How Marketing Automation Can Triple Your Conversions for Plumbing & HVAC Companies

Welcome everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in today’s workshop, we’re gonna be talking all about. How to leverage marketing automation to triple your conversions in your plumbing, HVAC, electrical or home service company. And I love talking about marketing. I love talking about the latest innovations on what’s going in with AI and where things are headed.

Let me know, if you’re watching this live or maybe you’re watching after the fact, let me know on a scale from one to 10, one being you don’t use automation at all and 10 being like you feel like you’ve got automation dial, then maybe you’ve got. AI chat happening on your website.

Maybe you’ve got online booking maybe you’ve got AI voice that’s actually answering your calls. Let me know on a scale from one to 10, one being like not at all on pen, paper and a phone call, that answers 10 being I’ve got it pretty well dialed in. Gimme a number right? That way, this also helps you check in mentally where you’re at.

Alright, Marcel feels like pretty strong, like a, an eight. Jason’s given himself a six. Cassandra, about a six. Excellent. I think there’s always a little bit of a spectrum, and you probably wouldn’t be logging in to a session on how to leverage automation if you weren’t leaning towards that direction or already embracing that idea.

As you grow. Nick, if you could find the mute button for that sound, that’d be great. So I really think automation, like we’re talking about our marketing automation to enhance conversions. Has to be looked at in the bigger picture strategy of what you’re looking to do. And our bigger picture strategy is the accelerated growth model, right?

Which is how do we accelerate the leads? How do we accelerate the book jobs? How do we accelerate the revenue in our business so that we can, accomplish the revenue growth that we’re after. And really there’s three things we have to focus on. We have to focus on driving leads, right?

Getting those phone calls, getting those web inquiries, getting those chats right. We have to then focus on conversion because leads that don’t convert into book jobs, that don’t convert into actual paying customers that use this again and again don’t go anywhere. And then we’ve gotta optimize our results, right?

We have to really figure out for all the money we’re spending in marketing. What’s working right is that the SEO is at the pay per click and really get a dial on how much we’re spending how much our average cost per lead is, and most importantly, what’s the, what’s driving the return on investment so we can optimize those results.

And so when it comes to driving leads, I’m a big proponent of let’s get the organic equation dialed in. We’re coming up in all the places our customers are looking for us, then let’s. Put some paid ad spend behind it. Let’s make sure local service ads is running. Let’s make sure Google Ads is running.

Let’s make sure we’ve got retargeting in place. And then also, let’s make sure that we’re collecting a database of prospects that haven’t converted yet, a database of customers that have done business with us that we wanna remain in touch with, so that we can do business with the them again in the future and get referrals, right?

If you get that dialed in, you’re gonna have. A plethora of leads, right? We all have a different lead volume that we need, right? If you’re looking to get from 700,000 to 2 million, it’s a different number of leads that you need than if you’re going from 5 million to 7 million. I wonder if anybody in the chat here would be able to say, Hey, you know what?

My lead target on a monthly basis is X, right? Let me know what that is. I’d love to know what your number is, and if you’re, again, if you’re watching this after the fact, type that in as well. Mike says, I’m the custom GPT builder and coach. Awesome. Glad to have you on here. Thanks for joining live.

From there, we have to maximize conversion, and that’s what we’re focused on today because if we’re generating a bunch of leads through these various paid channels. We wanna make sure those leads convert into, actual book jobs. They convert into actual revenue. And so couple things, right? Our website, which I talked about in our last live workshop, we have to make sure that website is built to convert, that it’s compelling, that it’s giving them a reason to do business with us and to call us versus the competition.

A lot of home service companies bleed in that area. We also have to make sure that we’ve got our reputation in place, right? Where if somebody looks us up, they’re gonna want to know how many reviews do they have, what are other people saying about them? Are they gonna take care of me? Are they gonna take advantage?

So making sure we’ve got that positive review sentiment online. And then ultimately to optimize conversion, we wanna leverage automation, right? And that’s where we can get quicker speed to lead. We can follow through and follow up better. We can meet our customers where they’re at. And so that’s what we’re gonna be talking about, really focusing on today.

Another way to look at this is in these three things, in these three boxes. And we’re gonna zoom in right now on marketing automation strategies.

So for those of you that don’t know who I am, my name is Josh Nelson. I’m the founder of Plumbing and Hvac, SEO. I’m the author of How to Triple Your Sales by Getting Your Internet Marketing been actively involved in this industry for going on, I think it’s 15 years now. Really involved in QSC nexstar Service Roundtable, CEO Warrior.

Have had the opportunity to, be in those rooms, be in those conversations. But I’d say more important than any of that stuff is at this point I’ve literally in our organization, worked with hundreds of plumbing HVAC electrical companies and be able to really get in the weeds with them in terms of their marketing and been able to see a lot of them go from, struggling presence online to the point where they’re now the dominant player in their market.

Many of them, seeing millions and millions of dollars in revenue growth. And I’m happy to share case studies on that as we go. And a lot of them have recently been acquired, right? With all of the acquisitions that are going on, if you’ve got a good marketing system, if you’ve got, a good conversion mechanism, you become very attractive to private equity.

And so what I share isn’t based on theory, like this is based on, our company physically working with hundreds of companies, seeing what’s working in the immediate moment. Testing new things, and that’s what we share and that’s what I’m gonna be sharing with you guys on today’s session.

And this is what we do, right? We literally have a team of 47 full-time employees at Plumbing and Hvac, SEO kind of scattered across the country. And we live this stuff, setting up the websites, making sure they’re built to convert. Making sure the copy is compelling, making sure the website’s got the proper authority to rank, and then putting all the strategies in paste with paid advertising, with tracking, with marketing automation.

And so if you’re interested in talking with us and having us do a free evaluation of your current. Online marketing strategy, we’d love to do that for you. Sometimes it’s good to be on these sessions, but sometimes you want somebody just to drill down on your specific situation. So if that’s you Nick’s gonna drop the link.

You just go to plumber seo.net/schedule. Grab a time, no, no hard sale. We’ll do an evaluation of your current online marketing, show you what’s working, show you where there might be some gaps, and talk about, Hey, if you’re interested, here’s how we can help. And if not. That’s cool too. We’d love the opportunity to just check your stuff out, share some insights, and if there’s a fit, fantastic.

If there’s not, that’s okay. So with that said, when it comes to marketing this is all about marketing and really marketing automation in general. What’s your biggest challenge right now? If you could drop that in the chat for me, whether you’re on with me live or maybe watching this elsewhere, maybe listening to it, I want you to at least think the thought.

What is the biggest challenge when it comes to marketing your plumbing? HVAC home service company? I would love it if you drop something in the chat, but what I typically hear, and we talk with, plumbing HVAC home service companies every day. Not enough leads. Hey, listen I’ve got technicians, I’ve got trucks, we’ve got things that we need to do and we don’t have enough leads coming in to keep the trucks running.

Type leads, if that’s you it’s just not enough leads. And I know that, I hear that often. The other thing I hear is. Low quality leads. It’s Hey, you know what? I’ve got leads. Yeah. I paid this company and they got me ranked, or I paid this, this company, and they’re doing ads for me.

And I’m getting leads. And they’re telling me, Hey, look, you got X amount of leads, but they’re low quality. They’re not the kind of customer that actually has a problem right now. Or they’re like, they’re just tire kickers. They’re not really the good fit for what we do. Type quality, if that’s for you.

Jason says, converting leads online, you’re in the right place. That’s what we’re gonna be really focused on today, but quality, for some of us, that’s the struggle. It’s man, it just. None of these jobs convert. It feels like a big waste of my time. The other challenge I hear like the big problem is the leads are costing too much and there’s a low return on investment.

And so we’re like, some of us are saying, look, I’ve invested in this and I do see lead flow and we actually get some book jobs, but by the time I pay my technicians, by the time I cover my overhead. There’s just not a return on investment. Like I’m just barely breaking even type ROI in the chat. If that’s you, it’s this isn’t an ROI issue.

Let’s see. Abel says, not able to cost control per lead through Google Ads. And that’s an issue, right? The cost of Google Ads right now, unfortunately is going up. And the competition, ’cause there’s so many other plumbing HVC home service companies out there. If we’re not. Getting a quality cost per lead through, effective strategy and then really converting those leads.

Our cost to require to actually convert the book job is more than the cost. Or more than the revenue generated, right? So this is an example here of like just low ROI. And it could be if you drill down, maybe Google ads in your market isn’t a good fit or maybe just the way that it’s structured, you’re going after too broad of a set of keywords and you need to dial that in.

That’s a topic for another, actually, I talked deep on, on that particular issue last week. So if you wanna go check out that the recording of our previous session on how to accelerate your results with Google ads and paid advertising you know that is a great session to dive into. And so for some of us, it’s a lack of clarity, right?

For ROI, so it’s Hey, you know what, I do get a return on investment. It’s not where I want it to be, never is, right? We always wanna make more than, we, we currently are, but I don’t know I’m feel like I’m blind, flying blind at some level. I feel something’s working, I just don’t know what it is.

Type clarity, if it’s for you, it’s like I just, I’d like I don’t really know and I’d like to know. These are the challenge we hear every single day. The other big challenge is there’s too many options, right? When it comes to marketing your home service company. In the back in the day, it was pretty easy, right?

We bought an ad in the double, a double truck ad in the yellow pages. Spent a bunch of money, but that’s where our customers looked and it was pretty simple. In today’s market, man, there’s so many options, right? They could go to Google, they might, maybe it’s Google Ads, maybe it’s local service ads.

Maybe it’s, Hey, you know what? These people are telling me I need to be on thumb tech, or I need to be on, whatever platform. I should be doing radio advertising. I should be on all of these channels. Type options if you just feel overwhelmed. There’s so many different ways to market your plumbing HVAC home service company.

That’s hard to, it’s hard to pick, right? It’s hard to stick with one particular strategy and my belief now having worked with, again, hundreds of plumbing HVAC home service companies is. In most cases, it’s not really a lead problem, right? There’s so many options that we can implement.

There’s so many strategies, there’s so many homeowners that are in desperate need every single day for our services, whether it’s, installing a water heater, whether it’s replacing an AC system, whether it’s, doing a new electrical build off for their EV system. There’s a surplus of demand.

For these services, and we all know there’s a limit to the amount of people that are trained in these services, right? There’s more supply than there is. There’s more demand than there is supply. And so with all the channels, there are companies that are winning today. There are plumbing, HVAC, home service companies that are absolutely crushing it, that are absolutely getting a hundred, 200, 500 times growth year over year.

What’s the difference? Why is it that, and maybe in your situation, you’re not seeing that growth, you’re not able to get the results that you want? I believe it’s not a, it’s not a lead problem, it’s a conversion problem. And what I’m seeing is unconverted leads is the biggest challenge.

Because I’ll share some stats with you. If we’re paying for Google ads, if we’re paying for SEO, if we’re paying for display advertising or Facebook ads or whatever channel you’re talking about, and we’re not really good at converting those leads into sales. It becomes very expensive. The ROI becomes very poor.

And so this is the problem we have to solve for and that’s what we’re gonna focus on today’s session. And we put together a little overview of kinda really focusing and looking at the biggest challenges, the biggest problems we’re seeing home services deal with. And we put together a little document, the five marketing mistakes.

That are quietly killing your book jobs. If you want that, just type in five, just put the number five in the chat. That will trigger Nick to say, okay, they want this. And we’ll send it over to you. And if you’re watching this after the fact, just put the number five. And that will tell us to go ahead and grab that file where you can download it.

Marcel, Jason. Okay, guys. Nick, if you could drop the link for them, that would be great. But here’s the problem. Big, big picture, the problem is. 90% of the people that get to your website don’t convert. If I look at your website today, you maybe you’re a unique situation. 90% of the time they get there, they’re in your market, they have a problem, but for some reason.

They’re not converting, and that’s statistically across the board. In the industry, 50 to 60% of your inbound leads go unconverted. So inbound leads, it’s like they’re picked up the phone, they called your office for some reason they didn’t convert, right? They didn’t actually even wind up doing business with you.

And then 90% of web forms go nowhere, right? If you’ve got a form on your website where someone can enter their name, their phone number, their email address, and a little brief description of their issue. I am telling you, I look at these every day, those aren’t winning. They’re not converting, and that’s a statistical reality in your home service business today.

So here’s why, right? Why is that happening? Why are the people that actually have a problem they need to solve coming to your website in your market, not converting well? Here’s the statistics. Hopefully you guys can see this. Just gimme a yes in the chat. Hopefully my screen’s large enough. Here that you can see it type Fs.

If you can see the text, I’ll walk through it, but I would like you to be able to give the visual reference as well. Number one, today’s consumer would prefer to book online versus to call in and speak to somebody, right? If they have the choice. They’d rather book online and I know home services we are conditioned for the phone, right?

We wanna have them call, we’ve got the dispatch company standing like dispatch team standing by to answer the questions. And that’s how we’ve built our entire marketing machine to focus on the phone call, to focus on the phone call. But I don’t know about you. I personally today have become very, Uber mentality, right?

I need groceries. I pull up an app, I put the seven items that I want in, and a couple hours later, the groceries show up at my door. I need to get to someplace and my car’s broken down. I’m not calling, the taxi service. I’m going into an app and I’m saying, come pick me up. That’s, most of your customers are either in that place today or very directly headed in that direction. And so if they have the opportunity to, they’ve got a plumbing or an HVAC or an electrical problem, if they’ve got the opportunity to get to your website and fill in a form or get to your website and pick up a phone call and have to talk to somebody and have to stop what they’re doing or the op, the opportunity to schedule a date and a time where one technician’s gonna come out to the house.

They’re gonna choose that every day. Now that’s not everybody. I’m not saying we need to eliminate the phone calls. I’m not saying we need to eliminate the web forms, but I am saying if we don’t have online booking, that’s gonna be a big problem in terms of like why somebody would hit the back button and go to the competition versus booking directly on your website.

If given the choice, they would prefer to text message or to start a chat than to have a phone conversation. I don’t know about you. Like right now, if anybody needs to reach me and they’re calling my, they’re calling my direct cell phone number. Unless I’m expecting the call, unless I know what that call’s about, it’s gonna, it’s gonna go to voicemail.

And I’m gonna wait for them to probably, I won’t even listen to the voicemail. I’m gonna wait for them to text, message me. If it’s really important, we’ll have a two-way conversation type text if that’s you like. Given the option to have a conversation or to have a quick text to solve the issue, what do you choose?

I want you guys to type this in if you’re live in the room or if you happen to be listening after the fact. Most of us, I. Opting to have a text conversation. Now, outside of that the, for the people that do submit a form for the people that do pick up the phone call and have a conversation leads that don’t get followed up within 15 minutes or less, go cold, right?

There’s just too many options and today’s consumers moving this quickly, right? They’ve got an issue in the home, they’re busy, they got other things going on. They’re maybe they’re quickly typing a search into Google or they’re typing the chat, GPT. And they’re just looking to get the problem solved as quickly and efficiently as possible.

And so if they get to your website and they opt to do a chat or they opt to fill in a form, if you don’t have somebody that’s immediately following up with them, they’re hitting the back button and they’re going to the next company and they’re going to the company that either does answer live and can book them, or they’re going to the company that’s got an online widget where they can schedule in.

True or true, just type true if you know that to be true. 15 minutes, and that’s an old stat, right? It’s probably more like five minutes in today’s market and the average unconverted customer. It needs to be touched five to seven times before they book. There’s a lot of customers that aren’t a shopping mode, right?

Sometimes it’s an emergency and we know those are gonna get booked one way or the other. But other higher ticket things that we do, like a full house Repi or, changing up their HVAC system or installing a, an EV system for their garage to to power up the, the new Tesla or whatnot.

Those people might need a little bit of more nurture, right? And I find most. Plumbing, HVAC. Home service companies, they’re tell me if this is you’re gonna cite me if this is you, their whole marketing strategy is optimized around, let’s generate a phone call, right? And somebody in the office ideally is there to answer the call and they’re gonna answer a couple questions.

They’re gonna try and schedule the conversation. They’re not gonna give the price over the phone. But best case scenario, the customer says, yes, I’ll schedule. And they schedule for Tuesday at two. After that, call hangs up. If they didn’t book, there’s literally nothing happening. There’s no follow up email, there’s no follow up call.

There’s no droop campaign. It’s if they didn’t book, it’s gone. And I’ll tell you, 99 out of a hundred plumbing HVAC home service companies in today’s market, that’s the reality. And statistics tell us if we can just be a little more diligent, if we can just be a little bit more thorough with our follow through, we can convert most or more of those opportunities into book jobs.

Type one in the chat here. If you’re following along, if this makes sense. These are the reasons you’re not converting the deals and the opportunities that are coming your way. Thank you, Jason. So here’s the solution, right? It’s pretty simple. In today’s market, the technology exists to eliminate. All of those issues.

Number one, offer online booking, right? Give the customer the ability to pick a date in a time, and we’ll talk more about logistics of that and whether it actually has to match to your exact dispatch availability, or if we could just do a soft booking, right? A lot of cases, the soft booking accomplishes the same outcome, so offer online booking.

Have a two-way chat option on your website where somebody can text message back and forth with you, right? And I’m gonna advocate for two-way text because just having a dead end chat on your site where they have to chat only on the website itself, you don’t get their cell phone number. And once they close the window, you’ve lost them.

Versus once they’ve two-way text messaged you, now you’ve got their cell phone, you’re actually able to communicate with them, wherever they go in that moment in time. Number three is we wanna make sure we’re leveraging automation. Automation now exists where the moment somebody requests an appointment, the moment somebody fills in that form on your website with the details.

That very moment, they can get a phone call connected to your office. They can get a text message, Hey, saw you filled in the form, how can we help? And they can get an email and then they can also, get added to a follow-up sequence where we can drip them automatically. Because let’s face it, you’re not going to put somebody on your office drip following up with all of your leads.

But we can put automation to continue to circle back until they’ve either booked the job or until they’ve said they’ve gone somewhere else. So this is the solution, right? It’s pretty simple. The technology absolutely exists, but it can have a huge ramification on the results that you get with your marketing and how you grow your plumbing.

HVAC home service company. So I’m just gonna give you simple math here, and I wanna share real examples on this as we go, but. Let’s just say right now you’re generating about a hundred leads per month, right? You’ve got like phone calls coming in. You’ve got web inquiries coming in, a hundred leads per month, and your conversion rate’s 30%, right?

And that’s about the norm, unfortunately, right? Because you have no automation, because you’re not quick to follow up on your leads, 30% of your leads convert. So what happens is. You wind up with, let’s just call it 30 book jobs from those a hundred leads. Optimistic. That’s optimistic, unfortunately. So a hundred leads, 30%, 30 book jobs.

Let’s just say your average ticket is six 50. Lemme know what your average ticket is here in the chat. I know that I’ve seen tickets as little as two 50 even in today’s market and tickets north of two grand. Depending upon what you do and whether you’re in a higher end and how well your technicians upsell in the field, lemme know if you could, what your average ticket is, but let’s just say it’s six 50.

30 jobs at six 50, that’s $19,000 in revenue generated. That’s, high cost to acquire. That’s rough. Now we’ve seen, when we put this automation in place. We’re following up speed lead. We’re giving the opportunity to book directly online. We’ve seen, we can see conversions go up to as high as 70%.

Really that’s the the gold standard from a lead to a book job. And so how does that change with the automation with putting this stuff in place? You go from 30 book jobs to 70 book jobs for the same number of leads without spending another dollar in advertising, without spending another dollar in local service ads, without spending another dollar in whatever.

We’re generating now 70 book jobs. Keep the average ticket at six 50. If you’ve got a higher ticket like Jason of 1209, numbers even look better. But you go from like 20,000 to $45,000 in revenue because you’re following up more effectively because you’re able to convert those leads into book jobs and into sales.

This makes every lead that you generate more valuable. It gives you the opportunity to be more aggressive with your marketing, right? Because if more of the leads are converting, your average cost to acquire a customer is less. You can spend more on Google Ads, you can spend more on local service ads. You can start to compete with even some of the big dogs in your marketplace.

And so a really good example of that is Cardinal HVAC out in the Wisconsin market. And you can pull up their website, Cardinal HV c.com. As a matter of fact, lemme just. Lemme just pull that up real quick, that way you guys can see a visual of this in the real world. Hang with me.

Alright, in one second. You guys should be seeing my screen up close. Alright, so let’s pull up, let’s pull up Caral, HVAC. And without getting into all the details about. Structuring of the website and everything else, there’s a couple things we definitely wanna optimize to improve conversion, right?

Just in, just say just drop one of the chat if you’re seeing my screen, I just wanna make sure you’re seeing my screen Okay. But obviously the phone number that phone number is gonna be where most of our opportunities convert. So we wanna make sure phone number’s front and center, and we wanna make sure it’s easy to get to on a mobile device, right?

So if we were to. Orient this so that it’s really tight, like phone numbers, they click to call right from the mobile site. The other important factor from a conversion perspective is online booking. I said it once, I’ll say it again and again, given the opportunity, your customers would prefer to book online versus pick up the phone and call.

And so we wanna have the opportunity where they can click a button, give you some details about their situation, give you some details about where they exist. And actually schedule, right? Whether that’s a hard booking or a soft booking. And we can do this through Conversion Amp, we can do this through Schedule Engine, we can do it directly on ServiceTitan, we can do it directly on house Call Pro and Field Edge.

But this technology exists and it’s crazy to me that there’s plumbing HVC electrical companies that aren’t putting this in place. Now the third conversion factor we want to have is the ability to have that two-way chat, right? And we can do this through chirp, we can do it through conversion Amp. We can do it through a variety of different platforms.

And these other tools, but it’s really important. Like you, I can talk about a million different reasons why this website convers, but specifically those three conversion factors are the main things that you wanna focus on. And so I just want to, now I’m gonna show some of the data here behind Cardinal, right?

And if we look at the metrics in their particular case, about a 14, 14,000 a month investment in online marketing. So that’s our management fees, that’s Google ads, that’s other retargeting spend. We track 1,931 leads per month, right? And more maniacal to see how many actually phone calls, how many web forms, how many online booking scheduled, so that’s 1,931 leads.

You divide that out, that’s about $7 and 28 cents per lead. Really effective cost per lead. I’m not promising that to anybody, but I’m just saying when we get the marketing lead generation strategy dialed in and then we really dial in the conversion. We can get really effective cost per lead metrics.

And they’re converting just in terms of their lead to call ratio, about 25%. When we look at the follow up and follow through on the backend, it’s getting close to 50% from lead to book job. Another great example of this is JD Precision. You can pull that up on your own if you like, but same thing, right?

Phone number in the right place. Chat online, ability to schedule directly through their website. Similar spend, about $14,000. They’re in spring text, a little more competitive market. 625 leads tracked. That’s an average of $22 69 cents per lead in plumbing, HVAC and electrical. And you can see it comes from a variety of sources, right?

Some from call-ins, some from Google Google ads, some from directly getting ranked on the Google map in their market. And so again, straight conversion website to conversion about 20% after the automation in place, close to 50%. And I can share lots more examples. I don’t wanna get too into the weeds, but a lot of us, I know me personally, like to see examples to validate, okay, do the does this actually make a difference in the world type example?

If it’s helpful to see a couple of examples of this in play. All right, so how do we do this? What is it that we need to understand what is it that we need to put in place? Number one, we have to engage the way that our customers wanna engage. I talked about this before and I just want to, I want to make sure it settles that your customer would like to book online.

They would like to two-way text message, and some of them would like to, to phone call. Stop making phone conversation. The only option in order to schedule a time with your company. Here’s some of the biggest trends on this particular area. Just to validate this with data, 73% of consumers prefer booking services such as plumbing, electrical, and HVAC Online driven by speed to lead and convenience.

That’s why valve and meter.com online bookings jumped 52% from 2019 to 2022. Think 2025, how much that’s accelerated. We don’t have that data right now, but we’re seeing our clients that do offer online booking, that’s where the prospects are going, so we don’t have that huge opportunity. Businesses that offer online booking see an average increase of up to 120%, and then 45% of bookings happen during off peak hours.

This is important because I know a lot of you guys have live answer between, 7:00 AM and three 30 or 4:00 PM Eastern time or whatever your time is where you operate. And after that it’s going to like this, janky phone answering service, and they do a very basic job of collecting details.

If you’ve got online booking, if you’ve got live two-way chat with automation. People can take care of their situation, even if it’s after hours, even if it’s like in weird hours and in their mind, solve the problem and have the thing scheduled. So just making the case like these are the trends, these are the opportunities type three, if these three conversion factors are starting to make sense to you and why we want online booking, why we want two-way text, and why we wanna have the other opportunities for conversion.

Alright, Marcel, thank you very much. Very good. Alright. Also, statistics say that 90% of all text messages are opened. 95% of text messages are responded to within three minutes of being delivered. And what’s more important is they’re five times more likely to send and receive a text message than a phone call.

So if we don’t have texting as an opportunity and we’re just leveraging the phone, or we’re just thinking we’re gonna use email, because email is a dead end for home services, right? Like very few of your customers are gonna convert via email. We need to give them online booking. We need two-way text messaging, and we do need the live phone answer as a mechanism.

Number two is speed. The lead, we have to follow up quickly. We have to make sure that we’re not leaving our potential customers waiting, right? The faster we can get back to their inquiry, the faster we can confirm their online booking, the better. Some stats on this, leads that aren’t followed up within 15 minutes or less, go cold.

Following up five minutes. Within five minutes. Is 21 times more effective than calling after 30 minutes? After five minutes, the odds of qualifying a lead drops by 80% and 50% of leads go with the company. That answers first, right? So if you’re frustrated with your thumbtack or you’re frustrated with your conversion rates, it’s because somebody else is using automation or enabling online booking and they’re following up quicker and they’re getting those book jobs and they’re capturing that revenue.

Hard to do this in the absence of automation, right? If we are not leveraging automation, then we’d have to have an army of salespeople standing by the answer live. We’d have to have an army of salespeople standing by the second a web form comes in, and they’d have to have an army of salespeople that are following up on all these opportunities manually, and, sending text messages and making phone calls.

With automation, we can streamline this entire process, and really what this enables us to do is. Allow customers to at least soft book online. And so this is where I want to talk briefly. I, some of you guys feel like I don’t want to give them an online schedule option because I don’t know when my tech’s gonna be available.

I don’t know if that’s gonna be like, matched up with our actual booking, system. And I hear that and I ideally get your whole stuff synced up so that when they do pick a time, it shows your actual availability and you can actually get that done. But in the meantime. You can absolutely offer a soft booking.

So what a soft booking is they see a date and a time, let’s say tomorrow at 2:00 PM and they enter their name and their email address and they’ve picked that time and they get an email that says, thanks so much for scheduling, or, requesting our team to come up this date at this time. We will get back to you as soon as possible.

And then Betty in the office, or Tom in the office, whoever gets that message can look at the dispatch board and say, oh, actually we don’t have availability right now. Let’s call that customer, Hey customer, I saw you requested that time. Unfortunately we don’t have availability at that time, but I can get there, the next day or the day, a little bit earlier in that day.

Does that work for you? The reason this is so important is your customers that wanna book online are, a lot of them are bypassing you altogether, right? They’re just trying to get something scheduled so they can take it off their plate. And so they’re gonna, your website, they’re seeing if there’s online booking, maybe they’re submitting the form, but they’re hitting back and they’re going to the next site and trying to book online.

The moment they pick a date and a time in their mind, it’s done. Alright. Tuesday at three o’clock I pick this company and. I’m gonna, I’m gonna stand by, right? They don’t need to keep shopping, they don’t need to keep looking. So just type soft, for those of you that are worried about this, if you can at least move to a soft booking approach, it’s going to lead to more book jobs.

It’s gonna lead to, a lower cost per appointment and it’s gonna lead to a happier customers, right? Assuming you’ve got at least relative availability close to the time that they picked. The other thing we can do with automation is make sure that every. Lee gets an email, an SMS and a phone call in 30 seconds or less, right?

The automation can automatically fire and say, Hey, thanks for coming to our website and requesting information. How can we help? Start that conversation. And we can also automate the next piece of that, which is, did you wanna go ahead and schedule a time? And if they’re write back yes, then it says, great.

Here’s a scheduling link where you can pick a time that works for you. And they pull that up and they pick a date and a time, and then they enter our confirmation workflow. But there’s lots of things we can do to automate the speed to lead, and then we can also make sure that those customers that are in that wishy-washy phase, maybe they’re still thinking about it, maybe they’re not ready to schedule yet, that we’re dripping on them, right?

We’re just dripping touch check-ins. Hey, it’s been a week. You were on our website, you requested a form, or you trying to schedule a time? Do you still need some help? Is there some way we can support you? Simple stuff, right? Really with today’s technology, not very hard to implement. But can have a huge impact on your results.

We’ve engineered this in our platform, which we call Conversion Amp. And it, it takes the entire process from somebody called in and went to voicemail. We can send them to missed call, text back. Somebody tries to schedule a time online, but they don’t actually pick a time. It says, Hey, did you wanna schedule a time?

Once somebody schedules confirming it and doing the soft booking process, that’s, that’s the platform we’ve developed specifically for the plumbing HVAC home service companies. I just want I’d love to know your thoughts. Do you feel if you implemented that you would make more money?

Just type Yes. If so. So if you implemented every lead getting followed up within. A minute or less every lead getting touched a couple of times, giving people the opportunity to schedule online. Jason says yes. I think obviously this is going to help you convert more jobs. It’s gonna help you, maximize the return on investment from your advertising, and will also give you a competitive advantage so that you can potentially participate if your Google Ads cost is too high right now.

Because you convert more of those opportunities or maybe even plug into other lead channels that to this point aren’t working out. I’ll share an example, like real world example of Triple A air conditioning. You can see here $6,000 in spend, 439 leads per month, give or take $13 and $79 per lead.

So 4 39 leads, average conversion rate was like 40%. That’s 175 book jobs, a little higher ticket. They’re on the HVAC side, nine 50. That’s 230 jobs at six 50 nine 50. That’s 166 K in revenue. That’s a projected ROI of 27 times. Now. Once we got the automation in place, we bumped that to 65%. Right?

So now we’ve got 285. Book jobs. Average ticket nine 50, that’s $270,000. Now we’re at 44. Time return on investment. And Mark Mason, I recently did an interview with him and he shared how this has impacted their growth. What he said was, we’ve gone from a million to over $14 million in revenue over the last three years and really getting the online marketing and the conversion was a massive driver of that outcome.

And I think the principle behind this, I’m not sure how many of you guys are fans of Dan Kennedy. An old school direct response guru. His famous quote was, the business that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins and you can spend more to acquire a customer when you’re able to convert more of the leads that you generate into book jobs and when you also are better at.

Converting those one-time customers into repeat buyers that use you again and refer you to others. And that’s the other beautiful thing we can do with automation. Like we can really nurture those relationships from a one-time customer to a customer that uses us again and again. So how do we implement this?

Your business? I’m gonna give you very basic tactics here. We wanna make sure regardless of how someone gets to you when they get to your website. We’re gonna drive them maybe through Google Ads or maybe through SEO or maybe through other advertising channels. We give them three opportunities to convert, right?

We give them the web form, we give them the phone number, we give them the online chat, and we give them the online booking. And then we’re gonna plug that in to a marketing automation system so that every lead gets that call and that text message and that email, and every lead gets added to a drip sequence communicating in the ways that they wanna convert.

Visually speaking, so this is Sasquatch Home Services in Canada website, right? We’ve got our website, we’ve got our phone number prominent. We’ve got our online booking, we’ve got our live chat opportunity, which is gonna open up to a two-way text message. Obviously the phone is the phone, right? We want to make sure when somebody clicks on that or when somebody clicks on it it’s click to call that we have a live answer, right?

Some of us. Need to make sure we answer those calls right. Some of us need to make sure we’re a little more diligent with the follow through on that. Number two is only when they click the little chat widget here. We make sure they’ve got a place to enter their name, their cell phone number, quick details, and that actually sends a text message that starts at chat queue and we can have automation behind that, right?

So that we’ve got speed to lead with our two way text messaging. So it’s Hey, just saw you filled in the form on our site. How can we help? And now we’re two-way text message and we’re trying to move them, and we can train the AI to ask the right questions, to answer the simple things and to try and get them to schedule soft, schedule that appointment.

And then of course, we want that online booking where they can answer some details prior to the appointment about the situation, about the service area, and actually soft book or book directly into the platform. There are some cool things since this is a session about marketing automation in place in today’s market that we can leverage for call answering.

And I know a lot of you guys are great. You’ve got great dispatch teams, you’ve got great people on the phones, but the technology now exists where we can train AI voice to answer the call, to have a two-way conversation, to answer questions and to qualify and soft book appointments. For some of you completely unnecessary.

For others of you, if there’s a time where you’re going to a voicemail after hours, let’s just say, and it’s ringing to a voicemail, that’s a big time missed opportunity. And we should be having AI answer those calls and vet those conversations. I’m just gonna share a quick preview of this.

’cause the technology’s come so far and this is something we’ve been working on, especially for our clients that have been you know. Sending their calls to, to an answering service after hours. It’s not perfect, but this is where it’s at today. You can only imagine where the technology’s gonna be in a couple of, in a couple of years.

And I will tell you we have clients using this in the immediate moment and getting great results. Let me actually, lemme just make sure that I’m sharing with sound because otherwise you won’t be able to hear this share with sound. Okay.

All right, here we go. Oops. So one of the big things company in AI right now is AI voice and AI messaging. It’s, our team’s been working hard on how to set up AI voice to answer calls and to expedite. Solving problems for protect prospective customers and booking more jobs more quickly. Speed the lead speed to booking is really the answer.

Let’s test this out,

this call for quality purposes.

Hey.

Hi, this is Josh. Hi, Josh. Nice to meet you. How can I assist you today? Are you having any issues with your HVAC system? Actually I’m having an issue with the water heater right now. It’s just not, it’s not heating the pipes. It’s not heating the water. I need to have someone come check it out. Oh, no.

That sounds frustrating. It could be a problem with heating thermos. Get someone’s happening. Yeah, like just basically we we go into the shower and the water’s hot for a second and then it gets cold. And so we need to try and get it fixed. ASAP. Got it. Josh, that sounds like a real inconvenience.

Let’s get this sorted out quickly for you. Could you please provide the service address and postal code? Yeah. It’s 1 3 9 9 9 Old Jams Road and that’s 3 3 1 5 8. Thanks for that, Josh. And just to confirm, could you please provide your full name for the record? Yes, it’s Josh Nelson. Great. Josh Nelson. And it’s the best contact number for you, the one you’re calling from now?

Yeah, that’s the best number. Perfect. And what’s your best email address? Just in case we need send you details? It’s Josh.

Thanks Josh. So let’s get you scheduled for a service appointment. How does tomorrow at 10:00 AM or Thursday at pm Sound? Tomorrow at 10 would be good. Could you one here today? I understand the urgency, but unfortunately we don’t have any slots available for today. Okay. Let’s walk in tomorrow at 10:00 AM to get this resolved as soon as possible.

Does that work for you? Yeah, sure. That’s fine. Great. I’ve got you scheduled for tomorrow at 10:00 AM Is there anything else I can help you with today? No I think that’s it. Alright, Josh. Thanks for reaching out to Bob Plumbing and Cooling. We’ll see you tomorrow at 10:00 AM Have a great day. So not too bad.

And we you can ask it a bunch of different questions that will come up with intelligent answers. Is only as good as the programming that you get it? How do you want it to address the customer? How do you want it to solve the problems? And so is the room for improvement? Absolutely.

Is it better than going to a call center that doesn’t understand what you’re trying to do or going to a voicemail? 100%. So in today’s market, if you’re going to a voicemail after hours, having an AI voice like this that can have a conversational tone with the prospect that can answer the questions, that can soft book the time can be a massive improvement in conversion because you’ve got a median answer 24 hours a day, seven days a week and you’ve got people.

Calling in and actually getting an answer and feeling like they scheduled a time. Technology in the works, but just a quick demo of how close this AI voice is to, to being ready for prime time. So good. It’s a good opportunity again for some of you guys, right? But for the rest of you, online scheduling two-way text messaging, leveraging AI to have those text conversations solves the speed, the lead issue and massively improves the conversion numbers.

So I, I’ve got a visual flow here if anybody’s interested in really looking at this and how it can imp be implemented in the real world we’d love to chat, right? You could schedule a time with us at plumber seo.net/schedule. We could review your stuff, show you where there’s room for improvement, or if you could just say, Hey, I just wanna see this AI stuff in action, we can definitely demo that portion of it for you.

So that, that company I was talking about earlier, Sasquatch, I pulled up their website and kinda showed you, the owner, Dale Morton just recently did an interview with our director of Client Services, k Chappelle, and he said he’s grown to over $5 million from startup in just two and a half years.

And a lot of that had to do with leveraging automation, online scheduling even not being the big player in his market because he had these strategies in place, he was able to remain competitive and see some accelerated growth. In his business. So final reminder, right? Final reminder here is your customers want to book online and they wanna engage via two-way text message leads that don’t get followed up within 15 minutes or less are going to go cold.

Follow up within five minutes is 21 times more effective and. 50% of your customers are gonna go with the customer, the company that answers first, that follows up first. That gives them the opportunity to book in first. And so hopefully this is something you’ll do whether you do it with us or not.

Is okay, but just let me know. Will you do something with this, whether it’s putting in online automations, whether it’s online scheduling, just type yes in the chat here if you’re gonna do something with this. And if you’d like help, we’d love the opportunity to connect with you. Again, you can call us at (866) 610-4647 or you can schedule@plumberseo.net slash schedule.

That’s, if you want help with your website, your online marketing, you wanna look at the big picture strategy of growing your plumbing, HVAC, home service business online. We do those sessions completely free. We’ll do a deep dive analysis of your current website, your current rankings, your conversion factors on the website, and show you where there’s room for improvement and how we can help.

Again, no, no hard sale, no pressure. You can complimentary do that at plumber seo.net/schedule. If you’re really just more interested in the the marketing automation side, you can check out, conversion amp.com. That’s conversion amp.com. There’s a demo there and an opportunity to schedule a free one-to-one.

Awesome. Alright guys. I think that’s it, Marcel. Thanks. We gotta go. Thanks so much for your feedback, everyone. I hope you got value from today’s sessions. If you’ve got questions, feel free to drop them here in the chat or if you’re watching after the fact, feel free to put it into the comments wherever you’re watching.

And be sure to schedule a time and let us know how we can best support you with with these strategies. Alright, great work today, Nick. Thanks everybody for your time. We’ll see you again real soon.