Star Heating & Cooling is a family-owned HVAC company serving Central Indiana. V+M has handled their inbound marketing, paid campaigns, and outreach for more than four years, including a full website rebuild that launched in February 2023.
The new site performed well out of the gate. But one number kept nagging: conversion rate. Star's website had a history of converting visitors to leads at 29% or below. Good traffic was coming in. Too much of it was leaving without doing anything.
The goal was 35%. We weren't there yet.
Website leads were their highest-value jobs for Star. The average ticket on a website lead ran above $1,100. Getting more of those visitors to call or fill out a form was a revenue problem.
We monitored the new site for five months after launch to establish a clean baseline. The rebuild had moved the needle. But visitors were still leaving without converting at a rate that left money on the table.
In July 2023, we added an exit intent feature to the site, a pop-up that triggers when a visitor's cursor moves toward closing the tab or navigating away, showing one last offer before they're gone.
The offer itself was straightforward: an $89 tune-up. It was seasonal, relevant, and low barrier. The kind of thing a homeowner on the fence about calling might actually act on.
The implementation was a one-time addition with minimal development time and no ongoing maintenance cost beyond refreshing the offer periodically.
What It Produced
We tracked results through December 2023.
That 3% lift came during one of the mildest weather years Central Indiana had seen in recent memory. Mild weather means less urgency, fewer emergency calls, and harder-to-earn conversions across the board. The pop-up moved the needle in conditions that were working against it.
The $3,195 came entirely from visitors who were already on the site and leaving. The traffic budget didn't change. The ad spend didn't change. One addition to the website turned browsers into booked jobs.
Star kept the same $89 tune-up offer through the end of the year. It worked. But exit intent offers perform better when they stay seasonally relevant. A tune-up offer in July lands differently than one in November. Rotating the offer every few months would push those numbers higher. That's the next test to run.
Your marketing should be as reliable as the service you provide. Valve+Meter's data-driven approach starts with understanding your business and ends with results you can actually trust. Schedule your marketing assessment and find out what measurable growth looks like for your company.
