Plumbing Advertising and Customer Retention

Some well-placed plumbing advertising can put your company on the map, then keep it there.

No one searches for a plumber in the yellow pages anymore. These days, even the best plumber in the business needs a strategy to acquire new customers. Digital marketing and outreach can provide consistent income, making them necessary practices for any plumbing business.

Of course, you don’t want to just rush out and start burning money. Instead, you should sit down and figure out how to get the most out of your spend. Let’s go over some planning techniques and things to consider for customer acquisition and retention.

Knowing the Business

A great place to start? Let customers know what you have to offer. This may sound obvious, but giving current and potential clients a heads up on the variety of services you officer can help you expand your business. Likewise, factor in the need for certain services at certain times. Prime example: the recent heavy winter in Texas. Normally, winterization wouldn’t move the needle in southern states, but after a major incident you may get some traction advertising these services.

If you’re looking for a more concrete guide to getting the word out, here’s an exercise you can attempt:

1. Build a list of services that you offer. Try to include common things like repairs or preventive maintenance, but also feature specifics like new water heater installs or winterization.
2. Split services based on the season you most often sell them. Reference past invoices or tickets that you have on record to help with this.
3. Build out four emails/letters for marketing based on the seasonal services most popular in each of the four seasons.

With these few simple steps, you now have a basic marketing program that you can deploy year round. Use data tracking in some form to really maximize your investment. If you use the plumbing software Smart Service, the reporting features can go a long way when it comes to tracking this data.

Don’t spend money you don’t have to!

Now that you have a marketing strategy, you have to figure out how to deploy it. This can come as a mass email mass sent out to customers. Alternatively, you can resort to mailing or general public advertising methods like billboards or local papers. No matter what route you choose to deploy, you should track where your customers heard about you. If you spend thousands a year setting up a billboard but all your work comes from mailings, wouldn’t you like to reinvest that billboard money into more mailings? When customers call to schedule service, make a habit of asking them where they heard about you. Conveniently, Smart Service users can use the campaign field within the software to track this data, then run reports to help draw conclusions. 

Retaining Current Customers

Maintaining current clients is a key part to any successful business. This includes followups, quality assurance, and general reminders that you’re still around. Let’s run through a good example of what your contacts should look like with a customer that purchased a new water heater and had it installed: 

1. Customer purchases a new water heater and schedules their installation.
2. Customer receives notification of scheduled installation time and specifics.
3. Work is performed, new water heater is installed.
4. Notes on location, warranty, and any unusual specifics get noted on the customer’s work order.
5. Customer get followup messaging asking how the work went and if they have any concerns.
6. You mark a calendar to reach back out with recommended maintenance around the end of warranty.

You’d be surprised how many people don’t keep track of warranties for customers. Granted, it is the customer’s responsibility to handle what’s in their home, but this gives you a prime opportunity to retain clients with routine maintenance agreements. Additionally, keeping individualized information on how their home or equipment got set up makes the experience more personal. Who would they rather go to? Someone who knows their layout and can get working right away? Or someone who will need to come out and learn everything before they can offer a quote and inspection?

Show and Tell

As an expert plumber, you have knowledge and expertise for fixing issues in a timely manner. On the flip side, a customer might not always understand what needs done or what has been done. A big way to bridge this gap is a little show and tell. Before and after photos and explanations of your work can go a long way here. These give customers a reference point for what you did for them. It helps build trust, since they can visually confirm the work done, a critical part in a long-term customer relationship.  As an added bonus, these photos will help you build out advertisements for future clients. Show them what you are capable of! You may even pick up customers who didn’t know they had an issue in the first place. 

This isn’t a be-all, end-all guide to developing a marketing plan, but if you’re new to the industry or haven’t thought about expanding your business, this will hopefully serve as a baseline to get you going. Plan well and keep track of your data! There’s no need to waste money or time where it doesn’t benefit your company.