HVAC Postcards Templates: Leverage Direct Mail and Track ROI on Your Campaigns

The most successful HVAC contractors we work with think of direct mail postcards as an opportunity for brand awareness, customer relationship management, and timely, targeted communication. 

It’s best understood as just one important component of a multi-channel marketing strategy that guides customers through enduring (and lucrative) relationships with their HVAC contractor via numerous touchpoints, which generally also include tools like email, texting, and social media. 

The thing is, integrating HVAC direct mail marketing into an effective multi-channel marketing strategy has traditionally been a challenge. 

Generally speaking, it involves hiring various outside vendors, including services like VistaPrint, graphic designers, and sellers of mailing lists, and then trying to coordinate mailings with a combination of hard-to-track Excel spreadsheets, Microsoft Word files, and Google Docs. 

This sort of arrangement can often be time-consuming, costly, and inefficient — especially for small businesses that have limited resources. It’s also hard to replicate over time.

Even when such methods are perfectly executed, they’re often a means of batching-and-blasting: Buying up lists of addresses and launching “every door direct mail” (EDDM) campaigns through USPS. Once it goes out, contractors usually don’t have a way to track the results, leaving them with little, if any sense, of which of their marketing dollars are being well spent and which are simply going out the window.

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In this article, we’ll explain how ServiceTitan’s HVAC postcard template features — which are available to ServiceTitan customers who use Marketing Pro — help address these issues. These templates allow contractors to seamlessly integrate targeted direct mail marketing into their overall marketing efforts, and deliver messaging that reaches the right customers with the right communications at the right time, boosting retention of current customers and revenue in the process.

Specifically, we’ll go over: 

• How we’ve made HVAC postcard marketing easier and more effective than ever.

• Examples of postcard templates and categories available. 

• Benefits such as no minimum print runs and the ability to track ROI from specific campaigns.

• How postcards tie into our Marketing Pro product.

Want to see how ServiceTitan’s HVAC software can help grow your business? Get a free, personalized demo. Already a customer and interested in upgrading to Marketing Pro? Click here to schedule a call. 

How HVAC Postcards Work in ServiceTitan Marketing Pro

With ServiceTitan, in just a few minutes, HVAC business owners can put together targeted direct-mail campaigns that are easy to track, drive revenue growth, and dramatically improve customer communication.

From the Direct Mail section of Marketing Pro, contractors and employees can begin building an HVAC postcard campaign by clicking the “Create Campaign” button in the upper right corner of the ServiceTitan app. 

Next, users can choose from a variety of pre-built campaign types. 

Popular options include Unsold Estimates, Membership Reminders, and Equipment Service Check-in. Many contractors also like our Inactive Customers and Recurring Service templates, which help generate new business from existing customers — a potential source of huge revenues that many service industry business owners often leave untapped. 

Each campaign type is highly customizable, and ServiceTitan users can build their own from scratch. But since our software is designed specifically for the trades — unlike more general vendors like VistaPrint and, for email marketing, Mailchimp — most of our subscribers find what they’re looking for among our pre-built templates. Each template has been created by our team of professional designers, copywriters, and long-time marketers in the trades. 

ServiceTitan’s marketing software also gives contractors much greater scheduling flexibility than traditional direct mail providers. Users can program mailers to go out just once, on a specific date, once a year, bi-annually, or at whatever interval they choose. 

Another major differentiator is ServiceTitan’s ability to create highly specific triggers for postcard campaigns. For example, with Marketing Pro, HVAC companies can automatically send a tailored mailing every time a customer has been sitting on an unsold estimate for a given number of days. 

Note: Our current direct mail features are solely focused on communicating with current customers. However, soon we’ll also provide options for running prospecting campaigns to acquire new customers.

With a campaign type selected, it’s time to choose the right audience. Marketing Pro gives you the ability to segment your customer lists in a myriad of ways, generating micro-targeted campaigns based on specific characteristics.

For example, contractors can create Unsold Estimate campaigns that zero in on outstanding proposals worth $500 and up, or target only homeowners with an HVAC system or air conditioning unit more than ten years old. 

In some cases, a broad audience might be appropriate. Generally speaking, though, HVAC contractors find the greatest success with highly specific marketing campaigns. To help contractors gauge their audience composition, ServiceTitan provides automated audience ratings: broad, medium, and so on.   

HVAC Postcard Templates and Categories Offered by ServiceTitan

Once they’ve drawn up their campaign and fine-tuned their audience, HVAC contractors can begin actually building their postcard.

For that purpose, we provide free access to a customized catalogue of colorful, professional, industry-specific postcards designed in Canva, a web-based graphics service. 

Below, you can check out a small sampling of the kinds of designs available in our Marketing Pro Direct Mail Template Gallery:

Membership Messaging

Recurring Service Reminders

Seasonal Check-Ins

Campaigns Aimed at Idle Accounts, Unsold Estimates, or Brand Awareness 

Templates are simple to customize in Canva, where contractors can complete their postcard with a customized message, logo, fonts, company name, heading and more. 

Then, you simply download your template and upload it into ServiceTitan Marketing Pro for the front of your postcard design.

Next, you can customize the back of your postcard from within ServiceTitan with a heading, body, and logo. So, for example, if you’re sending out a coupon for a special offer on pricing, you can easily display that with your heading and body text.

Once edits are finished, all that’s left to do is review, save, and submit the mailing for distribution to the pre-specified audience. 

One of the things that our users like best about ServiceTitan’s postcard functionality is the tracking capabilities it provides. 

The software allows contractors to attach a unique phone number to each campaign. (Users can select a number themselves, or simply allow ServiceTitan to choose one at random from an existing pool.) 

That way, when a call comes into the office through that number, they know that the caller is responding to the associated campaign. 

ServiceTitan automatically logs this information, giving contractors an unusually sharp, detailed view of exactly how their postcard campaigns are performing, as shown above in the screenshot of the “Analytics” view.

In combination, these features give business owners the ability to fine-tune their marketing strategy, bolstering, tweaking, or eliminating campaigns as needed to optimize their return on investment and increase their bottom line. 

As a final added benefit, ServiceTitan postcards have no minimum print runs. You can send as many or as few postcards as you like with any given order. 

Conclusion: How HVAC Postcards Improve Marketing Pro’s Already Powerful Tools for Generating Business

At its core, ServiceTitan Marketing Pro streamlines the direct mail process and employs industry standards to help shop owners become smarter marketers. Through automation, audience segmentation, templates, tracking, and reporting, it helps shop owners integrate direct mail into their existing marketing strategy and scale the growth of their company.  

Moreover, the role of HVAC postcards in Marketing Pro reflects ServiceTitan’s overall approach to helping service companies optimize their operations by integrating virtually all of their core business functions into a single platform. 

Currently, Marketing Pro gives ServiceTitan subscribers a three-pronged attack, which includes tools for email, direct mail, and reputation management. With this multi-channel functionality, HVAC contractors can stay in touch with homeowners over the course of months and years, initiating the multiple contacts that studies show most consumers need before making a purchase.    

If someone’s inbox is too cluttered to notice an email from their HVAC service provider, they might nonetheless respond to a message that arrives by mail. Soon, ServiceTitan plans to add SMS messaging to the marketing mix, to give our users yet another opportunity to convert. 

Around the same time, we plan to augment our current retention-focused marketing features with ad tools specifically designed to acquire new clients, furnishing our users with a full-funnel approach to business generation.

Once new customers are acquired, ServiceTitan’s HVAC postcard templates will be there to help contractors generate the kind of steady, repeat business that keeps service companies profitable year in and year out. 

Want to see how ServiceTitan’s HVAC Software can help grow your business? Get a free, personalized demo. Already a customer and interested in upgrading to Marketing Pro? Click here to schedule a call.