Your HVAC company likely uses a variety of digital marketing strategies related to your website, social media, and ads to engage prospects and existing customers, drive conversions, and keep your brand top of mind among your target audience. One of the most effective digital marketing strategies for achieving all of these things is email marketing.
Whether you’re new to HVAC email marketing or looking for ways to improve upon your current strategy, continue reading to learn how to build an HVAC email marketing strategy and review examples.
How Can HVAC Techs Use Email Marketing
Email marketing is a form of HVAC marketing that makes it possible to engage and reengage prospects and clients, cross-sell and upsell, and promote your services.
HVAC Email Marketing
Email marketing campaigns enable your HVAC business to share relevant education, service information, special offers, thought leadership content (e.g., how-to videos or blogs), and more with your target audience.
Since your HVAC business needs access to a target audience member’s contact info (e.g., their name and email address) to send a message, your email recipient list typically includes individuals who have shown interest in your business in some way. For example, maybe they were added to your email recipient list after one of your HVAC techs serviced their home, converted on your newsletter sign-up page, or clicked on one of your company’s Facebook Ads.
HVAC Email Marketing Strategy
An HVAC email marketing strategy is how you’ll plan, deploy, and understand the success of your HVAC email marketing campaigns. Here are some steps you’ll want to take.
1. Choose an HVAC email marketing tool.
There are several email marketing tools that your HVAC service may consider using to efficiently manage campaigns. These tools make it easy to set up audience groups and triggers for automated email sends and use integrated reporting features to understand HVAC email marketing success.
For example, Scorpion has an email marketing tool that provides access to pre-built templates and scheduling so you can easily create and send email campaigns to your audience at the right time. This increases opens, clicks, appointments, repeat business, and more. Scorpion tracks full-funnel performance from the moment you send an email to the moment you close an HVAC service sale.
2. Align your email strategy with other HVAC marketing strategies.
The most effective email marketing plan is one that aligns with your other digital marketing efforts and overall HVAC marketing plan. For example, if you are running a marketing campaign related to spring-time HVAC service, plan for a complementary email marketing campaign that’s sent to past customers.
Here are some more examples of ways you can tie HVAC email marketing to your team’s other marketing efforts:
- Search engine optimize your HVAC content: Incorporate HVAC SEO and local SEO best practices across your content and website including the creation of a Google Business Profile (previously called Google My Business). By optimizing your content and ranking in the search engine results for “local HVAC business”, you’ll improve brand awareness and drive organic traffic to your website. Meaning there will be more visitors seeing your contact pages and content resulting in a longer list of qualified HVAC prospects who you can email.
- Use HVAC advertising: Similar to how your email marketing strategy benefits from search-engine optimized content, ads — including direct mail, Google Ads, Google Local Service Ads, and other paid ads (e.g., social media ads like Facebook Ads) — drive traffic to your website, content, and contact information. This increases conversions so you can add more prospects to your email lists.
- Incorporate video marketing in your email: Video is a great way to engage your HVAC audience. So why not use this form of content marketing across as many marketing channels as you can? Place your HVAC videos (e.g. tutorials, customer testimonials, and social proof) in your emails.
- Drive email sign-ups through your social media marketing strategy: Use your HVAC company’s presence on various social media platforms to share content that is valuable to your audience. Consider adding links on your profiles with your contact information including your email or a link to your email newsletter sign-up page.
3. Segment your audience and automate your emails to those groups.
Next, segment your email recipients. By grouping your audience, you’ll be able to send them the right content at the right time.
For example, when website visitors complete and submit your contact form to get in touch, segment them into a qualified leads email list. Then, make that sign-up a trigger in your email marketing tool so it automatically sends a message to leads saying, “Thank you for your interest in our HVAC services! One of our HVAC techs will reach out to you in the next 24 hours to discuss your needs.”
There are other types of emails you may send to audience segments. For example, if you have a list of people who have signed up for your blog newsletter, establish a monthly email cadence to send your latest HVAC blogs.
4. Create templates.
Email templates are pre-built email outlines that may already include text, images, and other types of content. Use them to expedite the process of creating and sending emails — rather than manually building an email from scratch every time you have to send one, use templates to make the process more efficient. Email templates are also a great way to ensure your email communications and appearance are on brand and consistent, no matter who sends them.
5. Track metrics to understand success.
Test, learn, and iterate — this should be your HVAC company’s mantra when it comes to email marketing.
Test different email communications across audience segments. Review and analyze your resulting data to learn what’s working well and what isn’t. From there, adjust your HVAC email marketing strategy to improve conversions and communications via email.
This analysis will also allow you to identify actionable ways to stand out among your competitors in the HVAC industry and adjust emails to improve the effectiveness of your overall HVAC digital marketing strategy.
With Scorpion, this process is made easy since you can track performance from the moment you send an email to the moment you close an HVAC service sale. The tool also brings together all data related to your HVAC marketing plan so you can maintain one source of truth when it comes to your results.
HVAC Email Marketing Examples
Next, let’s take a look at some inspiration — here are a few examples of what your HVAC emails may look like.
1. HVAC Email Marketing Example: Spring Checklist
This HVAC email is an example of how you might share thought leadership and educational content with your audience. By sending your audience valuable DIY tips and education, you show them that you’re a trusted HVAC partner. As a result, you’ll increase customer loyalty and lower your number of email unsubscribes.
2. HVAC Email Marketing Example: Estimates
Use email to send estimates and close deals on upcoming HVAC services. Clients may not always be able to pick up the phone in the middle of the workday to call you. Instead, communicate through the channels that work best for them — send them the information they’re looking for via email so they can take as much time as they need to review and accept your service estimates.
3. HVAC Email Marketing Example: Latest Blog
Do you maintain an HVAC blog where you write and publish relevant HVAC blog content for your customers and target audience? If so, consider establishing a newsletter through which you highlight your latest blog articles. This is an example of how to feature your latest blog in your email and drive clickthrough to your website.
HVAC Email Marketing Templates
As mentioned above, it’s important to focus on sending the right message in your HVAC emails at the right time to increase conversions. Templates can help with this — they improve efficiency since they have a pre-defined layout/format, and, sometimes, text and imagery. Your job is to essentially “fill in the blanks” with personalized details about the individual you’re speaking with.
Scorpion gives your HVAC business access to pre-built and customizable HVAC email templates. For example, imagine you need to send an email to a customer who wants to have their A/C unit serviced. This type of service is very common for HVAC contractors and techs like yourself to send emails about. So instead of constantly writing emails about this service from scratch, simply pull up a pre-built template in Scorpion, plug in any additional information that you need to include (e.g., available dates of service), and hit “send.”
Create your Email Marketing Strategy
Establish an HVAC email marketing strategy to deliver value to your target audience, drive revenue, and retain more customers. Don’t forget to use an email marketing tool to automate the processes of sending emails, utilizing templates, and measuring email success.
Interested in learning more about how Scorpion’s email marketing tool can help your HVAC business convert and retain more customers?