Slow Season Marketing: What to Do When Phones Stop

Peak season ends and the phones stop ringing. The instinct is to cut marketing budget because revenue is down. This is exactly backwards.

The contractors who pull ahead during slow season aren’t the ones who hunker down and wait. They’re the ones who recognize that shoulder season is when marketing delivers the best return and competition drops.

Most of your competitors will cut back. Ad costs fall. Share of voice increases for anyone still showing up. The customers who do need service right now have fewer options fighting for their attention.

Slow season is when you build the foundation for next year’s peak.

Why contractors cut and why it hurts them

Marketing budget cuts during slow season feel logical. Revenue is down, so expenses should be down. Cash preservation makes sense.

The problem is that marketing cuts compound. Stop advertising and leads dry up. Stop requesting reviews and velocity drops. Stop posting to your Google Business Profile and engagement falls. Your competitors who maintain effort during this period don’t just keep pace. They gain ground.

When peak season returns, you’re starting from a weaker position. The reviews your competitors collected during slow season now push them higher in local rankings. The email list they grew gives them customers to reach directly. The content they published gives them better SEO.

The contractor who “saved” $5,000 in monthly marketing during a three-month slow season actually created $50,000+ in lost opportunity when demand returns.

The math on slow season marketing

Ad costs are driven by competition. During peak season, every HVAC contractor bids on “AC repair” keywords. During December? Far fewer.

Google Ads costs drop 20-40% during off-peak periods depending on your trade. The same $3,000 budget that bought 100 clicks in July buys 140 clicks in January. Your cost per lead drops even if conversion rates hold steady.

Email marketing delivers $36-44 return per dollar spent regardless of season. Reaching past customers costs almost nothing. A reactivation campaign to customers who haven’t booked in 18 months generates revenue from people who already know and trust you.

Read more about email marketing for home services.

Direct mail to past customers converts at higher rates than acquisition mail because you’re reaching people with established relationships. A maintenance reminder to last year’s AC customers costs $1-2 per piece and generates appointments at rates that paid acquisition can’t touch.

Read more about postcard marketing for home services.

The slow season playbook

Push maintenance agreements hard

Every slow season is an opportunity to build recurring revenue that smooths out the peaks and valleys.

Maintenance agreements create three benefits. They generate revenue during slow periods when you need it. They create scheduled touchpoints with customers that lead to repair and replacement opportunities. They make your business more valuable if you ever want to sell.

The shoulder season pitch is simple: lock in your annual tune-up now, skip the spring rush, get priority scheduling when something breaks. Bundle furnace and AC maintenance into a single annual agreement priced at $150-200.

Contractors with mature maintenance programs fill 30-40% of their slow season schedule with agreement work. That’s the difference between a cashflow crisis and a manageable dip.

Reactivate dormant customers

Your CRM contains goldmines you’re ignoring. Customers who booked once or twice and haven’t called in 18+ months haven’t left. They just forgot about you.

One contractor generated $60K from a single “we miss you” email campaign. The math was simple: 3,000 dormant customers, 12% open rate, 8% click rate, 15% of clicks converted to appointments, average job value of $400+.

The campaign took two hours to set up and cost $50 in email platform fees.

Segment your dormant customers by service history. Water heater customers who haven’t called in 8+ years are replacement candidates. AC customers approaching 10-year-old systems might be interested in efficiency upgrades. Plumbing customers might need drain cleaning they’ve been putting off.

Personalization matters. “Hi [Name], it’s been 2 years since we installed your tankless water heater. Just wanted to check in and make sure it’s still running great” outperforms “Dear valued customer, take advantage of our winter specials.”

Target high-value replacement opportunities

Slow season is when homeowners make planned purchases rather than emergency calls. Equipment replacement, system upgrades, and proactive projects fit slow season better than peak.

Focus marketing on customers with aging equipment. If you’ve tracked equipment age, filter your database for systems over 10 years old. These homeowners know replacement is coming. A well-timed offer during slow season when you have immediate availability beats competing for their attention during peak when everyone is booked out.

Manufacturers often offer rebates during slow season to smooth their own production cycles. Pass these along to customers as time-limited incentives.

Build your review base

Review velocity matters for rankings. The contractors with 200+ reviews outperform those with 50 in almost every local search scenario.

Slow season means fewer jobs, but every job is an opportunity to request a review. Systematize requests: automated SMS within 2 hours of job completion gets 42% response rates. Waiting two days drops that to 6%.

Read more about review generation for home services.

If you’re running 10 jobs per week during slow season and converting 40% to reviews, that’s 160 new reviews across a 4-month shoulder period. When peak season returns, you’re competing from a stronger position.

Invest in content and SEO

SEO results take 6-12 months to materialize. Content published during slow season ranks in time for next peak.

Slow season gives your team bandwidth for activities that get squeezed during busy periods. Update your service area pages. Add new content targeting long-tail keywords. Refresh your Google Business Profile with current photos. Create neighborhood-specific pages for the areas you serve.

Read more about SEO for home services.

This work compounds. The content you publish in November starts ranking by April. The service area page you create in January shows up in searches by June.

Add services that sell year-round

Some services don’t have seasonality.

Water heaters fail in every month. Drain cleaning happens year-round. Indoor air quality services actually peak during winter when homes are sealed up. Generators sell during storm seasons that vary by region. Backup sump pumps sell before spring thaw.

Analyze which of your services have the flattest demand curves and push those during slow season. If you don’t currently offer year-round services, consider adding them.

HVAC contractors who add indoor air quality during slow season create revenue that doesn’t depend on extreme weather. Plumbers who emphasize preventive maintenance and water treatment generate work regardless of season.

Train your team

Slow season is when you have time to invest in skills that pay off during peak.

Sales training improves close rates. Technical training improves efficiency. Customer service training improves reviews. The investment made when trucks aren’t running 12 hours a day generates returns when demand surges.

Some contractors treat slow season as an extended training camp. By the time spring hits, their team is sharper than competitors who just weathered the slow period.

The budget question

The knee-jerk response to slow revenue is cutting marketing to match. A smarter approach is reallocating rather than reducing.

During peak season, you need acquisition because demand exceeds what your existing customer base generates. During slow season, shift budget toward retention and reactivation because those channels deliver higher ROI when acquisition costs are high relative to demand.

A reasonable slow season reallocation:

Reduce paid acquisition spend by 20-30%. You’re not going to manufacture demand that doesn’t exist.

Increase email and direct mail to past customers. These are your highest-ROI channels and work better during slow season when competition for attention drops.

Maintain SEO and content investment. This is the work that positions you for the next peak.

Maintain review automation. Review velocity should never stop.

Add proactive outreach to customers with aging equipment.

The total budget might drop 10-15%, but the mix shifts dramatically toward owned channels and existing relationships.

What not to do

Don’t disappear. Going silent on marketing during slow season signals to Google that you’re less active. It signals to customers that you might not be around. Consistency matters.

Don’t chase bad leads. Slow season desperation leads to taking jobs you shouldn’t take. Low-margin work, difficult customers, and out-of-territory calls hurt more than they help.

Don’t discount recklessly. Some discounting drives volume during slow periods. Excessive discounting trains customers to wait for sales and damages your brand positioning. Targeted offers to specific segments outperform blanket discounts.

Don’t skip review requests. Every job during slow season is even more valuable for reviews because you have fewer opportunities. Don’t let any slip without asking.

Don’t wait until slow season starts. The best slow season strategies begin implementation during peak. Building your maintenance agreement base, segmenting your customer list, and creating email campaigns should happen before the phones stop.

The contractors who win slow season

The contractors who emerge from slow season ahead of their competition share a few characteristics.

They treat slow season as an investment period rather than a hibernation period. The marketing work they do during slow months pays returns for years.

They maintain visibility even when demand drops. Showing up when competitors disappear captures disproportionate market share.

They focus on relationship channels during slow season. Email, direct mail to past customers, and maintenance agreement promotion all deliver better ROI than peak-season acquisition tactics.

They use the breathing room to improve operations. Training, process refinement, and system upgrades happen when there’s time to focus.

Slow season separates the contractors who are building durable businesses from those who are surviving year to year. The difference isn’t luck or market conditions. The difference is what you do when the phones stop ringing.

Read more about marketing budget allocation.