If I were to ask you who or what you currently benchmark your HVAC company’s website against, what would you say?
a) A competitor in the heating and cooling industry that you admire?
b) Any company whose website you think looks great?
c) An e-commerce website that you’ve had a good shopping experience with?
d) I don’t benchmark it and instead just randomly ask people if they like my site?
Well, before you answer let me make a quick statement that may help steer your response, “making something like a website look aesthetically pleasing can be one of the easiest parts of your website strategy.”
The proliferation of free content management systems like WordPress and Joomla has not only made this process an easy and affordable do-it-yourself project, it’s also made it very impactful through readymade professional-grade third party templates, making the barrier to entry for a world-class looking HVAC site virtually zero. Now I’m not suggesting that this step isn’t important, quite the contrary, it’s probably one of the most important steps in the process, since this is what captures the customer’s first 3 seconds of attention, earning your company the next 30 seconds of consideration. I’m simply stating that it should by no means eat up the majority of your online development time or marketing budget.
Concentrating the bulk of your time and money on whether or not your website looks great won’t move furnaces and air conditioners for you. Sure, it might intrigue someone enough to open your site, but it won’t get that person to engage further and move down your desired online conversion funnel. You get what I’m saying, you need content and you need a plan for that content to convert browsers into buyers.
Getting your HVAC site ranked is more important
Now that we’ve established that good looking graphics isn’t a plan for increased sales and can actually be accomplished quite easily, let’s talk about something that can help increase sales.
You want your site to be purposeful, in other words, you want it to deliver you new customers by it ranking highly on search engines like Google, so that when people search terms related to furnaces, air conditioners and service they find your site. This of course is not a function of how great the site looks, but how well it is architected from a search engine optimization stand point. This requires much more of your online development time and budget. It’s a big topic and we cover it in a separate blog post called “search engine optimization (SEO) – a beginner’s guide“.
Converting visitors into buyers
Getting found is one thing, but what about when the prospect is now on your site? How do you get them to convert into an HVAC lead or a furnace or air conditioner sale? This is the real crux of this blog post and it helps to first get a little perspective from a human behaviour standpoint, because after all, it’s the consumer’s behaviour that you are trying to influence.
Let’s start with people’s affinity for the familiar. Behaviourally, if required to take on a new task, we would all prefer to accomplish that task from an existing point of knowledge. In other words, if given the choice to do something in a manner that you are already familiar with versus learning a new way of doing it, you’ll usually opt for the method you already know. If that’s the case, then why wouldn’t we look to create an online experience that is very familiar for the customer? I’ll give you some simple examples, if I know that the majority of the sites people visit will turn a visited text link on a page to another colour after it has been clicked on, then I should probably follow this same format on my site. If I know that a site that allows me to buy something always has a shopping cart at the top right hand side of the page, then my site too should have a shopping cart at the top right hand side of the page. See where I’m going here? Make the site operationally familiar and thus comfortable for the user towards the task you are attempting to get them to complete, and in this case that’s getting them to buy or commit to something from you.
The biggest website mistake HVAC contractors make
HVAC contractors tend to model their websites in relation to each other. Do a quick search for yourself, you’ll notice that the majority of heating and cooling sites look exactly the same. Pictures of furnaces and air conditioners, technicians, maybe a truck, some comments on how their service is the best and then some promotion on equipment. The call to action is always “call us for a free estimate”.
I’m assuming that these sites are all trying to get visitors to buy from them, so ask yourself this, “do these sites look like other sites where you traditionally buy stuff online? “ Is there a shopping cart? Are their customer reviews or ratings on the featured equipment? Are their suggestions for other products people like the visitor have browsed? Are their assurance badges like site security and purchase guarantees? If not, then these sites really don’t feel or look like any other online shopping experience a consumer would be familiar with.
So, if we’ve established that there is definitely a consistent e-commerce experience out there as a reference point for a consumer, the natural next step is to ask “why haven’t I modeled my HVAC site to deliver on this same expectation or experience?”
Making a heating and cooling site look more like an e-commerce site
If you’re like most HVAC companies, you’re probably saying “that’s a great notion but you can’t just buy a furnace or air conditioner online like a new sofa, you need to visit the customer’s home, do load calculations, take measurements and perform a consultative sales presentation for them.” That’s not a problem, you can still do all of that while delivering a truer e-commerce experience to your customer that will increase conversion rates.
The very first step, and one that is the most often overlooked, is that the good e-commerce sites exist solely to do one thing, sell stuff. They are not service and repair sites as well. I’m guessing you’re picking up on the HVAC implication here. You have to start by splitting your site into two pathways, a sales site and a service site. Each site is structured completely different because it addresses a completely different customer state of mind. As a nice added benefit, it allows you to create a very visually stunning first impression because you’re only focusing on two messages, which unclutters the space and opens up a lot to creative design.
We won’t get into the detail of the service site just yet. We’ve written another blog post to address this called “effective furnace and air conditioner service websites.”
Let’s start our e-commerce website building process by listing all of the information that you currently can offer on your website that mirrors those features found in a classic retail e-commerce site:
- Product categories, you have those, furnaces, air conditioners, accessories, service, etc.
- Featured specials, I’m assuming you have at minimum seasonal promotions.
- Within the categories, individual product options (e.g. good, better, best air conditioner or furnace options)
- Add on accessories that you can recommend for each individual product option, like indoor air quality products or thermostat upgrades.
- Assurance badges like BBB membership, industry accreditations, guarantees, number of years in service and customer testimonials.
That’s a pretty good start and just putting together these elements in a layout that’s closer to a retail site is already probably a step up for most. But now, let’s look at the elements that you probably don’t have today:
- Prices for each individual product.
- Consumer reviews of individual products.
- A shopping cart that the consumer can fill with selections as they shop.
- A purchase checkout.
The good news is we’ve got some ideas to get you around these perceived shortcomings and we’ll tackle each one in order.
Prices for each individual product
We hear this one a lot, “I can’t put up prices because I don’t know what size unit they need or how difficult the installation will be”, or “If I put up prices, the customer simply takes the price and asks my competitor to beat it so I don’t even get the call”. We hear you, all valid points, so guess what, you have a couple of options, either list them as Manufacturer Suggested Retail Prices (MSRP), or don’t show them at all. Here’s how you perform each:
One simple solution is to show prices that are close(ish) to your sales price and simply stamp it “MSRP”. Finish by inserting the statement, “May sell for less based on in-home assessment” or something along those lines. This is the preferred method because it’s the one that most closely delivers on the customer’s expectation; they want to see prices when they are researching online to buy.
If you’re dead set against putting any prices down, then simply substitute prices with value statements like “Our best value air conditioner” or “Our top of the line model”. This isn’t optimal, but it’s a pretty decent workaround.
Consumer reviews of individual products
If you’re like most HVAC contractors, you probably don’t have a bunch of reviews on the equipment you installed. You may have reviews about the service your company delivered, but probably not about the actual product model that was installed. The best solution for this is to actually call up customers where you’ve installed the equipment and ask them to rate it on a five star scale. Finish by asking them for a quote you can use and then include this on your site.
If this seems like a lot of work at first, there is a quick way around it, albeit not as optimal as the actual consumer reviews. This option involves either staff reviews or staff picks. In the review option, I wouldn’t recommend having 5 star ratings for everything, that just doesn’t seem realistic and what you are always trying to strive for online is honesty to the buyer. In the staff pick option, not every model gets a rating, but instead select options get a staff pick checkmark.
A shopping cart that the consumer can fill with selections as they shop
This is a clever workaround in my opinion. The technique here is to replace the shopping cart with a “quote cart”. How it works is to replace what would traditionally be a button stating “add to cart” under each individual product offer, with a button stating “add to quote list”. What you are doing is having the customer submit a number of options through their simulated shopping experience that they would like to get quotes on. This should feel very much like a classic retail experience.
A purchase checkout
Now that we’ve figured out how to facilitate a “shopping cart” experience, the natural next step is a checkout experience. This is the final step and is the tie in to the in-home appointment scheduling. Traditionally, this is where a potential buyer would be prompted for the moment of truth, the credit card entry and submission of the order. We are simply replacing this feature with an appointment schedule entry and submission of the appointment request.
Putting it all together
Now let’s review all of the clever things you’ve accomplished here that will dramatically improve conversions on your website. First, you’ve create a comfortable environment for the browser that will feel very familiar to them since this is pretty close to how they shop online for things today. Second, you’ve created a chain of small commitments through the shopping experience (i.e. browsing a catalogue, making selections and choosing to checkout). What this does is lessen the perceived level of commitment required for making the leap of inviting a stranger into your home to simply get a quote on something you want to buy. In other words, it is a more gradual build up in commitment versus the shocking immediate request of “want to buy something? Then schedule an in-home appointment”. Finally, because your sales people will receive all of the quote information the customer has chosen, they now can study this and start their sales conversations in the home from a point of commonality and understanding with the consumer, in essence, it’s like they’ve already spoken before the visit. This means instant rapport and this should mean better in-home sales conversions.