I finally finished crunching the #s on our 2010 marketing. The piece of direct mail you see above was the clear winner for the year. I am happy to report that for ever $1 *spent I made $31 back. Now … Continue reading →
Nice 
Not to start up with numbers… but I can see the difference between mailing and hand delivering fliers.
You make $31 for every dollar spent, I average it out to about $1 per flier return.
I don’t really factor in “time spent” on delivering fliers, because if I’m fliering it means business is slow that day anyways, and I’m not doing anywhere near the kind of volume that ACWC does, but its nice to know what the mailer/doorhanger return ratio is.
Jeez, i can’t even imaging hand-delivering 100k fliers. I’m taking 2 weeks in March to do 5k doorhangers alone. At that rate it would take me roughly a year to do your volume
Youll get to the point where you see it as opportunity cost. What could you have been doing with that time you spent handing out fliers? Cleaning windows maybe?
Dont get me wrong, fliers rule… But there are only so many you can put out in one day.
Chris, to each his own, but I think if you hired someone to hand out those 5K cards for you, it would be a better use of your time. You could spend those two weeks, bidding, further marketing, whatever to increase your business and bottom line.
When I used to have people put out doorhangers for me, I would pay them an hourly wage, and then anybody who called me from that neighborhood, who booked a job, I would give them a bonus from that job. That way it insured me that they would be handing them all out and not just tossing them.
Just a suggestion.
windowman
To answer both questions… I only doorhang when i hit a slow spot in my schedule. Its better to pass out fliers on a day with no work scheduled than sit at home goofing off.
There’s pros and cons to having someone pass out your fliers for you.
Pros - you can cover a lot more ground without having to do it yourself
Cons - You have to pay someone to do it
- You can’t do on-the-spot estimates like I do.
When I DO flier, that $1 per flier comes out of people I meet while fliering and schedule right on the spot. I haven’t done the numbers lately, but I know back in August my ROI with both on-the-spot booking and future bookings was more like $3-$5 a flier. One neighborhood, which I will keep hitting repeatedly until I clean the WHOLE community, I averaged more than $10 ROI per piece.
When I am a little more established and have steady full time employees I will be doing the mass mailings as well. For now, with just me and a part time assistant, D2D keeps more than enough money coming in
did you use that card as the initial mailing or to existing customers to get that return.
I am working on a 100k mailing in May and want to knock it out of the park. I like your stats on the card but wonder if new customers would disregard it as they have never used us before
Hey Micah
We used that last year on customers in our database that we did NOT see in 2009. This year we will be using this window cleaning post card:
For WCRA window cleaning association members this card is now available for download. If your not a member of the [URL=“http://windowcleaningresource.org/”]window cleaners association it will be available for purchase on June 1st.
