Beginner's Guide to HVAC Email Marketing

If you work in the HVAC business, email marketing can be your friend. If you do it just right and follow all the necessary steps, you won’t just get new customers for your business; you will also make them feel appreciated and loved. Check out our short guide to help you down the path to becoming an HVAC email marketing pro.

Have a goal for your email marketing.

When you start, you'll need a goal for your email marketing funnel. The kind of goal you choose depends on the needs of your customers and should drive everything you do. Since HVAC is a very specific industry, it’s fairly easy to narrow your efforts down to three specific potential goals:

• Making sure your old customers are thinking of you.
• Sell non-essential services and products to your customers.
• Tell your customers about upgrades, new products, and new services.

Your goal could even involve a variation of the above options. “What matters at the end of the day is that you have a goal to begin with,” says Jason Garcia of Xperwriters.com. Consider hiring a paper writing service to help you hone in on a specific plan. Once you’ve chosen a direction, figure out the process of sending emails to your customer.

Choose a platform for your campaign.

When you send out personal emails or just need an official email address for your company, you can use a regular email provider like Gmail. However, when you want to send out bulk emails, you’ll need a dedicated provider. These are known as email marketing platforms, and they allow you to do a lot with your emails, including automating them and customizing them to make them more effective. There are lots of factors you should consider when figuring out who to pick as your provider, including the number of campaigns you want to run, the size of your email list, the reputation of the provider, and the cost. Some free providers will help you get started if your contact list consists of only a few thousand contacts and you don’t plan on sending too many emails a month. However, if you have a large list of contacts and want to have all the bells and whistles, consider using a full-blown email marketing service like MailChimp or Constant Contact. Once you choose a system, you need to build your contact list.

Build and segment your contact list.

Some people think that a huge contact list is a universally good thing. In reality, it’s a little more complicated than that. The size of the list doesn’t matter as much as how the active of that list. You want contacts that open your emails and click through them consistently. If the addresses don’t exist or recipients don’t open your emails, your reputation score will suffer and your campaign won’t perform very well. You will likely have obtained contact info from lots of different places in the routine process of conducting your business. Start here. First, you need to import your email list into your email marketing platform and obtain permission to send messages to those addresses. Many email marketing providers have very stringent requirements for imported lists (some will automatically enforce these as part of the import process). For best results, follow these guidelines:

• Always ask your contacts for permission to send emails.
• Always give your contacts the option to unsubscribe from your emails by providing an unsubscribe link in the emails you send. (This is a legal requirement of the CAN-SPAM Act.)
• Never use or buy lists from third parties.

Once you have imported contacts to the platform, reengage them and give them an option to unsubscribe from you. If they do, don’t take it the wrong way. You want to send your emails to people who want them, not people who will impact your campaign in a negative way. Once you've cleaned your list up, segment it so that you can craft better campaigns. You want more people to open your emails and click on the links, which will lead to more sales. To do that, you could send out different email marketing campaigns to different groups of people so that you can make your emails more relevant to your contacts. Obvious market segments for the HVAC industry include commercial and residential customers. Once you've segmented, grow your list. Start by creating great content and enticing people to subscribe to your list. Promote your content on social media, your website, the emails themselves, and so on. Make it super easy for people to subscribe.

Make your content relevant.

“This is one of the strengths of email marketing. It makes it super easy for you to send emails to your customers that they will find interesting,” says Johnson Thomas, a writer at College Essay Writer. As an HVAC business, you will want to send your clients specific kinds of content, including product comparisons, seasonal offers and discounts, educational content, and newsletters. Send emails with specific timing in mind. You can schedule your emails and then automate them to line up with holidays or sales. To help you produce high-quality content, you can hire a writer or procure the services of an assignment service to offer you more custom essay writing for your email marketing content. Your emails should also remain consistent. You want your customers to receive just enough emails that you always remain on their mind. You don’t want to send them too many though, as that will increase the chance that they'll unsubscribe.

Respond to your emails.

You should encourage responses to your emails and then respond to those responses. People may have questions or want to tell you what they want from your service. “The last thing you want to do is leave them frustrated because they never got a response,” says Philip Berger, a customer service professional for a service that offers assignment help. “For starters, use an actual address, rather than a “no-reply,” which seems a lot more impersonal,” says Jillian Carter, a writer offering assignment writing services in the UK. You should also keep your response times as short as you can. Have an automated response for when you’re not able to respond quickly. This lets your customers know that you care. You should also write your responses within whatever email marketing platform you use. It makes it easier to record your interactions with contacts and can help with tracking and analytics later.

Perform analytics.

Email marketing platforms give you the ability to track your email marketing campaigns, letting you know what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. Things you should look at include:

• The proportion of people opening your emails (open rate)
• The proportion of people who click on links in the email (click-through rate)
• The proportion of people who follow through on a link and perform the intended action, such as filling a form or buying a product (conversion rate)
• The proportion of emails that never made it to the contact’s inbox (bounce rate)

Your bounce rate should be low; everything else should be as high as you can make it. If you notice dropping numbers, testing can help. A/B testing involves sending two slightly different emails to see which one does better. Keep the number of variables low so you know which ones impact your campaign.

Conclusion

If you do it just right, email marketing can prove a boon to your business. Follow these steps and watch your business grow at a fast rate.