Running successful email marketing campaigns is part of a solid marketing plan that keeps your service business top of mind with your existing customers and builds awareness with new customers.
Using a generic email marketing platform (like Mailchimp or Constant Contact) can help you segment target audiences, automate email delivery, and track results.
But, if you’re a home services business owner (e.g. HVAC, electrical or plumbing), using an industry-specific email marketing tool — like the one we offer within ServiceTitan — that has the functionality to integrate with your other business marketing activities (such as direct mail and Google Ads) and business operations (such as call booking and estimating) means you can track the entire customer journey from one place — from email delivery to actual job bookings.
With ServiceTitan, this means you can:
Easily track and analyze all of your marketing data together and tailor emails to specific audience segments. For example, if a customer responds to a Google Ad about checking their HVAC equipment in the fall, you can follow up with an email reinforcing the same topic.
Send personalized, hyper-targeted emails because you have an overview of each customer’s entire history (if they are an existing customer). For example, if their HVAC equipment is due for a renewal, or if they have yet to sign up for a service agreement, you can identify their potential needs and send them relevant emails.
Hyper-targeted, personalized emails like this get much higher engagement, opens, clicks, and ultimately conversions than generic emails because they speak to the customer’s exact needs and situation.
In this post, we’ll share 8 tips on how to create and execute effective email marketing campaigns for your service business. We’ll also explain how our email marketing software, ServiceTitan, was built specifically for service businesses, and provide 8 specific email campaign ideas that you can use if you’re a small-business owner running a home services business.
Table of Contents
Why Email Marketing?
Email marketing refers to sending emails to your existing customer base or anyone who has opted in to your list. It’s an extremely effective marketing channel for a few reasons. First, it’s extremely low cost. There is no incremental cost to sending emails, and the monthly cost of most providers spread across every email you send to each customer is tiny (especially compared to ad channels like Google Ads, Yelp Ads, Angi, and more).
Second, marketing to people who already know you (and have opted in to receive emails from you) is more effective than trying to convert strangers. Existing customers may buy again or, at the very least, will keep you top of mind and recommend you when friends ask for an HVAC, plumber, or electrician.
As a result, according to HubSpot, 79% of marketers included email marketing within their top three marketing channels (followed by paid search/ads, organic search and social media). And, in a recent study conducted by Thrive Analytics, 68% of homeowners are open to receive email marketing communications from home service providers at least quarterly, while only a third of homeowners are open to direct mail (32%) or text (35%).
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing channels, with $40 in revenue for every dollar spent. That’s almost a whopping 4,000% potential return on your investment.
Here’s how to create and execute an effective email marketing strategy.
Tip #1: Segment Your Audience
If you’re sending one email to your entire customer database, then you’re not sending the right message to the right audience at the right time. You also risk your emails being classed as spam.
When you segment your email list into specific groups, you can personalize your campaigns according to your customers’ needs. This means your customers receive the right kind of emails, it reduces your email bounce rate, and your emails reach more people.
Take a look at your customer list and see how you can segment and target them with relevant messaging that resonates with their needs.
While generic email marketing services will allow you to segment audiences by, for example, ZIP code, they don’t have the breadth of customer data held within operational software like ServiceTitan. This is data such as whether a customer has an open estimate, whether they are due for a service, or whether they came in via a specific direct mail or Google Ads campaign.
Segmenting customers by these traits is powerful.
For example, if the email software of an HVAC company knows which customers came in via an ad for furnace maintenance in the fall versus A/C maintenance in the spring, they can send personalized emails advertising each service specifically to the interested customers. Or, if you know which customers have open estimates or are due for a service, you can email them about that. These highly relevant, personalized emails are far more likely to be opened and clicked on than generic emails.
With ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro you can “set and forget” audience lists and narrow down your customers lists into segments, such as:
ZIP code
Age of homeowner
Has an open estimate
Age of equipment
Membership status
Date of last service
New homeowner
And more
In addition, with ServiceTitan, you can choose from two audience filter options:
Static filters: Select a certain date or date range (for example, customers who called before May 7th)
Dynamic filters: These can be set to continuously adapt to events, for example to add people to your target audience every time a customer has an estimate that’s over two weeks old.
Marketing Pro will even score your target email marketing efforts (as “strong,” “medium” or “broad”) so you can further fine tune your audience to achieve a better opening rate.
Segmenting and customizing audiences is seamless when all the necessary data is stored within the same software; there ’s no need to waste time jumping in and out of different tools or spreadsheets.
Robin Cody, director of marketing and business development for Cody & Sons Plumbing, Heating & Air, told us that Marketing Pro helped them halve the time spent on building email campaigns. Now it takes them only 30 minutes (or less) to set up a campaign instead of over an hour doing the same thing with different software.
“I just don’t have the time to look into our data, research, and start doing things like building audiences,” Cody says. “That’s what’s so great about ServiceTitan Marketing Pro. I can essentially use it as our customer relationship management software now. I can use and analyze our own data to target customers appropriately.
Tip #2: Send Consistent Seasonal Campaigns
As well as sending personalized emails to specific customer audiences, sending different types of emails to your customers keeps your campaigns fresh and your business top of mind.
Try seasonal campaigns, special promotions, transactional emails, event invitations, and informational emails. Send thank you emails after a job has been completed and “we miss you” emails if it’s been a while since your last visit.
The point is not always to drive sales with every email but to maintain awareness of your brand. That way, when the lights go out or that drain gets clogged, your business is the first one a homeowner thinks of calling.
ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro offers a huge range of email templates. Just pick the template that works best for you, adapt the text to suit your campaign, and send it out to your target audience.
Tip #3: Mix in Emails that Educate Your Customer About Your Niche
Whether you have plumbing, HVAC, electrical or another home services business, nobody knows the in-and-outs of the trade like you do. Educate homeowners on the basics by creating relevant content for your social media marketing and website and then deliver that content to your customers’ inboxes.
For example, you can use blogs and videos to target high-ranking SEO keywords in your market, such as “fix toilet” or “furnace blower repair,” and offer helpful information and advice. When a new video or blog post is published, you can email that to your customers.
Educational, how-to emails like this provide a nice balance to promotional or “hire us” emails that sell your services. They can serve to keep your brand top of mind, be seen as helpful, increase open and click rates (since customer’s won’t simply expect every email to be a sales pitch), and even get forwarded or shared with friends and family.
The #1 newsletter for the trades.
Alternatively, you can offer tips and best practices exclusively by email and encourage homeowners to subscribe to your email list to get this content. Including an email sign-up form on your website where new subscribers can opt in to receive your emails will help increase the number of email subscribers in your database.
The more value they receive from you, the more likely it is they’ll book a job with you when the time comes.
Pro tip: Always include a call to action (CTA) with clear instructions about what you want customers to do next, for example, “Call us today to book your free estimate.” And don’t forget to include an unsubscribe button on every email so customers have the choice to opt out if they don’t want to hear from you.
Tip #4: Craft Catchy Subject Lines
Your subject line and, to some extent, your preview headers (“preheaders”) will determine whether homeowners open your email. You want to capture their attention and get them curious enough to open your email and find out more.
Here are some tips to create subject lines that drive higher open rates:
Avoid spam triggers — including words like “Free,” using all caps, and using multiple exclamation points or dollar symbols.
Create urgency by adding a deadline like “Fall tune-up special ends tomorrow!”
Ask a question: “Embarrassed by your bathroom? Call for a bathroom remodel estimate.”
Add a number: “Top 5 ways to improve energy efficiency in your home.”
Keep it short. Remember, many homeowners will be reading your email on their mobile phones, so keep subject line length in mind. Move the most important information to the beginning of your subject line so it doesn’t get lost.
Read our full article on how to write successful email subject lines here.
Tip #5: Build Trust with Your Design & Branding
Are your emails professional looking, easy to read, and actionable? When your customers open your emails, will they think your company is experienced and reputable? Customer- service oriented? Take the time now to build trust with your customers by using professional email templates that you can easily customize for your business so that it’s not just about price later on.
Your emails should have your logo and branding consistently represented. Same goes for the content you create, whether it be educational videos, surveys, or a seasonal promotion. If homeowners know what to expect from you, they will be less likely to skim past your emails when they hit their inbox.
ServiceTitan’s library of email templates has been developed by our in-house designers and copywriters, which means that you don’t need to spend additional money on outsourcing design work for your email campaigns. Simply add your branding elements and content to your selected template to make it your own.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on our support portal to walk you through the process.
You can also watch our YouTube video on how to build your brand using ServiceTitan's email templates.
Tip #6: Automate Your Emails
It’s important to never miss an opportunity to make a sale or engage with your customers. You should already be following up on all your open estimates, sending thank-you emails after a job is complete, and sending emails to your customers whose memberships are about to expire, reminding them to renew.
Without software to help, manually finding this data is a laborious process. And with a generic email marketing tool, it’s not much easier. With ServiceTitan, because your email marketing is linked to your other marketing efforts, your operational business processes (call booking, scheduling, and billing, etc.), and your entire CRM, you always have an up-to-date picture of the status of each customer so you can trigger the next appropriate actions, such as executing specific automated emails.
Automating your email marketing campaigns lets you:
Send hundreds of emails automatically
Send perfectly timed emails
Personalize your emails so people receive emails that are relevant to them
Nurture potential customers until they are ready to close a deal
Send targeted emails by breaking down your mailing list according to age, gender, location, and past interactions
Weed out the glitches that harm your campaigns (for example, if emails are winding up in the spam/junk folder for certain email service providers).
Marketing automation will ensure that your email campaigns don’t fall through the cracks, freeing you up to focus on more strategic areas of your business.
Tip #7: Determine the Best Time to Send Emails
The best days and times to send emails really depends on your audience. It’s important to test and see when open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates are highest for your email campaigns.
A quick search on Google will produce all kinds of answers, with Tuesdays often mentioned as the best days and 6 a.m. mentioned as the best time for email opens. Some recommend targeting right after lunch for people who work or even Saturdays for the best conversion rates. Use your judgment, see what your competitors are doing, and test for optimal times.
Above all, find out when your customers might be the most receptive to your emails and also when they’re not. For example, it’s probably not a good idea to email over an estimate first thing on a Monday morning.
ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro lets businesses track audience email delivery history to determine the best time to contact them. You can do this by analyzing metrics such as how many emails have been sent, when they were sent, and when they were opened.
We’ll discuss the importance of tracking and analyzing your email marketing campaigns in our next tip.
Tip #8: Review Your Results & Optimize
Open rates and click-through rates are helpful in gauging whether your email campaign was successful in getting homeowners to take action, however, the key question you should be asking is: Did this email campaign drive calls, booked jobs, and sales?
ServiceTitan lets you assign a unique campaign code for every email campaign you send so you can attribute revenue to it after the campaign is complete. Email marketing solutions that can deliver true ROI (return on investment) will make campaign analysis much easier and will ultimately drive more revenue for your business.
With ServiceTitan’s reporting tool, you can create a marketing scorecard of all current campaigns, then tie all new customers to the specific email campaign that brought them to you. This lets you boost spending on campaigns with higher returns, and drop channels with poor performance.
And, if your company uses call-tracking software, such as our add-on product, ServiceTitan Phones Pro, you can easily track the number of calls, booked appointments, sales, revenue, cost per lead, and ROI for each marketing source, including your email campaigns.
Knowing exactly what’s working and what’s not is critical for working out the ROI on your email marketing campaigns.
8 Email Campaign Ideas for Home Services Businesses
Let’s take a look at a few email marketing campaigns specifically for plumbing, HVAC, and electrical contractors that you can include in your marketing plans.
1. Seasonal Campaign: Thanksgiving “Brown Friday”
Clogged up drains and garbage disposals are the cause of the busiest day of the year for plumbers: the day after Thanksgiving. Send an email to your customer base before Thanksgiving, providing helpful tips on what shouldn’t be thrown down their garbage disposal. Then follow up with an email on Brown Friday letting them know you are there for them if needed.
2. Vendor Campaign: Smart Thermostats
Want to push those smart thermostats? Create an email campaign using photos from your vendors and schedule any promotions you have with them, like offering a discount coupon.
Pro tip: Ask your vendors for access to their marketing material, and you can probably use some of those images in your email campaigns.
3. Severe Weather Campaign
If a big storm is heading your way, send an email campaign offering consultation for a whole house generator or offer discounts on whole house surge protection with the purchase of an electrical safety inspection. Target customers in ZIP codes where the storm is expected to hit.
4. Cross-Trade Campaign: Multiple Trades
Target your customer base that have used you for one type of service (example: plumbing) and let them know you also do electrical or HVAC. Follow up with a special offer on a tune-up as an incentive to call and book a job for your other services.
5. Unsold Estimates Campaign: Water Heater Replacement
Set automated email campaigns to follow up on your open estimates.
For example, let’s say one of your techs realizes a homeowner’s 10-year-old water heater is calcified and provides three options for replacement, but the homeowner is not ready to buy at this time. You can use this information to trigger an automated sequence of emails that remind them of the importance of changing their water heater, then follow up with a discount to help close the sale.
6. Membership Renewal Campaign: HVAC
Target HVAC customers with expiring memberships and remind them about the benefits they will continue to receive if they renew. Highlight exclusive discounts on maintenance visits, repairs, priority scheduling, or any other type of benefit that makes your customers feel special and valued.
7. We Miss You Campaign: Garage Door Maintenance
Send emails to homeowners that haven’t had a service or installation for over a year and remind them of the importance of preventative door maintenance. Offer a quick tune-up and add clear, prominent CTAs to call or text you to book an appointment.
8. Anniversary Campaigns
Celebrating your company’s anniversary? Proud of the many years of service to your community? Schedule your first email to go out a week before your anniversary letting customers know how excited and honored you are to serve them and the community. Offer a special “thank you” by offering a percentage off all services.
Ready to Try ServiceTitan’s Email Marketing Software?
With ServiceTitan Marketing Pro, you can hypertarget your audience and automate emails based on the goldmine of data already stored within ServiceTitan. Managing your email campaigns, marketing activities, and business processes from one software tool makes your job a lot easier.
And there’s no need to be a digital marketer. Many of the campaigns mentioned above can be created in just a few clicks, saving you time and driving more revenue from your existing customer base.
By consistently reminding your customers how important you are to the health of their home, you can book and close more jobs.
Learn more about email marketing in your specific home service sector in these posts:
To learn more about how ServiceTitan’s email marketing features could help your service business, book a free, personalized demo.
ServiceTitan Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and substantially elevate the trajectory of their business. Our comprehensive, cloud-based platform is used by thousands of electrical, HVAC, plumbing, garage door, and chimney sweep shops across the country—and has increased their revenue by an average of 25% in just their first year with us.
