Case study · Plumbers · Canada

Plumber Case Study Canada: +146% Leads

Name: Marketing & Lead Expert
Address: IN
Price range: $$

How an 11-van plumbing business in Ottawa grew calls and enquiries 146% and cut cost per lead 54% in 6 months with Business Listings, Email Marketing and Local SEO.

Illustrative case study: the business is anonymised and the figures are modelled on typical results for this market.

Plumbers · Canada

Plumbing

An 11-van plumbing business based in Ottawa, serving the wider Ottawa area and focused on water heater and tankless replacements, plus frozen and burst pipe repairs. Before working with us, 71% of enquiries came through HomeStars and similar paid platforms, where the same lead often went to three or four competitors. The goal was more exclusive calls and enquiries, a lower cost per booked job and a pipeline the owner controls.

Results After 6 Months

Leads per month

+146%

Cost per lead

-54%

Marketing-sourced revenue

+162%

Return on marketing spend

5.6x

The challenge

Where the business was stuck

Emergency jobs go to whoever answers first, so missed calls after 5pm quietly hand revenue to competitors.
Lead marketplaces sell the same enquiry to three or four plumbers, which drives prices down and win rates with them.
Low-value tap and toilet jobs fill the diary while hot water, re-pipe and bathroom work, the jobs that pay, go elsewhere.
Campaigns were not planned around peak season, so budget ran out when demand was highest.

The approach

Three services, one goal

We focused on Business Listings & Citations, Email Marketing and Local SEO & Google Maps, the three channels with the best cost per booked job for plumbing businesses in Ottawa. Every call, form and chat was tracked to a booked outcome from week one, so every decision was based on revenue, not clicks.

See our plumber marketing service in Canada

What we did

The technical work behind the numbers, service by service.

Service 1

Business Listings & Citations

Claimed and completed profiles on Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect and 64 local and industry directories.
Cleaned name, address and phone details everywhere, removing 4 duplicate listings that were splitting reviews and confusing Google.
Added services, photos, opening hours, licence numbers and booking links to every profile, with UTM tags to track leads by source.
Set up monthly listing monitoring so incorrect edits by users or aggregators are caught and fixed within days.

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Service 2

Email Marketing

Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the sending domain and warmed it up, taking inbox placement from 75% to 99%.
Segmented 6,500 past customers and quote recipients by job type, area and last service date.
Built 5 automated flows: welcome, quote nurture, post-job review request, annual service reminder and win-back.
Sent a monthly campaign with seasonal offers for water heater and tankless replacements and related work, A/B testing subject lines and send times.

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Service 3

Local SEO & Google Maps

Rebuilt the Google Business Profile: primary category corrected, 6 secondary categories added, 14 services with descriptions and a service area matched to the real travel radius.
Published 22 suburb and area pages across the wider Ottawa area, each with local job photos, travel times and area-specific FAQs.
Launched a review request flow by SMS after every completed job, lifting review velocity from 3 to 12 new reviews a month.
Tracked rankings on a 9x9 geo-grid around the office to see Maps visibility street by street, not just from one location.

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The numbers

Before and after

Metric	Before	Month 6	Change
Calls and enquiries per month	50	123	+146%
Cost per lead	C$101	C$47	-54%
Cost per booked job	C$261	C$113	-57%
Lead-to-job rate	39%	41%	+2 pts
Website conversion rate	3.5%	4.5%	+29%
Marketing-sourced revenue / month	C$18k	C$48k	+162%
Share of leads from paid directories	71%	16%	-55 pts
Listings with consistent details	11	67	all fixed
Email open rate	21%	52%	+31 pts
Keywords in the Maps top 3	1	28	+27

Lead growth

Calls and enquiries per month

Marketing-sourced revenue went from C$18k to C$48k a month, measured from booked booked jobs in the CRM.

Optimisations That Moved The Numbers

01
Fixing duplicates and inconsistent details lifted Google Business Profile views by 38%.
02
Bing, Apple Maps and directory profiles now produce 18 tracked leads a month that did not exist before.
03
Email flows now bring in C$3.3k of repeat and referral work a month from customers who were already on the books.
04
Adding 6 secondary Google Business Profile categories lifted discovery searches by 57% in six weeks.

The 6-month timeline

From tracking to scale.

Weeks 1 to 2
Audit, tracking and baseline
Call tracking, conversion tracking, CRM connection and a full audit covering Business Listings, Email Marketing and Local SEO.
Weeks 3 to 6
Build and launch
Business Listings, Email Marketing and Local SEO live for water heater and tankless replacements, plus frozen and burst pipe repairs.
Months 2 to 4
Optimise
Weekly search term, call and landing page reviews. Budget and effort moved to the jobs that close.
Months 5 to 6
Scale
Expansion into Mississauga and nearby areas, plus new services with proven demand.

Illustrative case study: the business is anonymised and the figures are modelled on typical results for this market. Your results depend on your market, budget, capacity and follow-up. We share realistic forecasts in your free audit.