T&T Plumbing & Heating

T&T Plumbing & Heating, Inc. is a local HVAC and plumbing company serving home and business owners in the Northeast Indiana region. When they partnered with us in June 2023, they brought an existing SMS marketing strategy that was underperforming — significantly.

T&T had been sending SMS marketing campaigns since May 2023, but the average response rate was just 0.1%. For every thousand messages sent, one person responded.

The problem wasn't the audience — T&T's customers were receiving the messages. And it wasn't the offer — the promotions were relevant. The problem was the conversion path. The existing strategy relied entirely on recipients responding to text messages in a conversational manner — texting back and forth to book an appointment. That's a high-friction ask. Most people don't want to have a multi-text conversation with a business. They want to tap a link and be done.

The fix was straightforward: add a landing page link to each SMS message. Instead of asking recipients to respond via text, we directed them to a landing page with an integrated ServiceTitan web scheduler widget where they could book an appointment in seconds. No back-and-forth. No phone tag. Just a tap, a time slot, and a confirmed booking.

The path to results wasn't perfectly smooth — and that's part of why this story matters.

In October 2023, we launched the updated strategy. Four users converted on the landing page almost immediately. But T&T's team wanted to reconfigure their CRM to properly integrate with the scheduler before scaling up. The widget was temporarily disabled and replaced with a standard lead capture form.

Over the next three months, without the scheduler, SMS campaigns failed to generate conversions. The friction was back — and the results proved it.

In January 2024, T&T agreed to move forward with the full scheduler integration. We worked directly with ServiceTitan to complete the necessary back-end configuration, including mandatory training for both our team and T&T's staff.

By late February 2024, the scheduler widget was back on the landing pages. The results returned immediately: nine leads in February, eight in March, and five in the first three weeks of April.

The final conversion rate across the SMS campaigns reached 1.67% — a significant improvement from the 0.1% starting point — with 22+ leads generated in a three-month period.

SMS marketing works. But only when the path from message to action is frictionless. T&T's experience illustrates two things: first, that the conversion mechanism matters as much as the message itself. A great offer sent to the right audience still won't convert if the recipient has to work too hard to take action. Second, that optimization sometimes requires patience. The CRM integration took time. The scheduler went offline and came back. But the team stayed committed to the right approach — and the results validated the persistence.

For any service company using or considering SMS marketing, the lesson is clear: don't just send the message. Build the bridge.