Bright ideas

Contractors showed up early and came ready to share ideas and pick up new strategies at PLANET’s Breakfast With Champions 2013. The event brought landscapers together to talk about some of the toughest issues in the industry, with each table moderated by industry professionals.

Contractors discussed smart business plans, as well as how to cut costs to run a leaner operation without sacrificing service, like ideas to streamline employee drive time to a job site and keeping sales within a particular territory to maximize coverage of an area.

They also talked about sustainability, dealing with difficult customers and employment issues like the H2B Temporary Guest Worker Program and its effects on the bottom line.

Chad Reinholz and Joe Shooner combined their topics into one larger discussion. The two topics were similar, ‘E-Mail marketing’ and ‘E-Newsletter programs’ and most of the conversation focused on whether companies used these types of marketing with their clients, and how they went about doing it. Members of the discussion traded ideas and asked questions about how to make their online campaigns better.

A popular idea Shooner presented was to come up with two email subject lines and send them out to 10 percent of your email list. After five hours, compare the number of opens and use that information to decide which title to send out to the other 90 percent of your list.