We often see contractors looking for good HVAC advertising ideas and examples to help get the phone ringing, especially during the shoulder season when the demand begins to slow down.
There are many ways to generate demand for your business during the shoulder months that will keep your team busy and bringing in new opportunities, such as out bounding to your existing customer base for preventative maintenance.
But you can also run some seasonal specials & promotions to help bring in new business.
Follow along as we share some of our favorite seasonal promotions for you to use in your advertising efforts. Many of these strategies can be utilized in your social media marketing, email marketing, and even television/radio advertising!
Table of Contents:
Best Promotions To Generate More HVAC Service & Repair Calls
Air Conditioning Tune-Up Offers
It’s no secret that offering tune-ups are a great way to get your foot in the door and generate new opportunities for value-based upsells. When it comes to offering promotions on tune-ups, we generally recommend doing it in tiers to build demand. For example, if you’re typically charging $119 for a tune-up in the heat of summer, you would discount $10 to $20 off each month for the months building up to the peak heat.
So to break this down, it would be something like:
- $59 Early Bird Tune-Up (March)
- $79 Hoppy Spring AC Tune-Up (April)
- $99 AC Tune-Up (May)
- $119 Summer AC Tune-Up (June – August)
This way, you can generate demand for tune-ups in the early spring time when there isn’t much demand for service and repairs. And you can position the messaging to build more demand with each passing month as summer approaches.
Offer Discount on Repairs
Typically in the summer months, you don’t need much help getting the phone to ring. Because let’s face it, people are running their air conditioners non-stop and breakdowns are inevitable. But you can position yourself as the one to call by offering a simple discount on repairs.
We wouldn’t recommend offering a massive amount of money off, but generally speaking, $25-$50 off of any repair will get the homeowner to choose you over someone else.
$0 Diagnostic Fee With Same-Day Repairs
This is one that works really well for customers that don’t like the thought of paying for a diagnostic fee. Why do they get mad about this? No one knows. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that if you call a company for help, that you’re going to pay for their professional advice and findings. But for some reason, some homeowners think this is highway robbery.
By waving your diagnostic fee with same-day repairs, you’ll get them to accept the quoted work a little bit quicker. Which can help if they’re trying to shop around and get eight quotes for a new capacitor.
Pro tip: don’t include the diagnostic fee into the quoted repairs. Truly waive the cost of it and charge the repairs at full amount. Many homeowners will think that you’re just going to jack the price up to offset the waived fee.
Advertising Ideas To Generate More HVAC Replacement Opportunities
These are the promotional ideas that generate the higher ticket sales. So you’ll have to get a little bit more creative with the messaging. Because there aren’t many homeowners that actually want to drop the money on a new system.
So if you’ve built the value in your content strategy to educate customers on when the time is right for a new system, these ads can be the cherry on top to get them to take action.
Discount on Replacement/Trade-In Allowance
The trade-in allowance offer one is our favorites. Because this empowers your comfort advisors to dictate what the discount will be.
For example, you can say “Up to $2500 in trade-in allowance.” And on the surface, that sounds like a HUGE discount. But remember, you said up to. So if you’re quoting a job that is going to be a 2.5 ton 14 SEER system, you can give the customer a smaller discount.
But if you’re quoting a changeout on a massive home that has three full systems, you can sweeten the deal a bit to get them to pull the trigger on a much higher ticket job.
Advertising Financing Options “As Low As”
Advertising your financing options can really help generate demand for new systems as well. However, please take a note of caution that you may get lower quality leads on this.
We’ve seen success on examples such as “As low as $89 per month.” Which obviously is the best case scenario for the homeowner. But you’re painting a picture of opportunity for someone who may need a new system and putting it into perspective that they can actually afford it.
Ways To Grow Your Maintenance Club Memberships
Preventative maintenance agreements are crucial to the success of your contracting business–especially if you plan to sell your company one day.
Maintenance is guaranteed work for your company, and generates monthly recurring revenue, which is crucial for predicting expenses.
Buy One Membership Get First Month Free
Though maintenance memberships are typically a low-cost offer for customers, sometimes you need to be able to offer something that will get them to sign up. Especially if they’re apprehensive on the value of a membership.
We’ve seen many contractors offer a “first month free” or “first month for $1” to generate more demand for their maintenance club. This will work well if you can provide the maintenance service at the same time. So they can test out the service at a low entry cost.
Lunch On Us/Gift Card with Maintenance Club Membership
Another great way to generate new maintenance club memberships and referrals is to offer “lunch on us” or a gift card. Typically a visa gift card will suffice, that way they can choose how they spend it.
Educate Homeowners With A Dedicated HVAC Content Marketing Strategy
Lead generation is great, but demand generation is even better. By creating a dedicate content marketing strategy that answers your customers most commonly asked questions, you’ll be top of mind when they have a problem.
At Rival Digital, we offer full-service content creation services such as copywriting, photography, videography, that will help elevate your entire digital marketing strategy.
Contact us today to learn more about our services.
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