Electrical contractors depend less on repeat customers than other service companies—such as HVAC and plumbing—because there is naturally less repeat work or maintenance needed. This makes getting new job leads extremely important to electrical businesses. You need a system to effectively market your service and persuade prospective customers to book a job with you, over and over again.
What’s the best way to build that consistent lead flow?
From our experience working with thousands of home and commercial service contractors, including many electricians, one of the most effective ways to build a consistent lead flow is by appearing in online searches when your customers need an electrician.
For example, when homeowners or commercial building managers with an electrical issue search Google for “electrician near me,” how does your company rank?
Or when they ask friends on Facebook to recommend an electrician, does your name get mentioned? Do neighbors on Nextdoor recommend you for electrical contractor job leads?
ServiceTitan’s management and marketing software has in-built features to help electrical companies show up in potential customers’ online searches. Our platform gives you the tools you need to enhance your website’s SEO (search engine optimization), so that your website and ads show up when customers are googling for a local electrician.
Our platform also helps you easily manage your Google reviews, automate your marketing campaigns, and lower your cost-per-lead with targeted email marketing.
According to this 2019 Local Consumer Review Survey, 90 percent of consumers used the internet to find a local business in the previous year, with 33 percent searching online every day.
At ServiceTitan, we have roughly 10 years of experience working with thousands of electrical and other home service companies. Based on this experience and feedback from our users, we have put together a list of the top electrical marketing strategies to bring your business quality electrician leads.
To consistently get more electrical leads, we suggest the following lead-generation strategies:
Appear on the first page of Google searches for electrical services.
Invest in targeted email marketing to get more electrical leads.
Automate customer experience processes with electrical software.
Connect with lead-generation companies and referral services.
» Want to grow your electrical business? Click here to get a demo.
Below, we’ll go through each strategy to streamline your electrical company’s operations, boost revenue, and grow electrician service leads. We’ll also show you how successful electrical businesses use ServiceTitan’s software to help them show up when customers are searching online for electrical service providers, along with how to manage Google reviews to make your company compelling to new customers, and more.
If you want to learn more about how ServiceTitan can help your electrical business generate exclusive leads, you can schedule a call with a product expert for a free demo.
1. Show Up Prominently in Google Searches for Electrical Contractors
One of the most effective ways of generating electrical leads is to show up on Google when potential customers search for electrical services. There are two main ways of doing this:
Using paid online advertising.
Optimizing all of your online content by using popular keywords throughout.
Use Paid Online Ads
Traditional electrical marketing ideas such as advertising through direct mail, newspapers, radio, TV, and billboards, tend to take a back seat in most current electrical marketing strategies. Nowadays, online pay-per-click (PPC) ads, or paid Google local service ads more effectively drive revenue.
“Focus on Google when it comes to online electrical advertising,” says ServiceTitan user Tommy Mello, owner of A1 Garage Door Services, a $30 million-plus home services business with over 200 employees in nine states.
Mello advises spending at least half of your marketing dollars on electrical SEO, PPC digital ads, Google My Business, Google Local Services, and getting more positive customer reviews.
Today’s consumers find 70 percent of all services online through Google searches. Mello says, “Just understand Google is God when it comes to home service.”
ServiceTitan integrates with Google Local Services Ads to allow homeowners or commercial managers to directly schedule online appointments with your company, and provides business owners with ROI metrics on every campaign.
Show Up in Organic Google Searches
Another strategy is aiming to appear in the organic (free) search results of Google. These are the listings that appear below the paid ads when your customers search for a specific set of keywords.
This approach is known as search engine optimization (SEO), and companies that get it right show up exactly when potential customers search for a professional.
To keep electrical leads flowing, you need to include top-ranked keywords in all of your online content, including your website, social media channels, online newsletters, and every piece of internet marketing content. This will increase your chances of appearing toward the top of Google’s search results when customers search for keywords related to your electrical business.
To attract residential or commercial customers in your local service area, you can also include your city or neighborhood as keywords. For instance, “Austin electrician” or “restore power in Austin.”
When a customer searches for “fix power outage” or “electrician near me,” Google’s algorithm finds the most topically and geographically relevant results. Since these “organic” (non-ad) results are primarily based on relevance, location, and authority, strong SEO gives smaller electrical businesses an opportunity to be featured as prominently as larger companies in Google’s organic search results.
In terms of paid advertising, Google reserves several of the top results for paid ads. You can get listed in these results by paying for Google Ads, as shown below.
Learning to use Google Ads can be time-consuming and complex, so to help electrical companies, ServiceTitan integrates with Google Local Services. When you link your Google Local Services ads with our ServiceTitan integration, potential customers can click on your ad and schedule an appointment directly.
For example, when a homeowner searches for “install electrical system Providence,” your Local Services ad appears at the top of Google’s search results. The Google Ad your potential customers click on takes them to an automatic scheduling page, so they can easily book an appointment online without having to make a phone call.
Note: If you run Local Services ads, make sure your company operates from a physical building (headquarters, satellite office, etc.) in the specific area where you’re advertising your services. Do not use a P.O. Box address, otherwise, Google may penalize your company and remove your name from their local electrical list.
» Learn more about SEO with this complete beginner’s guide.
2. Revamp and Optimize Your Electrical Website
Many of the potential customers who find you on Google, Nextdoor, Yelp, or other online platforms, will end up on your website, so it needs to look good and be easy to navigate. Beyond these design considerations, you also need to fully optimize your website content for organic Google searches.
Your site should be mobile-friendly with a responsive design, so that it ranks higher in Google searches. Customers searching online for a local electrical company probably need one right away and may be searching on a mobile device.
Make sure potential customers find you first. Quickly convert them into an electrical lead by:
Optimizing your website. Make it appealing with a clean, user-friendly design that’s focused on SEO keywords.
Allowing customers to easily contact you. Display your phone number and other contact information at the top of your website and make sure calls are answered 24/7.
Personalizing your message. Tell your company’s story or showcase your electricians’ work in behind-the-scenes videos.
Highlighting online reviews or customer testimonials. Get customers to spread the word about your excellent electrical service.
Writing a blog or starting an electrical podcast. Become an online resource for consumers and electricians.
Engaging customers with CTAs (Calls to Action). Use special offers, discounts, and other incentives to drive website traffic and increase electrical service leads.
Ron Lutwiller, chief operating officer at The Roby Family of Companies in Charlotte, N.C., revamped and optimized Roby’s website by switching to ServiceTitan’s software for electricians.
The move to an all-in-one software solution, he says, helped facilitate other changes needed to grow the family-owned business—such as switching to a flat-rate pricing system, placing more emphasis on selling service contracts, creating friendly competition plus more accountability for technicians, while providing data in real time.
With analytics right at his fingertips, Lutwiller uses the software to create customized reports for every aspect of the business, from job details and CSR performance to technician stats and equipment inventory.
“We probably vetted four or five different companies. We could see that ServiceTitan was regarded as one of the best, if not the best,” Lutwiller says.
3. Invest in Targeted Campaigns
Email marketing is another effective way to get and re-engage electrical leads. This involves sending regular emails to the customers in your database to promote your electrical work. The aim of these emails is to keep your business top of mind so that when the customer (or anyone they know) needs electrical services, you’re the first company they think about.
Targeted email marketing usually costs less per electrical lead than traditional electrical advertising channels and keeps your business in customers’ minds, according to Megan Bedford of Mugyver Consulting, which works exclusively with ServiceTitan customers.
Email marketing is thought to be one of the most successful marketing channels, earning $40 for every $1 spent. Email marketing works—as long as it’s targeted, designed for your business, and relevant to your customers.
ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro add-on gives electrical companies all the tools they need to create and run effective email marketing campaigns. Our process allows you to target existing customers based on their profiles, job histories, previous spend, age of equipment, and many other parameters.
You can select only the customers in your database who have not responded to an estimate, for example. Your follow-up message reminds them they have a pending estimate and gives them a phone number to call to book the electrical work. In our experience, this simple reminder—compared with no follow- up — often makes paying customers of previously cold leads. This targeting allows you to send specific email marketing messages to exactly those customers who will be more likely to book a job with you.
ServiceTitan also allows you to monitor the ROI for each email campaign in the ServiceTitan dashboard:
Our software can automatically deliver a sequence of emails—a drip campaign—to your chosen past customers to re-engage them and get you new online electrical leads through a timed, automated, and hyper-targeted marketing message.
To get started quickly, select an appropriate, pre-filled template from the ServiceTitan library, as shown in the GIF above, add your logo, and adjust the text to fit your needs. These professionally designed email templates represent your brand well without the time and expense of finding and hiring designers and coders to build marketing emails from scratch.
If you want to learn more, we shared new features released in Marketing Pro and discussed the best email marketing practices in our recent webinar. Among the takeaways:
Don’t blast your entire contact list with information. Send smaller batches of targeted, automated emails to specific customer groups, such as a “We Miss You!” campaign to residential or commercial customers you haven’t heard from in a while.
Provide engaging, educational content about electrical safety with links to your blog or YouTube channel videos. You can send a series of messages but send out follow-up emails only to people who haven’t opened the first message.
Clean up your lists regularly by removing inactive and unengaged email contacts. Marketing Pro includes an Automated Opt-In Feature to do this automatically.
Keep your subject lines free of spam triggers! Using the word “free” or several exclamation points in your subject lines typically leads to customers deleting emails without even reading them.
Watch the webinar on ServiceTitan Marketing Pro here.
How a ServiceTitan Email Campaign Increased One Small Electrical Company’s Revenue by $4,000 in One Week
Jupiter-Tequesta Air Conditioning, Plumbing & Electric—a small electrical, plumbing, and HVAC company—used ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro to send marketing emails to a targeted list of its previous customers who had not been in touch for a long period.
The one-off, “We Miss You!” email message quickly brought in a huge number of leads.
“We thought if we get 10 calls out of this, then awesome. We weren’t expecting anything crazy,” says Bill Highsmith, the Process & Procedure Manager at the company. “After one week, the revenue on that one email brought in about $4,000.”
» Click here for more email marketing tips.
4. Manage Online Reviews to Increase Electrical Leads
Before booking an appointment with any electrician, most people search online for electrical companies with amazing reviews, and make sure to avoid companies with negative reviews and low star ratings. This is why managing your online reviews is a great way to increase your electrical leads.
Positive customer feedback on crowd-sourced review platforms such as Google, Facebook, and other electrical social media and business review sites can tip the scales when prospective customers decide which electrical service company to hire.
Real customers who leave positive reviews help build trust in your electrical business. Prospective customers read an average of 10 reviews before trusting a business, and 89 percent of those people—between 35 and 54 years old—trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, according to the same survey.
To help keep high review ratings online, ServiceTitan’s customer experience software includes a built-in notification tool that can be used to manage reviews and nudge customers to give you online reviews. When one of your electricians closes out a job, ServiceTitan can be triggered to automatically send a survey request after the electrical work is completed. That makes it easy for customers to share their experience on an online review site (Google, Yelp, etc.) while it’s still fresh in their minds.
We also offer a reputation management tool that lets you automate review requests to customers (so you can get more reviews from more customers). Our tool lets you easily stay on top of your online reviews, reply to reviews, show appreciation to customers, and get insights into which technicians or jobs are attached to which reviews, so you can better see which of your employees is producing positive or negative customer experiences.
How ProSkill Services Collects Thousands of Google Reviews with ServiceTitan’s Notification Tool
ProSkill Services—which offers electrical, plumbing, and HVAC services in Arizona—has more than 3,000 Google reviews with 5-star ratings and nearly 800 Facebook recommendations. Co-owner Travis Ringe says there’s more to getting good reviews than simply asking customers for one.
“If you want to drive reviews, you have to deliver a full experience worthy of writing a review,” Ringe says.
You also need to make it easy for customers to leave a review, such as texting the review link directly to the customer before leaving the job site. ProSkill uses ServiceTitan’s built-in messaging tool to customize a personal message and ask customers to specifically leave a Google review.
“Google really rules the roost, and I want all my reviews on Google,” Ringe says.
» Learn how to ask customers for reviews and boost your company’s online rankings.
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5. Show Your Electricians How to Get More 5-Star Google Reviews
Electricians often hesitate to ask customers for reviews. It’s a common problem for many industries, not just home services. If you explain to your electricians how good and bad reviews directly affect your company’s bottom line—and your techs’ paychecks—you can motivate them to regularly ask for reviews.
Incentivize your techs to get more 5-star Google reviews with pay-for-performance bonus checks, or encourage in-house competition to win prizes for the most 5-star reviews. ServiceTitan user Travis Ringe, of ProSkill Services, says his CSRs and home service techs go the “second mile” to deliver a review-worthy customer experience. His tips include:
Make a good first impression, from the moment they call to book an appointment to the follow-up after completing the job.
Offer online scheduling to make it easy to do business with your company.
Book the appointment immediately and don’t make the customer wait.
Shorten your arrival window and use technology to allow customers to track their tech.
Determine customer satisfaction before leaving the job site to mitigate any complaints they might include in a review.
ServiceTitan’s scheduling and customer experience software lets you text customers with alerts, including: appointment reminders, notices that the technician is on the way, and even a link to a Google review page where they can easily provide a review after the job. This makes it easy for them to leave a review and increases the chance that they will. If they feel like the technician communicated well and showed up on time, they're more likely to love the service and give you a top-notch testimonial.
» Learn how to get more 5-star reviews with these tips.
6. Automate by Using Electrical Software and a Mobile App to Get More Electrical Leads
Looking for ways to personalize the customer service experience, but need a more effective and efficient way to do it? Electricians on ServiceTitan deliver better customer service by using the automation of our electrical software to train and equip their CSRs, dispatchers, techs, and sales teams.
ServiceTitan’s mobile app for electricians streamlines operations in the office and in the field, for a more polished and professional approach. Here’s how some popular features help generate quality electrical job leads:
When a customer calls to book a service, ServiceTitan provides the CSR with details such as call occurrence, service history, equipment used, and even special notes about prior electrical safety inspections by using ServiceTitan’s call tracking software. Greet the customer by name, and turn them into a repeat electrical lead.
Good electrical service reviews often depend on timely and efficient service. Use ServiceTitan’s dispatch software to send out the nearest available tech with the right skills. You can also monitor the GPS location of your field staff in real time, and prevent delays and missed appointments.
Empower your techs with the ServiceTitan mobile app, which offers on-site quoting and estimates, so you can give both residential and commercial customers instant quotes on the work that needs to be done. This gives your customers immediate information about their specific electrical issue and the options they can consider, increasing the likelihood of closing a sale.
Position your electricians as true service experts by equipping them with a visual sales presentation tool. With high-quality product photos and detailed descriptions shown in a good-better-best format using ServiceTitan Pricebook Pro, it’s easier to convert electrical sales leads into sold jobs and higher average tickets.
Increase opportunities for on-site electrical sales by setting the stage in advance. Send customers a text when your electrician is dispatched to let them know who's on the way and when they’re expected to arrive. It’s a great way to prepare for a more comfortable customer interaction and to provide excellent electrician service.
» Learn more about ServiceTitan’s Pricebook Pro.
7. Connect with Electrical Lead-Generation Companies or Local Apps
To find electrical work to bid on, companies can also sign up with an electrical referral program, such as Google Local Services, Angi Leads, or even Lowe’s or Home Depot. These lead-generation services are particularly useful if you are just starting out. But be careful not to spread yourself too thin and lose sight of your company’s mission to provide great electrical service.
Ben Stark, a trades consultant and owner of a Texas HVAC company, enhances his company’s online presence by staying active on Nextdoor, a host for closed social groups in individual neighborhoods, and Alignable, a small business networking group that generates referrals from other nearby businesses.
How One $8 Million Electrician Business Takes an Unconventional Approach to Getting Exclusive Leads
When Mario Campirano—owner of Express Electrical Services, an $8 million electrical company in Los Angeles—decided to switch from commercial to residential electrical services more than 10 years ago, he knocked on many doors and even visited local home improvement stores to find potential customers.
Campirano also took an unconventional approach to electrical services during the Covid-19 pandemic. Realizing people may be trying to store food in a second refrigerator or freezer—a problem he experienced himself—Campirano immediately changed his electrical advertising strategy to meet those customers’ needs.
“We started getting calls like crazy,” Campirano says.
The key is knowing how to send the right message at the right time.
“You’ve got to be hungry for it, at the end of the day. You're not hungry for it if you can't go knock on somebody's door,” Campirano says.
8. Measure ROI to Understand Which Marketing Campaigns Are Working
Our final tip, and a key part of any lead generation campaign, is to properly measure the return on investment (ROI). This means calculating how much business you’re getting for every penny you’ve invested in a specific marketing channel (e.g. Google Ads).
If you’re not paying attention to what’s working and what’s not, you’ll waste a lot of time and money on efforts that aren’t generating much for your business. Make sure you have a system in place for tracking how many leads and customers you generate from which sources.
You should also be regularly analyzing your website data to see which sources are resulting in the most leads. Use this information to focus your efforts on the strategies that are producing the best results.
ServiceTitan offers campaign tracking telephone numbers and real-time ROI reporting for all your marketing campaigns:
You can track the number of calls, how many jobs your CSRs booked from those calls, and sales made from those jobs within your ServiceTitan dashboard.
You can also calculate true ROI on electrical advertising campaigns by tracking how much revenue each advertising source generated and identifying total cost per lead.
By measuring the marketing ROI for each campaign, ServiceTitan helps companies:
Know how much revenue each electrical marketing campaign generates.
Measure how well their staff converts leads into appointments and sales.
Invest electrical marketing dollars in the right places and in the right proportion.
Stop wasting money on ineffective ads and digital marketing platforms that don’t perform.
Whether you’re investing in local SEO, Pay-Per-Click ads, social media, email marketing, or another advertising campaign, your electrical contracting company can track what’s working and what isn't, so you can make informed decisions on the best strategy for capturing more electrical leads.
Try ServiceTitan’s free ROI calculator.
» Ready to learn more about what ServiceTitan can do for your electrician business? Contact one of our product experts to schedule a demo today.
ServiceTitan Electrical Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive electrical business software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and achieve growth. Our award-winning, cloud-based platform is trusted by more than 100,000+ contractors across the country.
