Hudson River Chimney is a home-based, full-scale chimney contracting company that serves the greater Upstate, New York area. Hudson River Chimney has provided high-quality chimney cleaning, inspections, repairs and even custom chimney work for the past one and a half years.
A year ago, Dion Maratolla was spending thousands of dollars on a monthly basis, advertising for his home-based chimney repair business.
The problem?
Most of this advertising money was spent without knowing if it brought in enough customers to justify the expense.
For most small or home-based businesses, advertising costs are a huge expense.
While the U.S. Small Business Administration recommends spending 7-8% of your gross revenue for marketing and advertising expenses, home service businesses tend to spend more along the lines of 12-15% of their gross revenue on marketing costs. Some high-ticket home service businesses in industries like solar or HVAC, can even spend upwards of 35-50% of their gross revenue on advertising costs.
So it’s crucial to get it right, and understand which advertising channels are worth the expense, and which aren’t bringing in any customers.
As one of Dion’s biggest business expenses, Dion was doing a considerable amount of advertising online to find new business, but had no idea if this marketing was actually working, or bringing him any customers.
Like most home service businesses, Dion was advertising his chimney repair business on multiple sites, like Yelp, Angie’s List, Facebook, Google, and more. But he was unsure about the profitability of each separate advertising channel. This could actually mean overspending by $600-$700 a month just on one site (of many.)
The secret to his savings? Call tracking.
Call tracking is a way for home-based businesses to measure their ad performance, by assigning dedicated numbers to each ad channel or ad campaign, to understand which ad channels are putting you in the red and which are bringing in business.
By assigning a dedicated number to each ad channel, you can better understand where every job came from, which ad channels are working, and which are just a waste of money. With call tracking, you’ll also be able to see all of your campaigns at once, and understand which are the most profitable and which don’t generate business.
Dion decided to use Workiz Call Tracking to better understand his ad spend, and really get a sense of what advertising was profitable, and what was not worth the money. “Over the winter we were putting $600-700 a month towards our Yelp budget and we were getting no leads.”
“Call tracking has definitely been helpful with the phone numbers to track advertising. For $2 a phone number and for five cents a minute, I can go in at the end of the day (to Workiz) to see if the phone’s been ringing or if the phone hasn’t been ringing. Maybe I’m putting $1,000 into Google and I don’t need to be.”
“I can see if you called me from Yelp or Angie’s List, and if I’m running a target marketing Facebook campaign for chimney leaks, I can type in a phone number (into Workiz) and can see did that work, did that not work? Should I raise the budget, lower it, do away with it altogether? It’s kind of a no brainer for me really.”
In addition to saving at least $600 a month on his monthly advertising expenses, call tracking lets Dion have more control over his business. With call tracking, every call that Dion makes is recorded into his customer CRM, and conveniently found in the client’s job history. So if he’s in his truck when a client calls, he can listen to the recording afterwards to make sure he didn’t miss or mishear any crucial information, like a client’s name, phone number, address, services required, etc.
Call tracking has also been crucial for his business success in identifying human resource challenges. While his fiance, Emily, is primarily responsible for dispatching and scheduling jobs for the company, occasionally they used outsourced administrative employees to help with overload, or when they had to take days off from the business.
After using Workiz Voice to listen to their call recordings, they realized they had a number of consistent issues. The administrative assistant would often take down wrong information, customer names, numbers and addresses, resulting in Dion sometimes driving to the wrong location, or testing the patience of his customers due to wrong information entered into the system.
“Without recording my calls, I wouldn’t have known who the culprit was. I was able to see that we constantly had problems with the appointments that were scheduled by this administrative assistant and it was just not gonna work out with her. We ended up letting her go, but that could have also been money and reputation lost.
