As an answering and telecommunications company, we understand seasonal upswings.
Here at Dexcomm, our staff is at their busiest when the holiday season rolls around. In our experience working with HVAC companies, we have noticed that the times of the year for upticks in business are during the summer and winter months.
Unlike most companies that maintain a fairly consistent client base all year round, many HVAC companies face a sharp decline in customers once spring and fall arrive.
How Can an HVAC Business Bring Customers During an Off-Season?
We asked our current HVAC partners how they keep their business operating successfully during these slow times. The two most popular off-season activities that our HVAC customers do to maintain business during the off-season are:
- Attending certification classes and/or hosting in-house training sessions
- Marketing preventative maintenance and/or general business
How to Promote Your HVAC Business During Slow Months
Preventative maintenance marketing or general business marketing are great techniques to increase seasonal business, but they must be carried out efficiently.
Even the best marketing will fail if a business is not prepared to handle the customer response, either through answering calls or providing a user-friendly website and up-to-date social media.
The inability to capture callers and appropriate data in response to your marketing message(s) usually poses the biggest problem.
How do we know this? Because we have received phone calls from clients asking for help, telling us that they ran a marketing campaign and were overwhelmed with calls that they were unprepared to receive.
If you are not prepared to receive feedback from respondents to your marketing messaging, a few things may happen, and they will not benefit your business.
For example, the caller might automatically judge your service capabilities as poor if they can’t reach you when they try to contact you. In addition, if you are advertising a particular service and can’t respond on time, the caller may even call a competitor. This, unfortunately, means that you very well may have just paid for some other HVAC company’s advertising!
How To Handle Overflows from HVAC Marketing
Three ways that you can prevent call overflows this from happening is to make sure that you:
- Break up your marketing messages that you are sending out into smaller groups over a specific time period. Also, stay away from mass marketing if you are not going to be getting support from an answering service, especially if you are a smaller HVAC company.
- Hire an answering service to handle overflow calls in case you need their assistance when responses start coming in so that you can capture all of your calls.
- Partner with an answering service to take all of your calls and schedule appointments during your marketing endeavors so that you can focus on your customers and appointments
Key Points
No matter what you choose to do to keep your business afloat during your off-season, just make sure that you are putting your best foot forward.
