McAllister…The Service Company couldn’t be branded much better in Southern New Jersey.

With an impeccable reputation for quality and service earned over more than a century of serving their community, a series of “Healthy Home Tips” broadcast on local television, and a fleet of trucks whose paint jobs coincidentally play off the color scheme of the Garden State Parkway,  it’s pretty hard to find a South Jersey homeowner who hasn’t been touched by the McAllister brand in one way or another.

The Challenge

“We did so many direct replacements of damaged equipment in the wake of Super Storm Sandy that we couldn’t help but see a drop off once that work was completed,” explains Tom McAllister. “We have a loyal customer base, but once somebody gets a new system, they’re in pretty good shape for a while.”

For the first time in years, McAllister needed new customers with equipment that was ready for replacement.

The Solution

Using inbound marketing techniques, we ran a contest to give away a free pre-season heater tune-up every day for a month.

To enter, contestants were required to provide their name, email, zip code, the type of heating equipment they had and the approximate age of the equipment.

To drive awareness of the contest, we ran Facebook pay-per-click advertising campaigns targeting primary and secondary zip codes in McAllister’s service area.

Facebook users clicked back to a landing page where they were able to see the value proposition and enter the contest.

The Results

Due to the overwhelming response, the campaign was cut nine days short of the thirty day plan.

Of the 149 people who entered the contest, more than half self-identified that their heating systems were more than ten years old, providing the ongoing opportunity to nurture more of these leads through the sales funnel over time.

Total PPC budget spent came in just under $1,000.

Since this campaign was run through HubSpot, we were able to track every aspect of it to analyze the contribution of each individual campaign asset.

There are a couple of ways you can calculate the cost per lead and cost per new customer; unburdened, using just the PPC budget as a cost base, or burdened, adding in all associated costs like marketing consulting, tech time and other fixed overhead:

Unburdened: $1000/149 leads = $6.72/lead

Unburdened: $1000/27 customers = $37.03/customer

Burdened: $8569/149 leads = $57.51/lead

Burdened: $8569/27 customers = $317.37/customer

The real art of this process is now to nurture the 122 folks who did not immediately convert to customers, so that every time we close a new customer, the burdened cost of each lead and customer drops even more.

We do this using automated workflows that continue to respectfully educate these people about the issues they need to know when it comes to home comfort, equipment and safety.