When it comes to picking the right digital marketing tools, it’s hard for most home service business owners to know where to start.
Many consider hiring a marketing agency to manage their digital marketing strategy. An agency can certainly help, but usually with a hefty cost. In our experience, having provided operational and marketing software for thousands of home service businesses for years, it’s much more cost effective for small businesses in the home services industry to use modern, cloud-based software to manage their own marketing efforts.
In this post, we discuss the 10 key features we believe a good home services marketing tool should have, specifically:
Email marketing tools to automate campaigns and target specific customers
Integration with Google Local Services Ads for lead generation
Reputation management for customer reviews and business listings
Online appointment booking integration to attract new customers
Customizable templates for on-brand email newsletters and direct mail
We’ll discuss why each feature is important to marketing a home services business and then explain how our software, ServiceTitan, approaches each of these features.
Want to discover how ServiceTitan can help your home services business with your marketing strategy and other essential business operations? Book a free, personalized demo.
1. Email Marketing Tools
Email marketing remains the most effective form of marketing communication. If you’re still manually sending generic customer emails that don’t resonate with customers and then painstakingly tabulating the results internally, consider cloud-based software to automate email marketing campaigns and receive accurate reporting to show you which messages convert.
ServiceTitan’s email marketing tool, Marketing Pro, links to your customer data and automatically delivers an email drip campaign to re-engage past customers and new online leads with a timed, targeted marketing message.
By using data already collected in ServiceTitan, you can segment your email audience by ZIP code, age of equipment, date of last service, new homeowner, and more. This means you can be super-specific and target previous customers with a “We Miss You!” email campaign, follow up with existing customers on unsold estimates, or offer a discount to new homeowners.
With Marketing Pro, the contact information automatically updates in real-time so you can “set and forget” audience lists that focus on specific customers. For example, those who have yet to respond to an estimate or are due to update their service contracts. Sending these customers a reminder email gives yourself another opportunity to convert them into revenue.
Sending targeted emails is simple. Choose from our huge range of email templates, adjust the text to fit your campaign, and deliver to your chosen audience.
ProSkill Services in Arizona, recognized as Titan of the Year in 2020 by ServiceTitan, uses Marketing Pro to leverage customer data and deliver hyper-targeted email marketing campaigns.
The company’s first email campaign using the marketing automation tool brought in $6,000 in revenue within 24 hours. ProSkill’s co-founder, Travis Ringe, calls ServiceTitan business software a “game changer” and credits the platform for driving tremendous success—with 400% growth since adding the software.
“ServiceTitan is as important to our company as the tools and the trucks we use every day to accomplish the job,” Ringe says.
Targeted emails mean higher open rates and more calls coming in. With ServiceTitan, you can also monitor the exact ROI for each campaign by tracking the email performance and the revenue attribution within the ServiceTitan dashboard.
2. Automated Direct Mail Postcards
Combining traditional direct mail with social media marketing and other digital marketing works well for many companies as part of their home services marketing strategy.
Some companies use dedicated home services marketing agencies to create and send these mailers, but that can be an expensive approach. In addition, campaigns may not be laser-targeted, with blanket mailings sent out to your entire customer base.
With ServiceTitan, not only can you utilize email marketing, but you can also use our software to easily automate direct mail and send specific marketing messages to a select segment of your customer base.
With ServiceTitan Marketing Pro, you can quickly create branded, targeted direct mail postcards that get sent out right away. No more waiting weeks for delivery, or sending the same message to every single customer.
ServiceTitan has a library of postcards that home services businesses can choose from to execute their direct mail campaigns. Setup takes minutes. Simply choose your design, adjust the text, then print and mail your postcards to your chosen audience.
Direct mail campaigns cost a flat rate per postcard, so you only pay for the number that you send. And, as with the email campaigns, you can track the results of each campaign so you can see exactly which ones are driving revenue.
Bill Highsmith, Jupiter-Tequesta Air Conditioning, Plumbing & Electric says:
"The ROI is definitely there. With our first few campaigns, we paid for a year, easily. We made over $4,000 in the first week of the first campaign."
3. Google Integrations
Most business owners understand Google reigns supreme for online marketing, with the majority of searches for home services happening on Google (rather than Bing) and pay-per-click (PPC) digital advertising taking up large portions of marketing budgets.
“Google really rules the roost,” Ringe says.
ServiceTitan offers several Google integrations to help you win leads and grow your business.
Google Local Services Ads
Google Local Services Ads represent Google’s newest search marketing offering. They show up at the very top of a local search results page related to a locality and specific service (“roofing, Charlotte,”), and show a company’s phone number, hours, ratings and reviews. If you qualify for the Google Guarantee, you are eligible to buy these ads, which couldbe the first thing potential customers see when they search.
Companies only pay for leads who schedule service through the digital ad and can easily pause the ads if they are too busy to accept new clients. Marketing software helps service companies track their results in real-time, and add automation elements to the ads, such as allowing online leads to see real-time availability and schedule a job online.
ServiceTitan integrates with Google Local Services Ads, allowing homeowners to directly schedule online appointments with your company, and provides business owners with ROI metrics on every campaign.
Some wonder if Google Local Services Ads are worth the cost and the hassle of setup; we believe they are. The low-maintenance upkeep once setup is complete and the focus on customers in geographic service areas that companies want to target make them extremely effective.
Note: Google Local Services Ads are different from Google ads. For Google Local Services Ads, you select categories of work you do rather than optimizing for keywords that prompt your ads to show up when a potential customer searches for them.
Reserve with Google
Your Google Business Profile is a common place for prospective customers to find and learn more about your business. An up-to-date Google Business Profile should include information such as your business’s location, phone number, website, services, hours and reviews. This information can help improve your profile’s SEO ranking on Google.
On your Google Business Profile you can add a call-to-action button that gives customers the ability to take a specific action like “Learn More” or “Call Now”. ServiceTitan’s Reserve with Google integration enables contractors to add a ‘Book Online’ button to their business profile; this allows customers to book jobs on the contractor’s Dispatch Board in real-time on Google Search or Maps.
Contractors that integrate Scheduling Pro with Reserve with Google have the ability to create an enhanced booking experience that includes custom workflows and questions, availability controls, and enhanced company branding.
Learn more about how a partnership between ServiceTitan and Google makes jump-starting your advertising success easier with Google’s Local Services Ads and Reserve with Google.
4. Online Reputation Management
Do you check all of the various customer review sites on a regular basis and make an effort to respond, especially to stellar feedback or to address complaints? Do you have any idea how many different websites and social media platforms display your service company’s business profile—and whether the information is all correct?
Online referrals and testimonials can really help—or hurt—your business. Monitoring and maintaining a good, consistent online presence is a must for brand awareness and marketing success. It’s where most new customers find you first, and research shows they’re much more likely to hire a company with more 5-star reviews.
Ringe estimates that ProSkill gets an average of five to 15 Google reviews per day. At the time of writing, the Arizona company boasts roughly 6,500 Google reviews with a 5-star rating.
The #1 newsletter for the trades.
With ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro software tool, home service businesses can monitor and respond to customers' online reviews from various sites—all in one place. It also allows companies to update business listings information across more than 60 sites.
The software automates follow-up review requests, asking customers if they’re satisfied with the completed job and sending them a link to a preferred review website by email or text. It’s convenient for customers and happens while the service experience remains top of mind, without any extra effort from your technicians.
Learn more about how to ask customers for reviews and improve your online rankings.
5. Job Booking Integration
How your business handles the very first conversation with a customer is critical, whether it’s answering a question or booking a job — his is where software can help.
ServiceTitan’s software helps companies drive more conversions on their website by offering online scheduling and live chat through Scheduling Pro. Incorporating online scheduling and live chat on your website gives customers easy ways to initiate a conversation and book more jobs.
Direct booking turns your website into a powerful marketing tool. With Scheduling Pro, home services companies can offer customers complete online booking. The online scheduler enables customers to create appointments in real-time, which converts your web traffic into booked jobs.
As we discussed above, ServiceTitan software integrates instant booking with Google Local Services Ads and Reserve with Google. These integrations allow potential customers to easily book a service with your company on a digital ad or on your Google Business Profile.
Those booked jobs from Google appear on ServiceTitan’s Dispatch Board in real-time. That keeps everyone from dispatch to the technicians apprised of what jobs flow in from those digital ads.
6. Tagging for Audience Segmentation
Audience segmentation means narrowing a broad customer list so you can deliver a relevant message that resonates with that particular group. Sending specific messaging to a target audience makes for supremely successful marketing.
Many companies manually perform this rigorous task by running several different reports in their customer database, uploading spreadsheets, and deleting duplicates or those who don’t exactly fit the desired audience profile. It’s time consuming and often inaccurate when sorting by a variety of different columns within a spreadsheet.
Marketing software that integrates with your CRM database and offers an easy tagging or filter feature can help your team easily identify different campaign ideas and obvious audience segmentations.
Using tags in Service Titan’s Marketing Pro, you can easily segment your send list to deliver hyper-targeted messaging to specific types of customers. You can tag customers based on job type, estimate status, ZIP code, and endless other unique identifiers.
Popular tags for home service companies can tell you:
Whether they're an HVAC customer, a plumbing customer, or both
If you’ve performed an install for the customer within the last five years
The number of maintenance visits performed
Who has unsold estimates or overdue services
If they’re a maintenance service club member
As we discussed above, you can automatically send postcards to customers tagged in the system as new leads or create an email campaign to target those due to renew their maintenance agreement. Marketing Pro also grades your audience segmentation efforts to improve your campaign reach.
For one email content marketing campaign, Chloe Davis, Chief Marketing Officer at Express Plumbing, Heating & Air in Idaho, selected residential customers with open estimates for more than $500, received no more than two days before. She excluded commercial customers and estimates already dismissed or won. Those tags ensured extremely timely, relevant email content, and allowed her the opportunity to offer financing resources that appeal to customers considering expensive work.
Doing testing to measure open rates and conversion success, Davis reported an initial open rate of nearly 50% with a 25:1 return on investment (ROI).
“I use everything I know about them, and that makes it extremely easy to create content,” Davis says. “Marketing Pro is honestly one of the best funnels I’ve been able to utilize. That’s how I look at audience building—it’s a funnel.”
7. Templates for Marketing Campaigns
Think of how many promotional emails land in your inbox each day. A boring, plain text email that doesn’t prominently display your company logo won’t cut it. The same goes with direct mail—it better look slick and grab attention, or it goes straight into the trash.
There’s no need to pay a designer or marketing agency thousands of dollars to turn your idea into a visually appealing and subtle piece of advertising. If your home services business doesn’t employ a graphic designer or a marketing professional who can craft a professional-looking email or postcard, you can find software to fill that gap.
Davis uses templates in ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro, regularly updated with new designs and messaging, that she can then easily customize for Express Plumbing to create branded email and postcard campaigns. She uses the templates to come up with new ideas for her marketing plan, too.
“It’s definitely been one of my main areas of inspiration,” Davis says. “Templates give me some great ideas that I can leverage—seasonality, playing off the holidays, spring specials—and images to go along with each trade.”
8. Data Analytics to Show ROI & Track Performance
Data drives the world of marketing (and business). Tracking results for every marketing campaign, in real-time, to see ROI and gain actionable business insights should rank as a top priority when evaluating a marketing technology tool. Detailed data analytics reveal which marketing messages resonate most with customers and show which campaigns drive the most profit for home service providers.
When integrated with other aspects of the business, managers can see which aspects of the marketing strategy and sales process converge to successfully convert a customer and move closer to achieving business goals. It can even tell you which technicians garner the most positive online reviews and track other metrics to help measure tech performance across a variety of tasks.
ServiceTitan users can create a marketing scorecard of all current campaigns, then tie all new customers to the specific marketing campaign that brought them in. This allows you to boost spending on campaigns with higher returns, and drop channels with poor performance.
9. Call-Tracking Software
In addition to using data analytics to track marketing campaign results, call-tracking software provides full transparency into which calls convert to real job leads from actual customers.
ServiceTitan’s call booking software automatically records every phone call between your customer service team and your customers. Because each incoming call is captured, you have a complete record of how your CSRs are handling the calls and exactly what was said, so you can provide coaching, if needed.
We also offer ServiceTitan Phones Pro where you can easily track the number of calls, booked appointments, sales, revenue, cost per lead, and ROI for each home services advertising source.
10. Integrated Software to Connect All Marketing Mediums
Employing multiple marketing systems that don’t work in unison to deliver holistic results defeats the purpose of investing in technology to simplify and amplify your marketing strategy. Pick one software service to create and monitor email marketing, direct mail, and optimize digital advertising. Ideally, it will also integrate with your customer database and other business operations.
Maximize effectiveness by choosing a SaaS (software as a service) marketing tool that works with your existing software or replaces it with comprehensive features to handle every aspect of your home service business.
ServiceTitan’s integrated field management software has helped thousands of home services providers grow. We provide a range of tools to manage advertising and marketing, attract new business, and track the ROI of every campaign along with Google reviews.
We also offer tools to manage the operational processes of your business. ServiceTitan integrates with QuickBooks and Sage Intacct software, online financing partners, and a host of other top-rated services (such as Google Local Services Ads) to help you expand your business.
Ready to Try our Home Service Marketing Software?
Seek out a comprehensive, cloud-based marketing software platform that integrates seamlessly with existing business systems to deliver holistic data and business insights.
The platform should be able to create messages built for mobile devices (since that’s the preferred viewing format for most customers), and give you the best-in-class tools to design professional promotional content you can automate—without an entire staff of marketing professionals.
ServiceTitan offers the leading all-in-one field management software for residential and commercial HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and other service businesses. Improve your marketing and overall business performance with powerful, fully integrated features that facilitate:
Dynamic data reporting
Contracts and memberships
Customized pricebook, estimating, and invoicing
Payroll, timesheets, and job costing
Mobile app for technicians
Marketing and Local Services Ads
For more marketing tips on specific sectors of the home services industry, take a look at these guides:
Find out more about how ServiceTitan can help you implement your home services marketing strategy, as well as help you run your entire business by booking 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.
