i see many positive opinions about direct to mail on here but everyone i talk to in real life says it dosent work or is useless.
so is it the real deal?
my plan was to put out a few thousand door hangers and 3000 direct to mail postcards
to get a clientele going. is this a good idea?
i was also going to do some internet and paper stuff but not sure of the costs.
thanks for the advice
Done right, right message, right times of year…Yes. But it does take $.
I would invest in a website and getting it ranked. it takes a while for your site to start ranking well on google. In about 3.5 months I went from having no website to being ranked one page one. I gets lots of people finding me on the internet. In regards to Direct mail, it is needed because it can get you into the areas you can’t hit with doorhangers, which are ultimately the neighborhoods you want to be in. I would be leery of newspaper ads and other such advertising. I did one and got one call in six weeks, but it was a smaller paper. Test everything and see what works best, but I would start with internet and Direct mail
i have been washing windows professionally for two years for a large company, my cleaning skills are there but i am really blind to the back end stuff i guess. i have been reading the forum alot and feel a bit better with it though .
adrian, when exactly are the right times, it would be a huge money waste to send out when no one wants their windows cleaned.
diamondridge ,thanks for the advice, i think i will focus on getting a website and then ranking it higher and higher as well as the direct mail.
how exactly do i go about ranking up? i’d imagine it must be very expensive to get to page one, much less spot one. am i wrong?
also how much advertising did you start with? about how many customers called you in the first 3 months?
Sorry that was a typo, it should have said “on” page one. It didn’t really take that much. I tried to write good content that contained my keywords in the natural flow. Page titles, meta tags, meta descriptions. I linked to some sites of other WCR members. Put my link in my sig line of every message board I’m on. I did have a professional optimize my keywords and generate some links. Just be. Careful, there are a lot of Internet marketing scammers out there
By the end of the year I will have spent $100k on direct mail.
I don’t do it because it doesn’t work.
Holy crap dude! How many per year/at a time?
100k? wow thats alot of postcards. im going to have an advertising budget around about 2000k. the 5000 mailers i was going to send, would that even be enough to draw a response?
WOW!!! I would be happy to earn that much money never mind having that for an advertising budget. Man, I have a looooong way to go…
Agreed we do a similar amount. I have had a few years where we mailed out more than a million pieces. Fortunately I put out much higher quality pieces now so mailing that many isn’t necessary anymore.
Your advertising budget is 2 million? 
Seriously though, 5k pieces if they are strong pieces with a good offer, sent to the right areas, should net you some good jobs.
I would send out at least that many. 5000 should get you into 5 or 6 neighborhoods for a good sample rate. I just did my first direct mail, but only 2500 of them.
You might want to send 2500 and then hit the same areas again in a week
This year we will do between 400-500K direct mail pieces.
We send out a minimum of 50k 8 1/2 x 5 1/2 high quality double sided glossy postcards.
