Appliance repair marketing for service calls.

Appliance repair is the inverse of remodeling in almost every way. The jobs are small, the customer will not wait, and there is no backlog to build — somebody's refrigerator is full of food and it stopped working two hours ago.

Which means your queue is zero. A lead arriving on a day you can't service isn't deferred revenue; it's a customer who calls the next company within the hour, and you already paid for him. Your upper limit isn't this month's capacity or this week's — it's today's open slots. So campaigns have to breathe with the technicians' calendar: slots open, budget up; the day fills, budget down. The unit is five or six calls per technician per day, fewer in a spread-out service area, because you pay for drive time either way.

The economics are the friendliest in home services. A Los Angeles account ran a $265 ticket at a 50% margin, a 67% close rate from dispatcher to booked job, and 3% site conversion — which works out to $132.50 per customer, $88.78 per lead, $2.66 per click, all lifted by half again because a household that found a repairman it trusts is worth about 1.5 jobs. Week one came in at $95.60 per lead, above the ceiling. Three weeks of pruning search terms and reallocating budget put it at $22.46 — four times the volume for less money, with nothing about the business changed.

Two warnings. First, the close rate is what kills, not the margin: a second operation with a higher $300 ticket could only afford $1.30 a click against a $5.26 market price, purely because it closed four inquiries in ten instead of nearly seven — appliance work was its side line, and it converted like one. Second, we deliberately did not scale that Los Angeles account, because only about one in ten qualified leads became a booked diagnostic visit. Doubling the budget there doubles the number of people who call and don't book. In this trade the bottleneck is almost never the technicians; it's whoever answers the phone.