quarterly contract three years running, a guy who paid once for a wasp nest in 2023, a commercial account that needs monthly documentation for its health inspector, a customer who quietly lapsed last spring, and a lead who called in March and never booked.
Send all five "spring is here, time to think about pests" and you have written a message for nobody.
Everybody on that list is standing somewhere different
The quarterly customer doesn't need convincing that pests exist. She needs to know her next service is already scheduled and handled.
The wasp guy needs a reason to think of you before he searches again, because as far as he knows you are a company that removes wasps — not one that could have been handling the thing currently in his crawlspace.
The commercial account needs paperwork, not marketing. And the lapsed customer needs to be asked why she left, which almost nobody does.
Four people, four different messages. One broadcast can't be all of them, so it ends up being none of them.
What a tag is actually for
A tag isn't tidiness for its own sake. It is a promise that the next message this person gets will make sense for where they actually are.
Before I build any campaign with an owner, I ask for one thing: pull me a list of everyone whose contract renews in the next 60 days. If that takes longer than a few seconds, better copy won't fix the follow-up — you can't send the right message to a group you can't name.
Three splits worth making first
- Recurring contract versus one-time job. This is the big one. Nearly everything else is detail.
- Service type — termite, rodent, mosquito, bed bug. What you'd sensibly say next is completely different for each.
- Active versus lapsed, with a date attached. "Hasn't been serviced in fourteen months" is a campaign. "Inactive" is a shrug.
Three tags. Not thirty.
Where the renewal money leaks out
Recurring revenue businesses lose customers quietly. Almost nobody calls to cancel a quarterly plan. They stop answering the scheduling text, or the card on file expires in November and nothing catches it until March.
So that is the segment I'd build first, before any marketing campaign at all: contracts renewing soon, and cards expiring soon. Both are short lists. Both are worth real money. Neither needs clever writing — it needs a message that arrives before the lapse instead of a phone call after it.
The mistake that comes right after this clicks
Owners who get segmentation immediately want twelve segments with a different sequence for each. Then nothing ships, because there are now twelve things to write instead of one, and the season starts.
Start with three. Run them for a quarter. The fourth segment earns its place only when you catch yourself wanting to message a group you can't currently pull.
Split the list in three
Open your system this afternoon and try to produce three lists: recurring customers, one-time customers, and anyone lapsed more than a year.
If they come out in a couple of minutes, you're most of the way there and the campaigns are the easy part. If they don't, that is the actual work — and it's worth doing before you write another word of marketing.