New customer acquisition gets most of the attention in plumbing marketing. But for operators serious about building a business that will be successful long term, repeat business is where you will find your largest margins. Acquiring a new customer costs far more money than retaining one. A customer who calls you twice is worth multiples of one who calls you once.
The challenge with plumbing is that nobody really thinks about their plumber until something goes wrong. Your work could be perfect, but a customer still might not remember your company name eighteen months later when a pipe bursts at 11 PM. You need to figure out a way to keep top of mind.
Build a Communication Cadence
A quarterly email newsletter is one of the highest-ROI tools available. Creating a practical newsletter that has seasonal maintenance tips that cover topics like what to do before a cold snap, or signs your water heater is failing. Content that’s useful is going to get saved and remembered. Automated email sequences can keep all of your past customers warm with minimal ongoing effort. All you need to do is grab an email address of your customers, then create a newsletter 4 times a year.
Own Your Social Feed
Customers who follow your social accounts are giving you ongoing permission to stay in their lives. Use it. Post short-form content, quick tips, before-and-afters of jobs, and behind-the-scenes plumbing processes. This is going to build up the familiarity with your brand over time. When something goes wrong in a potential client’s home, the company they’ve been passively seeing in their feed is the one they’ll call first.
Make Your Number Impossible to Forget
A vanity number like 1-800-PLUMBING® is not a marketing gimmick. It serves as a recall mechanism for customers. Top-of-mind awareness (TOMA) is the goal of every retention strategy on this list. A number like this one achieves this more efficiently than a regular number. When a customer has a plumbing emergency at midnight, they’re not scrolling through contacts or searching Google. They’re trying to remember a number. If yours is 1-800-PLUMBING, you’ve already won that moment.
Put Your Brand in Their Home
Branded leave-behinds like a quality pen, a magnet, or a small tool keeps your name physically present in the places where plumbing problems happen. A useful, well-branded item is going to remind past customers that you exist more often than just when a plumbing issue occurs. For operators thinking about lifetime customer value, these small investments pay for themselves many times over.
The plumbing businesses that win long-term are the people who are good at marketing and making sure past customers never have a reason to call anyone else. A strong retention system, anchored by an easy to recognize brand and a number people can actually recall, is one of the most leverageable assets a plumbing business can build. This asset can help enhance all of your marketing, no matter what you do.
