The plumbing slow season plan: what to sell in the months the phone goes quiet
A month by month marketing calendar for a plumbing company, with the softener, maintenance plan and water heater offers that fill the dead weeks.
Plumbing revenue is lumpy in a predictable way. Freeze events and holiday weeks spike emergency work. Late spring and early fall go flat. Most shops ride the wave, panic in the quiet month, then discount their way through it.
The alternative is to decide in January what you will sell in April, and to spend the quiet weeks selling planned work to people who already know you.
The shape of a plumbing year
Adjust for your climate, but in most of the country it runs like this:
- January and February: emergency peak in cold markets. Frozen and burst lines, water heaters failing under load, holiday-drain aftermath in the first week of January. You do not need marketing, you need capacity and a phone that gets answered.
- March and April: the first flat stretch. Emergencies stop, nobody has started remodeling yet.
- May through July: steady. Remodels, sprinkler and hose bib work, garbage disposals, moving season inspections.
- August and September: the second flat stretch, especially late August.
- October and November: pre-winter work. This is the best planned-work window of the year.
- December: dead until the 26th, then a week of holiday-drain emergencies.
Mark your own two flat stretches on a calendar from last year's revenue. Those are the months your marketing has to carry.
What to sell in each quiet stretch
Spring flat (March to April): water heaters and softeners. Nobody has an emergency, so sell the thing that is going to become one. Pull every customer whose heater you have seen that is over eight years old and run a direct campaign: "Your heater is a 2016. It will not give you notice. Replace it on a Tuesday of your choosing for $2,150 instead of on a Sunday for $3,400." In hard-water metros, run the softener offer through Meta at the same time, as covered in the Meta ads guide.
Late summer flat (August to September): maintenance plans and sewer cameras. This is when to sell the recurring product. A $14 to $22 a month plan with an annual heater flush, a drain check, priority scheduling and 15% off repairs turns a dead August into a revenue base that shows up every month afterward. Sell it to past customers by phone and text, not to cold traffic.
The camera offer works here too because the ground is dry and access is easy: "Sewer camera inspection, $149, and if we find roots we credit it toward the repair." A shop that runs 40 of those in a month typically finds six to ten jobs worth $3,000 or more.
October and November: pre-winter. The easiest sell of the year because the customer already believes it. Hose bib and backflow winterization, water heater flush, main shutoff check, insulation on exposed lines. Bundle it at $189 and load the schedule for six weeks.
The list you already own
Your customer list is the cheapest media you will ever buy. Most plumbing shops have 800 to 4,000 past customers in QuickBooks or their field software and contact them zero times a year.
A quiet-month sequence that works:
- Segment by last service date and job type. Water heater installs from 9 or more years ago are a separate list from drain customers.
- Text first, because texts get read. Keep it to two sentences and a question. "Hi Karen, Dave at Riverbend. We put your water heater in back in 2017. Want me to have a tech check it while we are in your neighborhood Thursday?"
- Email second, one message, same offer, with a photo.
- Call the top 100 by ticket value.
Expect 3% to 8% of a well-segmented list to book something. On 1,200 customers at a $480 average that is $17,000 to $46,000 from work you already did once.
Keep the ads on, change the offer
The instinct in a slow month is to cut the ad budget. That is backwards in one respect and right in another. Cut the emergency campaigns, because there are fewer emergencies to catch. Move that money to the planned-work campaigns, where the audience is not seasonal.
Keep retargeting on year-round at $8 to $12 a day. It is the cheapest thing in the account and it is what makes the customer who read your water heater page in April call you in October.
Slow weeks are also the right time to fix the things that are always urgent-but-not-important: rewrite the service pages, add the price ranges, photograph the trucks, clear out the review backlog. The reviews guide is a good slow-week project, and moving from the median of 21 reviews toward the 75th percentile at 86 pays every month afterward.
A one-page calendar
- January: capacity and answering. No new offers. Just do not miss calls.
- February: start the water heater age list from last winter's service tickets.
- March: launch the heater replacement campaign. Softener ads on in hard-water markets.
- April: past-customer text sequence. Book spring remodel work.
- May and June: steady. Ask for reviews hard, because volume is high.
- July: build the maintenance plan offer and price it.
- August: sell the plan by phone and text to every past customer. Camera offer live.
- September: keep the plan push going. Start winterization creative.
- October: winterization bundle, full budget behind it.
- November: winterization plus water heater urgency. Best month of the year for planned work.
- December: quiet until the 26th. Staff the phone hard the last week.
Frequently asked
Should I discount to fill a slow week? Bundle instead of discount. A $189 winterization bundle protects your price. A 25% off coupon trains customers to wait for the next one.
Is it worth advertising at all in a dead month? Yes, at the same budget with a different offer. Turning ads off and on costs you the learning period every time you restart.
What if my market has no real winter? Your flat months are usually midsummer and the holidays. The principle holds: sell planned, high-ticket work to your own list when the emergency phone goes quiet.
If you want the slow-month campaigns and the past-customer sequence built for you, both are in the free 14-day trial. Text or call (385) 832-6175.