Would it catch your attention if I said there was one thing you could do to increase the ROI of your marketing spend five to eight times and lift sales by 10% or more? The thing I’m talking about is personalization, and it is key today to help your HVACR business stand out. 

Personalize Your Marketing

A highly effective way for HVACR businesses to use personalization in their marketing is by leveraging the weather to its fullest advantage. It’s well-known in the home services industry that the weather is strongly correlated with sales patterns. Behind the economy, the weather is the second-biggest factor in determining consumer purchasing decisions. But, exactly how this plays out is unique to each HVACR business, based on the industry, geography, and individual customer profile.

Creating successful weather-based marketing campaigns requires taking a deep dive into the data. By layering historical weather data with your unique sales and customer service information, it’s possible to accurately anticipate the specific actions current and prospective customers will take, and when. Advertising campaigns with personalized messaging can be developed and launched at exactly the right time with intelligent weather triggers.   

Steps to Execute a Weather-Triggered Campaign

What does the process of building a sophisticated weather-based marketing campaign look like? Let’s break down the key steps. 

Step 1: Identify Your Target Customer 


Audience selection plays an important foundation in the success of your campaign. Though it’s tempting to believe that a campaign should reach as many people as possible, the reality is that only a percentage of the population is the right fit for a certain product or service at a given point in time. Your goal is to focus on those people – your target customers. 


Most HVACR businesses find it beneficial to develop campaigns that anticipate the needs of current customers and attract new prospects. An analysis of your customer, sales, and weather data can pinpoint the right audiences to target in specific detail. 

Because most HVACR businesses don’t keep detailed demographic information about their customers, your database can be augmented with additional third-party national consumer data to better illuminate the people you are targeting. It can be helpful to have information such as age, income, age of home, home value, and drive time from your location. You can append your customer database by purchasing this data from various sources.

Step 2. Determine the Weather Triggers and Frequency 

An intelligent weather campaign must be rooted in your business’s unique data analysis to reveal the largely hidden, but powerful opportunities created by very specific weather patterns and changes. For example, what is the degree of temperate change that increases the propensity to purchase a specific product or service? Or, how do different audience segments react differently to weather conditions?

After the key weather opportunities are determined, a seven-day weather forecast monitor can be set up for the appropriate zip codes. High and low-temperature triggers are monitored daily to capture service opportunities in real-time. 

You can set the campaign frequency that will achieve your goals while working within your marketing budget. You may choose to execute your triggers on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. 

Step 3: Determine the Right Messaging

Following step 1, you should have detailed “personas” of your target audiences. These insights will help to craft a marketing message that will resonate by better understanding their decision-making styles. 

For example, price-conscious consumers will be better motivated by special offers. Those who care more about quality will be more concerned with maintaining their home and working with top-end products and an experienced and reputable company to install them. 

Paying attention to how your current and prospective customers want to be communicated with will improve the overall effectiveness of your campaigns.  

Step 4. Target IP Addresses

Digital ads can be precisely delivered by employing IP targeting. During this process, home addresses are matched to modem or router IP addresses with greater than 95% accuracy to direct advertisements to any device on that IP network – whether that’s a mobile phone, tablet, laptop, SMART-TV, or desktop. 

IP targeting is highly accurate without the use of cookies, census block, or geo-location tools. It greatly reduces the risk of your ads being delivered to “non-human traffic.” A surprisingly large percentage of online traffic is generated by automated bots, which is not the intended audience for your campaigns! 

Step 5. Intelligently Deliver Ads 

When the weather triggers for your campaign are met, your ads will be immediately and automatically delivered to the websites your target audience is already visiting across their various devices. Your audience insights can help you further refine the types of digital channels each segment will be most receptive to. 

IP-targeted ads can be anywhere from six to sixty times more effective than other online ads! Additionally, they have a click-through rate that is three times higher than average. 

Step 6: Analyze and Optimize

An additional benefit of digital weather campaigns that HVACR businesses appreciate is the measurability. After your campaign is complete, you won’t be left to try and connect the dots between your efforts and results. Instead, you will receive a clear summary of the outcomes across multiple metrics – clicks, impressions, click-through rates, and more. It’s even possible to quantify the dollar amount of business that was generated from your weather-triggered campaign. With B2E Data Marketing, we have done extensive analysis for you and can provide these reports to you. However, with the information I am sharing, it is possible to follow these steps and look at your annual data with triggers for seasonal changes, customer demand peaks year-over-year, and regional customer target points, as well as seasonal peaks in the industry regionally, and use it to your advantage. Whichever way you choose to do it, the more specific you are with the understanding of your customer base, regional demands, and year-over-year analysis, the more you can use weather-triggered marketing to increase profitability.

Analyzing your campaign performance is a valuable way to inform your go-forward strategy. You can continually refine which audience segments are most receptive, and which messages and channels work best. 

Data-driven marketing strategies will transform the way HVACR businesses think about and capitalize on weather opportunities. You can start using weather intelligence today to build intelligent campaigns that directly impact your bottom line. 

Keith Snow is the president of B2E Data Marketing, which provides data-powered marketing campaigns to the home services industry. The data scientists at B2E help HVACR businesses leverage consumer and weather data to target ideal customers with personalized messages influenced by their unique preferences and weather-related behaviors. Learn more at marketing.b2edata.com/home-services.