Winback for Plumbers
Several hundred people have your number and have never used it twice
The one-time customer problem
A bathroom refit is £1,850. A boiler replacement, £1,670. A shower installation, £840. A leak repair, £235. A blocked drain, £215.
Go through three years of job records for almost any plumber and the same pattern appears. A few hundred names, the overwhelming majority appearing exactly once.
They had a leak, you fixed it, they paid, and you never heard from them again. Not because anything went wrong — they were perfectly happy — but because nothing else broke for two years, and by the time it did they had lost the number and searched instead.
That is the largest untouched asset in a plumbing business, and it is unusual because the failure is entirely one-sided. The customer did not choose to leave. They simply had no mechanism for remembering you, and you had no mechanism for reminding them.
Winning them back is not persuasion. It is retrieval.
Why plumbing is the trade where this works best
Two reasons, both specific to you.
Everybody eventually needs a plumber again. Unlike an extension or a re-roof, plumbing recurs. A house with a boiler, a bathroom and drains produces work every couple of years without fail. The demand is certain; only the supplier is in question.
Emergency customers remember you disproportionately. Somebody you helped at nine on a Sunday, with water coming through a ceiling, remembers that visit far longer than they remember a planned job. The gratitude is real and it lasts, which is why a contact from you two years later is received warmly rather than as a nuisance.
That combination — recurring need plus unusually strong recall — makes a plumber’s dormant list the most responsive winback population of any trade on this site.
The ratio
A boiler is £1,670. Our Seen package is £29 a month — £348 a year. One boiler replacement covers nearly five years.
On the dormant list: five hundred one-time customers, a three per cent response to a well-written contact, is fifteen jobs. At a blended average of £400 that is £6,000 from people you have already met, already been paid by, and already impressed. There is no acquisition cost anywhere in that number.
What we’d actually do
Rebuild the list from your job history. Every customer with exactly one job and nothing since. Split by what they had done, because a boiler customer and a blocked drain customer need different messages.
A first contact that acknowledges the gap honestly. Not a pretence at a relationship. “We came out to you in March 2023 about the leak in the kitchen — we are still local, here is our number for the drawer.” Plain, brief, and it works precisely because it is not a sales letter.
The boiler-age filter. Anyone whose boiler was already old when you saw it is now a replacement prospect worth £1,670, and that is a different, warmer message.
Something to keep. A fridge magnet or a sticker with the message. Physical, kept, and the entire problem was that they had nothing with your number on it.
A capture fix, so it stops happening. The reason there are five hundred one-time customers is that nothing was ever set up to bring them back. Fixing the winback without fixing the cause means doing this again in three years.
What good looks like at twelve months
- A dormant list rebuilt and actually contacted
- Boiler-age customers identified and messaged separately
- Something physical in the house with your number on it
- Work arriving from names you last saw in 2022
- One-time customers becoming a shrinking category rather than a growing one
The mistakes we see most
Believing they chose somebody else. They almost never did. They lost the number.
One message to everybody. A drain customer and a bathroom customer are different prospects.
Contacting once and stopping. The dormant list is worth an annual touch, not a single campaign.
Fixing the winback and not the cause. Without a capture habit, this becomes a job you repeat every three years.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–4. The list assembled and segmented from job history, which for most plumbers is the first time it has ever been looked at as a whole.
Weeks 5–8. The first contact out, plus the boiler-age filter run separately.
Weeks 9–12. The keep-something-physical habit set up, and the annual rhythm scheduled so the list stays alive.
At ninety days the measure is jobs booked from names already in your records. In this trade that number should not be zero and usually is.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Job history shows who has one job and nothing since, which is the entire list — a filter rather than an afternoon with a spreadsheet.
Because installs carry dates and appliance details, the boiler-age filter is a real query rather than a guess about who might be due.
And a boiler fitted through winback opens an annual service schedule, so the customer who was dormant for three years becomes one who comes back every year without anybody chasing.
Some of those one-time jobs were rental properties
Go back through the dormant list looking for a specific pattern and a proportion of it changes value entirely.
A share of your emergency callouts were not owner-occupied houses. They were rentals, and the person who rang was a tenant, a landlord or somebody at an agent’s office covering a burst pipe on a Friday afternoon. You attended, fixed it, invoiced whoever was paying, and never established which category it was.
Those are not one-time domestic customers. They are a landlord with somewhere between one and forty properties, all of which have boilers, bathrooms and drains, all of which fail on the same schedule as everybody else’s, and all of which are somebody’s responsibility to keep working.
They are identifiable with a little work. Invoices paid by a company rather than an individual. Addresses that appear as flats or as house numbers with letters. Jobs where the person on site was clearly not the bill payer. Repeat visits to the same road under different names.
The message for that group is completely different from the one going to homeowners — availability, response times, whether you can hold keys, how you handle access and what you charge for out of hours. Those are the things a letting agent cares about and none of them appear in a message written for a household.
One recovered landlord with a dozen properties is worth more than the entire rest of the dormant list.
Questions plumbers ask
Will people mind hearing from me after two years? Emergency customers particularly do not. The visit is remembered better than you would expect.
What response rate is realistic? Two to four per cent on a first contact is normal, and higher on the boiler-age segment.
Should I phone or write? Write, or text. A phone call to somebody with no current problem is an interruption; a message is a number for the drawer.
How often? Once a year to the whole dormant list. More than that and it becomes noise.
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