Comparison
Looking for a Hudson Ink alternative.
Hudson Ink knows contractor marketing and has for decades. Before you compare us to them, check whether your manufacturer will pay for the newsletter either way.
Check the co-op money first. It changes the whole comparison.
Several manufacturer co-op and dealer programs will fund a contractor’s newsletter — Lennox is one worth asking about — and many contractors never claim what they are already entitled to. Call your distributor rep and ask two questions: does my dealer tier include marketing co-op, and does a customer newsletter qualify for it.
We are telling you this before we tell you anything about our own service, because the answer might mean you should buy from whichever vendor is already on the approved list. That could easily be Hudson Ink and not us. It is your money either way and it is worth a phone call.
Co-op programs usually reimburse against an invoice and often require the manufacturer’s logo placement and pre-approval of artwork. Ask what the artwork rules are before anything gets designed, not after.
What Hudson Ink is good at.
Hudson Ink writes for home-service contractors and has been doing it for a long time. That experience is real: they know the seasonality, they know what a homeowner actually worries about, and they have a catalogue of contractor-specific material that a general marketing agency would take a year to accumulate. Their HVAC Advantage newsletter is sold at about 86 cents a copy all-in including postage, which is a low per-piece number for a printed and mailed item.
If your priority is the lowest defensible cost per household mailed, with contractor-aware content, that price is hard to argue with and you should probably take it.
Stay with a low-cost mailer if you are mailing wide and cold.
Cost per piece matters most when the piece is going to a lot of people who do not know you. Large route mailings, new-development saturation, a push into a neighbouring town — under those conditions the arithmetic favors volume pricing, and paying several times more per copy for custom writing is hard to justify.
It is also the right choice if nobody at your company will sit for a monthly conversation. A written-in-your-voice newsletter requires a voice to write in, and that means twenty minutes of someone senior’s time every month. If that will not happen, buy the catalogue product and be happy with it.
Where custom writing earns its cost: the maintenance base.
The economics change completely when the audience is your existing customer list — the people with a service agreement, the people whose systems you installed, the people who called you once in a heatwave and have not heard from you since. That list is small enough that per-copy price is not the deciding factor, and valuable enough that one saved agreement or one replacement system pays for a year.
What works on that list is specific. The failure you kept seeing in the field this quarter. Why you stopped installing a particular unit. The tech they liked, by name, with a photo. What the refrigerant change actually means for a homeowner with a fourteen-year-old system, said plainly rather than as a scare line.
- Service agreement renewals, timed before the season, not after.
- The real reason a system failed, from your own jobs.
- Techs by name — homeowners hire people, not companies.
- Financing and rebate deadlines while they still apply.
Seasonality is the whole calendar in this trade.
A home-services newsletter that runs on a generic content calendar will land its cooling-season piece in the week everyone is already booked solid and useless to you. The issues that earn money land in the shoulder months, before the first heatwave and before the first cold snap, when a homeowner still has the time and the inclination to book maintenance instead of an emergency call.
In Florida that calendar is not the national one, which is a reason to have someone building it around your market rather than a national publishing schedule.
The plain differences.
Hudson Ink is a publisher with a long catalogue and a low per-copy price. We ghostwrite one issue a month for one contractor at a time, print and mail it, and publish the same issue as a digital flipbook and an email. There is no large minimum, and print and postage go through at cost with no markup on either.
The limit is capacity. One person means a small number of clients and a straight answer when the calendar is full.
Questions
The things people ask before they hire us.
Sometimes. Several manufacturer co-op and dealer programs fund contractor newsletters — Lennox is one to ask about. Rules vary by brand and dealer tier, so call your distributor rep and ask whether a customer newsletter qualifies and what the artwork approval process is. Do that before you pay anyone, including us.
Hudson Ink sells HVAC Advantage at about 86 cents a copy all-in including postage. A newsletter written specifically for your company costs more per copy than a catalogue product — that’s what custom writing is. Our print and postage are passed through at cost and the rest depends on list size.
Your customer list, if you’re working with us. Saturation mailing to cold households is a volume game where per-piece price wins, and a low-cost catalogue mailer is the better buy for it.
About twenty minutes on the phone, and we schedule it around your season rather than ours. Most contractors do the call from a truck.
The same issue goes out as a flipbook link and an email to your list. We also do email campaigns, CRM follow-up and missed-call text-back as separate pieces of work. We don’t do social media management.
Keep reading
Related pages
Ask your rep about co-op, then talk to us.
If the manufacturer money only covers an approved vendor, take the approved vendor. If it doesn’t, tell us how many customers are on your list and we’ll give you a number.
No pitch deck, no discovery-call gauntlet. One conversation, one straight answer.