Sample issues
What would actually be in a home services newsletter, page by page.
For HVAC, plumbing, roofing, electrical and pest control. Four pages built around the maintenance seasons, service agreements, and the customer who has not called in three years.
These are sample headlines for a sample issue
Nothing on this page was printed for anybody. No company is named, no job described here happened, and no result is claimed. The headlines are written out in full because the thing a contractor cannot picture is four pages a month that are not a coupon, and the fastest way to fix that is to show the pages.
The real version comes out of your trucks. Your jobs, your crew, your service area, your seasons. What holds across every contractor we would build this for is the structure below and the reason for it.
Sample only. Nothing here is a published issue, a real job, or a customer.
Page one: the job story with the part that went wrong left in
Front page, one story, 450 to 550 words, and at least two photographs taken on a phone by whoever was standing there. This is the single most-read page in a contractor newsletter and the one most companies get wrong, because they write it as a success story and readers can smell that from the doormat.
The version that works leaves the mistake in. A worked example: “The attic job that took us two visits, and what the first one missed”. It runs as a story — the call came in on the hottest afternoon of the week, the tech found the obvious thing, replaced it, and the house was cool by five. Then it was warm again on Thursday. The second visit found the real problem in a crushed return duct nobody had looked at. The piece ends with what the company changed about how it checks, not with a boast. That is what makes a homeowner trust the invoice.
Page two: the one thing to do to the house this month
Left side of the spread, around 350 words, and it has to be a thing a homeowner can do or schedule this month, not a general education piece. Timing is what makes it useful and useful is what makes it read.
A sample for March: “Run your air conditioning for an hour now, before you need it in May” — why the first hot week is when systems fail, what noises mean, what a homeowner can check themselves in ten minutes, and what genuinely needs a technician. The honesty of telling somebody what they can do without you is exactly why they call you for the part they cannot.
Page three: the crew page, and the agreement page
Right side of the spread does two jobs in about 300 words plus photographs. The top is the crew — who is on the trucks, who just got certified, whose kid plays for the local team, the new hire so a homeowner recognises the face at the door. Home services is a trade where a stranger enters your house, and the whole business runs on that not feeling like a risk.
The bottom is the service agreement, written plainly rather than sold. A sample block: “What the maintenance plan actually gets you, and when it is not worth it” — the two visits, the priority scheduling, the discount on parts, and a straight sentence about the age of system where a plan stops making sense. Agreement renewal is the commercial job this newsletter is really doing, and it works better as a plain explanation than as an offer.
Page four: the calendar that lives on the side of the fridge
The back page is a keepsake, the phone number in large type, and the mailing panel. For a contractor this is the highest-value page in the issue, because the number a homeowner calls at nine on a Saturday night is the number they can see.
Sample keepsakes: a twelve-month home maintenance calendar sized to stick on a refrigerator. A one-page “what to do before the plumber arrives” card, starting with where the shut-off valve is. A hurricane checklist with the dates on it. A card listing your after-hours number, your service area and what counts as an emergency. People keep those for years, and years later they are still the reason a call comes in.
What changes month to month, what is fixed
The frame stays put so the issue is quick to produce and instantly recognisable. Same masthead, same crew block, same back-page number, same place for the owner’s short note. What rotates is the job story, the seasonal page and the keepsake.
- Changes monthly: the job story, the seasonal maintenance page, the crew feature, the keepsake
- Fixed every issue: the layout, the owner’s note, the service area map, the after-hours number, the mailing panel
- Changes once a year: the maintenance calendar card, the truck photography, the agreement pricing block
A twelve-month calendar around hurricane season and the load
The advantage a contractor has over almost every other industry is that the year tells you what to write. Every month has a thing that is about to break. In Florida the calendar has a second spine: hurricane season runs 1 June to 30 November, and the preparation content has to land before it, not during it.
- January — water heaters, and the post-holiday drain nobody wants to discuss
- February — dryer vents, and the fire risk homeowners never think about
- March — run the air conditioning now, before the first hot week
- April — the pre-season tune-up, drain lines, and the attic
- May — hurricane prep in full: generators, shutters, trees, before 1 June
- June — season opens: what a power surge does to a compressor
- July — peak load, thermostat settings, and why the system runs all day
- August — humidity, duct sweat and the mould conversation
- September — the busiest storm weeks: what to check the morning after
- October — post-storm damage that shows up late, and roof checks
- November — season closes on 30 Nov; guests, holiday load, and a plumbing warning
- December — agreement renewals and the year-ahead calendar card
The dormant customer is who this is really for
Most contractors have a database several times larger than their active customer list. People who bought a system four years ago, were entirely happy, and have not thought about you since. When the next thing breaks they will search, because searching is easier than finding an old invoice.
A monthly piece with your name on it is the thing that stops that search from happening. It also does the two quieter jobs: it keeps agreement renewals from lapsing by accident, and it gives an existing customer something to hand a neighbour who is complaining about their own system. That is what the referral card on the back page is there for.
Your twenty minutes is mostly your phone camera
One call a month, about twenty minutes, usually with the owner or a lead tech. What did you go out on, what surprised you, what did you have to go back for. That call is the front page. The only standing ask is that somebody on the trucks takes photographs — bad phone photographs of real work beat anything else available.
The rest is ours: writing, design, print, mailing, the digital flipbook and the email edition. Print and postage are billed through at cost, and you deal with the same small team every month rather than a ticket queue.
Questions
The things people ask before they hire us.
Every contractor says this and every contractor is wrong. The call you went back on, the thing you found behind a wall, the part that took nine days to arrive — those are stories. The twenty-minute call exists precisely because you will not think of them sitting at a desk.
Sparingly, and never on the front. An issue that reads as a flyer gets thrown out with the flyers. A seasonal offer on the back page next to the maintenance calendar works because the page is being kept for another reason.
Your own database first — every customer you have ever invoiced, not just the active ones. The dormant list is where the return is. Mailing to a purchased neighbourhood list is a different exercise with different economics, and we would talk about that separately.
That is one of the main reasons to do it. Agreements lapse quietly, usually because nobody was in touch between visits. A monthly piece that explains what the plan covers, plainly and repeatedly, keeps the renewal from being a surprise.
You can, but the months you want to skip are usually the months the newsletter earns most. The point of building the twelve-month calendar in week one is that a busy August does not require you to think — the issue is already planned and your part is still one call.
Keep reading
Related pages
Tell us your trade and your service area.
What you install, how big the customer database is, and how many agreements you carry. We will come back with a twelve-month outline and a real number.
No pitch deck, no discovery-call gauntlet. One conversation, one straight answer.