HVAC Email Marketing – 10 Steps to Success

By: Frank DePino | May 18, 2023

HVAC email marketing is a great way to build your audience, convert leads, and increase customer loyalty. You might have had intermittent success with email marketing for your HVAC business, but nothing sticks. What are the best email marketing strategies for HVAC contractors to improve your open rates?

We recommend the following as part of your HVAC email marketing plan:

• Setting goals
• Integrating with your marketing strategy
• Making lead magnets
• Picking an email platform
• Crafting email content
• Tracking metrics

In this guide to formulating an HVAC email marketing strategy, we’ll take you through 9 steps or stages needed to build a comprehensive strategy that will have your leads and customers eagerly opening more emails and interacting with the content therein.

Why Should HVAC Companies Do Email Marketing?

Yours is a bustling HVAC business. You always have a full workload and thus not much time to commit to email marketing. Why should you prioritize it?

These are the advantages of using email marketing for HVAC contractors.

Propels Your HVAC Lead Gen Efforts

Even if your HVAC company is busy now, you never know when the customer activity can go from a deluge to a trickle.

You need a contingency plan and having leads in the sales funnel is that contingency plan.

HVAC email marketing is the perfect launching pad to collect more leads. When a lead visits your website, they’ll see your opt-in form or lead magnet.

Since you’re providing such highly valuable content, of course, the lead will have no qualms about sharing their contact information and signing up for your email list.

With email marketing strategies, your HVAC business could have more leads in the funnel than ever before.

Converts More Customers

Converting leads into customers isn’t an exact science, but a big part of the equation is building a relationship with your leads. Email marketing campaigns do exactly that.

Through your email content, you’ll educate your leads about the HVAC services you provide, peel back the curtain with informative newsletters, and provide current news on services and specials.

You’ll also have a team who can directly respond to emails rather than always send out automated emails.

All these efforts build a relationship with a lead. When a lead feels like they have the full breadth of information they’re looking for, they may be likelier to convert.

Engages with Customers

It’s not solely your leads who benefit from the aforementioned email content.

Your customers too like to feel like you remember and care about them, especially the customers who go way back.

You can do more than send them informative content and newsletters. You can personalize and automate messages such as for their birthday and offer them exclusive discounts to reward their loyalty.

Increases Sales

Finally, yet another very compelling reason to use HVAC email marketing is to increase your sales.

Leads who have recently converted into customers will be readier to buy.

Some of your customers who maybe weren’t considering HVAC services this year might change their minds if you dangle a tantalizing offer in front of them. 

How to Create an HVAC Email Marketing Strategy

Aspire Internet Design notes that the average HVAC conversion rate is two to five percent for your website alone.

Through a combination of your website, the other marketing strategies your HVAC business has in place, and email marketing, you should be able to increase your conversions.

Per the intro, let’s now go over the steps for crafting your HVAC email marketing strategy.

Create an Email Marketing Plan (and Set Your Goals)

Before you do anything else, you need a blueprint that will act as your guidepost as you navigate HVAC email marketing.

This blueprint will be known as your email marketing plan.

In your email marketing plan, you want to establish what your company’s goals are as they relate to email marketing.

Do you want to increase the size of your contact list? Generate more leads or perhaps even more qualified leads?

Build customer trust and retention, possibly with the goal of a referral strategy? Increase sales?

Maybe it’s even a combination of goals, which is likely.

Once you’ve identified your goals, it’s time to determine what steps you’ll need to take in your email marketing campaigns to achieve them.

Do you need a more robust email list? Maybe you should prune inactive contacts? Could personalization help? Perhaps email automation?

At this stage, the plans that comprise your email marketing plan are fluid rather than static. You’ll continue to refine the steps until it’s time to put them into action.

Even then, once you see your email marketing strategies play out in real time, you will undoubtedly go back and revise your strategy for the next campaign.

Integrate Your Email Marketing Campaign with Your Marketing Strategy

As you determine what your HVAC email marketing goals are and how you’ll achieve them, you can’t think of email marketing as a singular entity.

You must consider as well how your email marketing will integrate with existing HVAC marketing strategies.

Namely, you should pay attention to your content marketing.

You can integrate video from your YouTube channel and embed it into the body of an email (as appropriate, of course).

When integrating email marketing and your existing marketing strategies, the key is to avoid repeating content as much as you can.

You want to assume that those who read your blog also read your email and provide unique content for each.

Create Lead Magnets or Opt-in Forms

The next part of your email marketing strategy is to put together the forms that will grab the attention of your website visitors and hopefully inspire more signups to your email list.

You can do this through lead magnets and opt-in forms, which we’ve touched on several times already.

A lead magnet is a critical part of email marketing campaigns, as it’s designed to incentivize leads.

When a lead agrees to share their contact information and join your email list, they’re not doing it for “free,” per se. They receive something in return that’s known as a lead magnet.

The lead magnet should be a piece of highly valuable content but not a readily available post from your blog.

Perhaps you wrote an eBook on mold prevention in basements, so you take the first two chapters and use those as a lead magnet. Maybe your lead magnet is a checklist detailing signs you need a new furnace.

A lead magnet needn’t be extensive content, but it should be something that the lead will find valuable enough that they’re willing to give their contact info to you for it.

Choose How (and Where) to Integrate Your Opt-in Forms

Next, you have to choose where your opt-in forms will go on your website.

After all, if the forms aren’t seen by your visitors, then no matter how enticing the content is, you won’t get many email list signups.

Here are some prime places to put the opt-in forms across your site:

• In the middle and/or end of your blog posts
• In your sidebar
• On the about page
• As a pop-up on popular webpages on your site
• On your hello bar
• In the footer

We recommend A/B testing to see which opt-in form location will drive the most signups.

Keep in mind that the form’s location is not set in stone.

You also don’t have to use a single opt-in form on your whole website. You can have several across the site, but don’t add so many that a site visitor would feel bombarded!

Select a Platform for Your HVAC Email Marketing Campaign

Assuming this HVAC email marketing campaign is your first, you might not yet have an email marketing platform or software.

There are countless options out there available at all sorts of price points, and we won’t cover them here.

Instead, we’ll provide some pointers that will make it easier for you to choose the right platform for your HVAC business.

• Plan the types of emails you’ll send: You don’t want to find out after you’ve already paid for the year that your new email marketing software can’t send X or Y types of emails when that’s what you’ve built your HVAC email marketing campaign around. Know the kinds of emails you’ll send and be sure the software has them.

• Set your budget: You also need a budget when shopping around for email marketing platforms. Many offer options to pay annually or monthly, with monthly plans usually cheaper. Review your expenditures to determine how much you can spend on software and then go from there.

• Decide which features you can’t go without: Email marketing platforms do not offer identical features from one software to another. If they did, they would all be the same. Thus, it’s best for you to determine which features are must-haves and then choose an email marketing platform that has as many of those features as possible.

• Use trials and free plans: Many email marketing platforms offer either free trials or free plans. Take advantage of these! Even if you can’t necessarily use all the features in a free plan, you can get a feel for how the software handles, how fast it loads, and what the customer support is like.

Make an Email Template

Once you’ve purchased an email marketing software of choice, it’s time to go in and create your first email template.

This might be an HVAC newsletter template, a welcome email template, or another type of email content you plan to regularly send.

Many email templates feature drag-and-drop features for ease of use and speed in template creation.

You can save a template so you can refer back to it later when sending the same type of email, which is very convenient!

Create the Content

Your email template is finished. Next, you have to create the content that will comprise your HVAC email.

For instance, there’s the subject line.

According to HubSpot, about 35 percent of email recipients choose to open (or not open) an email based entirely on the subject line.

That does put pressure on marketers to write the best subject line ever with every single email they send.

The following best practices will make the act of writing email subject lines less strenuous:

• Use emojis if appropriate, but only if they add to the message, and use them sparingly at that.
• Don’t put any part of your subject line in all caps, even if you want to attract attention to it.
• Don’t use spammy and salesy words just to get opens.
• Avoid the use of special characters, as they don’t appear on all devices.
• Stick within the parameters of nine to 60 characters.

You also have to write the email body

Here are some tips that will help you write compelling emails your audience won’t be able to wait to read:

• Keep your paragraphs short and sweet. Add no more than three sentences to a paragraph.
• Break up the text with visual elements such as videos, images, or bullet points at the very least.
• Insert links, but don’t be spammy about it
• Make it clear where the links take the reader. Instead of a hyperlink that says, “click here,” you’d say, “click here to schedule your furnace maintenance.”

Collect Leads and Build Your List

Through your marketing measures and especially through the email marketing strategies that we’ve discussed to this point, you should have begun collecting leads who have joined your email list.

Once you have your list, the next part of your HVAC email marketing plan is to segment your audience.

You should use criteria that account for demographics, geographics, and psychographics.

As a very easy example, you would segment heating-only customers from cooling-only customers and heating and cooling customers.

This is how you deliver a personalized experience through email.

Monitor and Test Your HVAC Email Marketing Campaigns

Your first email marketing campaign has gone live. Now it’s time to review the metrics and see how the campaign does.

One of those metrics will be your email open rate, which determines who’s opening your messages.

According to management software company FieldEdge, the average email open rate for the HVAC industry is 23 percent. That’s not spectacular, but it’s not bad, either. You can work with it.

You also want to track the email click-through rate. This rate is a lot lower in the HVAC field, as customer service company Zyra states the rate is at about three percent.

Conclusion

HVAC email marketing requires a comprehensive strategy to find the roadmap to success. If you’re struggling with your email marketing, trust in the pros at Mediaboom. We’ll discuss your goals, deploy your campaign, and monitor its success along the way.

By: Frank DePino

Frank DePino is Principal and Founder of Mediaboom. Since 2002, Frank has led Mediaboom’s award-winning staff of creative and technical professionals, building the most effective marketing and advertising solutions for its clients.