Seasonality in appliance repair and a slow-season marketing plan that keeps the vans moving
When the appliance repair phone goes quiet, why, and a month-by-month plan with offers, budgets and channels for the slow weeks between the summer fridge surge and the holiday oven rush.
Appliance repair is seasonal in a way most owners feel but few plan around. The summer phone rings with refrigerators and freezers. The weeks before Thanksgiving ring with ovens. The rest of the year has two dips, late September through early November and the first half of January, where a two-van shop can lose a third of its volume and start cutting prices to fill the board. The dips are predictable, which means they are plannable.
The appliance calendar
What breaks, and when, in most US markets:
- June to August: refrigerators and freezers. Heat raises the load on compressors and old units fail. Ice makers get used hard. This is the busiest window and the easiest marketing; the demand is already there.
- Late September to early November: the first dip. Kitchens are quiet, washers and dryers are not stressed, nothing has been cooked. Calls drop 20% to 35%.
- Mid-November to late December: ovens, ranges and dishwashers. The first big meal of the season reveals the igniter that has been getting slow all year. Short, intense.
- January: the second dip, after the guests leave and before the tax refund arrives.
- February to May: steady. Washers and dryers from spring cleaning and the kids' sports season, dishwashers, the occasional refrigerator.
Pull your own invoices by month for the last two years and you will see the same shape. The plan below assumes it.
The rule: book the planned work in the dip
The slow season cannot be fixed by waiting for emergencies that are not happening. It is fixed by selling the work homeowners can schedule whenever they want and that they never schedule on their own:
- Dryer vent cleaning, $129 to $169 flat. Fire safety message, visible result, and the tech is in the house looking at every other appliance.
- Refrigerator coil cleaning and gasket check, $89 to $129. Sell it as "before the holidays, so it survives the extra load".
- Washer tune-up: hoses, pump filter, balance, $99 to $139. Ten-year-old rubber hoses are a flood waiting to happen, and the homeowner knows it once you say it.
- Pre-holiday oven check, $89 to $119, offered in October: igniter test, temperature calibration, door seal.
- An annual maintenance plan, $149 to $199, with two visits and priority scheduling. Sold in the dip, delivered in the dip next year.
None of these are emergencies, which is why they fit the slow weeks, and all of them put a tech in a kitchen where a second job is often waiting.
The slow-season plan, week by week
Six weeks before the dip (mid-August for the fall one, late November for the January one):
- Pull the past customer list. Everyone you serviced in the last two years, with a phone number.
- Write the offer. One flat price, one appliance, one deadline.
- Build the Meta ad with phone video of the lint, the coil, the hose. See the Meta ads guide.
Four weeks before:
- Send the past-customer text. "Hi, it is the shop that fixed your dryer in March. Dryer vent cleaning is $139 through October 31. Reply YES and we will find a slot." Past customers book at three to five times the rate of strangers, and the text costs almost nothing.
- Turn on the Meta ad at $15 to $25 a day in your service area.
- Add a Google post with the offer.
During the dip:
- Keep Google Ads running at normal budget; the fewer emergency calls that exist are still worth winning, and competitors who cut spend hand you cheaper clicks.
- Rerun the past-customer text once, to non-responders, with a shorter deadline.
- Offer techs a small bonus, $5 to $10, per maintenance job booked from the kitchen on any other call.
Two weeks before the busy season:
- Switch the Meta ad and the Google post to the seasonal emergency: "Oven not heating? Same-week appointments before Thanksgiving" or "Fridge not cooling? We are seeing calls within 48 hours this week."
- Raise Google Ads bids on the seasonal appliance terms by 20% to 30% for the window.
Budget across the year
A shop spending $2,000 a month on marketing should not spend it evenly. Weight it toward the two weeks before each busy window, when a dollar on Google or Meta catches the demand as it rises, and toward the past-customer campaigns in the dips, which cost less than $100 to run. Cut nothing entirely; a Google Ads account that goes dark for a month loses its history and restarts slower.
Use the dip for the work that compounds
The slow weeks are when the long projects get done. Build the appliance pages on the site (the website guide has the list). Fix the Google profile services and hours. Train the techs on the kitchen review ask and run a review push; only 22.4% of appliance repair companies have passed 100 reviews, and a slow October is when a shop at 60 can get there. Apply for Local Services Ads so it is approved before the November rush.
Frequently asked
Should I discount the diagnostic fee in the slow season? No. A discounted fee attracts the free-opinion caller and trains your market to wait for the deal. Discount the planned work instead, or bundle it: "dryer vent cleaning free with any repair over $200 this month" keeps the fee intact and raises the ticket.
What about home warranty work to fill the gap? It fills the board, at $45 to $75 a claim, often with an unpaid second trip. It is a reasonable backstop for one tech in a dead week. It is a bad plan for the whole dip, because the warranty customer rarely becomes your customer and the review rate is low. See the FAQ on warranty work.
Can I predict my own slow season more precisely? Yes. Export completed jobs by week for two years from your field software and chart them. Most shops find their dips start a week or two earlier or later than the general pattern depending on climate. The benchmark report has state-level review and website numbers that hint at how crowded your market is in those weeks.
If you want the past-customer campaign, the Meta offer and the seasonal Google adjustments run for you, the email and SMS campaigns service in the free 14-day trial covers it.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, appliance repair companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor