10 marketing automations every RealGreen company should be running

A company on RealGreen sits on more automatable data than almost anyone else in the trades: years of customer history, program status, invoices, visit records, and condition codes. Most of it just sits there. Here are the ten automations we'd wire up in order: each with the trigger, the action, and the math. (All program numbers are illustrative; plug in your own.)

One note before the list: every automation below assumes your RealGreen data is synced nightly into your marketing system rather than hitting the API live. Otherwise the monthly call limits will stall the whole stack mid-month. That's the architecture behind our RealGreen automations.

The catalog

1. Condition-code upsells

Trigger: a tech logs a condition code on a visit: patchy turf, grubs, weeds in beds. Action: the property is auto-measured and priced, and a branded quote texts the customer the same day, with follow-up until it books. Math: 6,000 visits × 7% flag rate × 25% close × $340 avg ticket ≈ $35,700 a season, zero ad spend. Full setup in our RealGreen condition-code guide.

2. Neighborhood 9-around

Trigger: a job is marked complete. Action: the nine nearest non-customer homes get a postcard or priced offer, "we were just at your neighbor's," via neighborhood marketing. Math: 800 completions a month = 7,200 warm impressions on your densest routes; even a 0.3% conversion is ~22 new customers a month at direct-mail cost, on streets you already drive. Playbook here.

3. AR collections

Trigger: invoice hits 30, 45, and 60 days past due. Action: a polite escalating sequence (email, then text, then letter) each with a one-tap pay link; the sequence stops the instant payment lands. Math: if $80,000 sits in 30+ day AR and automation accelerates a quarter of it, that's $20,000 of cash pulled forward, plus fewer write-offs and zero awkward office calls.

4. Pre-pay renewals

Trigger: active customer, November 1. Action: letter + email + text sequence with an early-bird discount and a one-click pay link. Math: moving pre-pay take rate from 25% to 35% on 1,500 customers at a $550 program is ~$82,000 of extra cash before Christmas. Full breakdown in our pre-pay guide.

5. Win-backs

Trigger: customer canceled 12–24 months ago, no outstanding balance. Action: a three-touch "we've missed you" sequence timed to season start, with a comeback offer. Math: 400 eligible cancels × 8% return × $600 program = ~$19,000, from people who already know your trucks.

6. Stale-estimate reactivation

Trigger: an estimate sent 30+ days ago, never accepted, service window still open. Action: re-send with a deadline or small sweetener; close the loop either way. Math: 200 open estimates × $450 avg × 10% revival = $9,000 recovered from work you already quoted. Pairs with the speed-to-quote habits in this article.

7. Review requests

Trigger: job completed (best: visible-result services), invoice not past due. Action: next-morning text with a direct Google review link, one polite reminder three days later. Math: 600 jobs a month × 12% response ≈ 72 reviews a month versus the 3–4 most companies collect by hoping. Why steady velocity matters more than totals: the review velocity playbook.

8. Referral asks

Trigger: customer leaves a 5-star review or praises you on a call. Action: an immediate referral offer: $50 credit for them, $50 off for the neighbor. Math: 70 five-stars a month × 5% referral rate × $600 program ≈ $2,100 a month of the highest-closing leads you'll ever get.

9. Big-job alerts

Trigger: an estimate or inbound request over a threshold: say $2,500, or any commercial property. Action: the owner or sales manager gets an instant text; a human calls within the hour instead of the lead sitting in a queue. Math: studies commonly cite that the first substantive responder wins the majority of service work; on ten $3,000+ opportunities a month, one extra win pays for a lot of software.

10. Budget anomaly flags

Trigger: daily ad metrics deviate from baseline: cost per lead doubles, an ad gets disapproved, LSA quietly pauses. Action: an AI callout in your reporting dashboard plus an alert, with budget pacing showing where the month stands. Math: catching a runaway $150/day mistake on day 2 instead of day 30 saves ~$4,200, once. It happens more than once.

The rules that keep ten automations polite

The reasonable fear about a list like this is burning out your customer base. The fix isn't running fewer automations. It's global guardrails that sit above all of them:

• Behavioral triggers only. Each automation fires for customers in a specific state: past due, flagged by a tech, recently canceled. No customer is in more than a couple of states at once, so any one household sees a handful of relevant messages a year, not a blast.
• Frequency caps. A hard ceiling, say two marketing texts per customer per month, that every automation respects, with collections and transactional messages exempt.
• Suppression hierarchy. A customer in the AR sequence is paused out of every upsell and referral sequence until they're current. Selling aeration to someone you're dunning is how you lose both conversations.
• One source of truth. All sequences read and write the same synced dataset, so a payment, a cancel, or an opt-out stops everything at once, instantly, everywhere.

Which three to turn on first

Don't launch ten at once. Sequence by payback speed:

1. AR collections: cash lands within weeks, and it funds everything else.
2. Review requests: near-zero cost, compounds forever, and improves every other channel's close rate.
3. Condition-code upsells: the biggest single number for most fert companies, once techs are logging codes.

Layer the rest in over a season. Each one is boring on its own; together they behave like a quiet, tireless inside-sales team that never forgets a follow-up.

The takeaway: your RealGreen database already knows who owes you, who left, who got quoted, and whose lawn has grubs. Automation is just the machinery that acts on what it knows, the same day, every time, without a human relay race.

Start this month

1. Get your RealGreen data syncing nightly (replicated, not live API calls).
2. Turn on AR collections and review requests: they need no tech training.
3. Pick 5 condition codes, map them to priced services, and brief the crew.
4. Put flags → quotes → booked revenue on one weekly report.
5. Add one new automation a month until the list above is running.