Why past customers are the cheapest jobs you will book
Every customer in your Housecall Pro account already found you, called you and let a tech into the house. You paid to win them once. Sending them an email costs close to nothing, and there is no auction to bid against.
They also need you again. Water heaters wear out. AC systems on the Gulf coast run hard most of the year and need regular maintenance. Drains clog again. The shop that stays in touch gets that next job. The shop that goes quiet hands it to whoever shows up first on Google.
That is why customer sends sit near the top of our slow season playbook.
Campaigns we run
Tune-up and maintenance reminders
A reminder when a customer is due, based on the date of their last visit. Maintenance plan members get a renewal notice before the plan runs out, and a nudge to book the visit they already paid for. For HVAC shops this is the backbone of the calendar, and it pairs with the work on our HVAC SEO page.
Seasonal sends
Timed to the Gulf coast calendar. A pre-summer AC check in spring, before the first heat wave fills your board. A hurricane prep note before June 1, when the Atlantic hurricane season starts, with what to do about the AC, the generator or the water heater before a storm. Then a follow-up after a storm passes, for customers who lost power or took on water.
Replacement offers for aging equipment
Your job history knows which customers have a water heater past its prime or an AC system that has been patched three summers in a row. We send those customers a replacement offer before the next failure, not after it.
Review requests after every job
A text or email after each completed job, with a direct link to leave a Google review. No gating and no paid reviews. Reviews help you in the map pack, they are central to Google Business Profile optimization, and they now count toward your LSA ranking too.
Where the list comes from
From your own records in Housecall Pro or ServiceTitan: names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, equipment and the date of the last job. Before anything goes out, we clean it up. Duplicates are merged, bad emails come out, commercial accounts are split from homeowners, and customers are tagged by trade, by town and by the age of their equipment.
That tagging is what makes a send useful. A Spring Hill customer hears about the Spring Hill office. A customer with a brand new AC system does not get a replacement offer.
We also set up the email records that prove your mail really comes from you, called SPF, DKIM and DMARC, so your sends land in the inbox instead of spam.
Consent basics: opt-in and STOP
Texting is the channel with the most rules, and the one where shortcuts cost the most. Here is how we handle it, in plain terms.
- Opt-in first. Marketing texts only go to customers who said yes to getting them, for example with a checkbox on your booking form. A number given to schedule a repair is not a yes to marketing.
- Keep the record. We keep track of when and how each customer agreed.
- Say who it is, and how to stop. Every text names your company and says to reply STOP to opt out.
- STOP means stop. When someone replies STOP, they come off the list right away and stay off.
- Reasonable hours. Texts go out during the day, not late at night.
- Carrier registration. Business texting from a local number goes through a carrier registration step called 10DLC. It is part of the setup, so your texts are not blocked.
Email works differently. Every email we send has a working unsubscribe link and your business mailing address, and unsubscribes are honored.
Tying sends to booked jobs
Every send gets its own tracking number or a booking link tagged with the campaign. When a customer calls or books from it, we match that to the job in Housecall Pro, so the report shows booked jobs and revenue for each send, not just opens and clicks.
We only count a job for a send when the customer booked through that send’s number or link. Some of them might have called anyway, and we would rather undercount than take credit for every job that week. It is the same reporting we built into our Marketing Tracker.
Opens and clicks still help us write better subject lines. They are just not the scoreboard. If you also want to reach homeowners who are not on your list yet, Facebook ads can carry the same seasonal offers to new neighbors.
