EP. 258 I Tested A New Direct Mail Strategy.. Here's The Results

(upbeat music) Welcome to the service industry podcast. I've spent the last decade as a CEO, operator and business builder, selling tens of millions of dollars in products and services. I, just like many of you, started with nothing. My mission for this podcast is to help you become the greatest version of yourself. Help you grow and scale your business and create the life you've always dreamed of. I'm your host, Matt Smith. Enjoy the episode. (upbeat music) What's going on guys? Matt here from the service industry podcast. Hope everybody's doing well. Episode number 200. And I don't even know at this point. A lot. Welcome back. If you are a return listener, means the world that you have this iPad, or iPad, this podcast rather saved on your phone, wherever you listen to it. And time and time again, listen to these episodes. I hope you get value out of them. And if you're a new listener, welcome. This podcast is for home service business owners. We basically go and do things and tell you what does and doesn't work. And hopefully it makes you more successful in the process and speeds up your success and allows you to build the business and life you want. So today we're talking about direct mail. I've been testing some stuff in my own business. And I want to tell you about the results. I'm really excited about it because I think it's something that can help anybody that's listening today, who owns a home service business. But before we dive in, as always, you guys know, got some housekeeping to knock out. For those of you who don't know, I own serviceindustrycoach.com. We are a home service business marketing company. We specialize in print marketing, website design. And literally anything you can think of, that would allow you to acquire customers we likely do. But websites and print marketing is our bread and butter. And then of course, you guys know, I do one-on-one coaching as long as it's a proper fit. Not just with anybody, but with the right people. So if you're interested in any of that fun stuff and you want to grow your business, click the link in the show notes or go to serviceindustrycoach.com. All right, second thing if you haven't joined the Facebook group, 100% free, no strings attached, not trying to sell you anything in there. Almost 300 home service business owners. It's a good spot to be again. That link is also in the show notes, go click it. I'm gonna say this again 'cause it happens all the time. Some y'all just don't know how to listen. If you wanna join the Facebook group, you've got to tell me and the questionnaire what kind of business you own or else I will not accept you. We will not allow spam people in there. So you gotta tell 'em what you own and then you get in there and be good to rock and roll. All right, so many of you guys know we launched a roofing brand. This is about six months ago now. And this is be interesting to hear some of your guys' feedback, but I talk to a lot of home service business guys and gals on a daily basis, a ton locally and a ton across the country. And I can't tell you honestly, almost everybody in every industry, pressure washing, painting, roofing, siding, gutter installation, all of these different industries right now are all saying the same thing to me. They're saying, Matt, our Google ads aren't performing like they were. Now, let me be clear. Everybody's still getting clicks. Everybody's still paying Google, but the phone isn't ringing. So like you can go in the back into Google and someone might search Painting Contractor near me and they're getting that click, but the phone's never ringing. So I don't know what's going on, to be honest. You guys have heard me say this a million times. Internet marketing changes non-stop. Algorithms change non-stop. And so it's not like a, oh, I set my Google ads and I'm good forever. No, Google changes things all the time. And you have to know and be up with the way they're doing things if you want to rank properly, if you want your ads performed well and the same goes for Facebook, right? And like, Facebook has gotten harder and harder and we do really well on Facebook. I don't want to say anything bad about it. But the reason I say all this about the digital side when it comes to marketing is because it's ever changing. The beautiful thing about direct mail and print marketing is that outside of offers that are on the direct mail, outside of the way you design the postcard, the door hanger, and the way you set it all up, nothing else changes. Like there's nothing that can affect the way it performs outside of your control. And that's why I love it so much. And so with a little bit of a dip in performance on the Google side, I'm like, man, I want to try some new direct mail stuff. Obviously you guys know, if you guys work with my company's service industry coach, you get all of our, you get the templates we use in our home service company. So everything that we use with you guys has been tried and true, proven in my businesses for almost a decade. We're not just designing random crap like most marketers are. These are proven templates. And so we've got the postcard side honed in, but I've got this one competitor in the roofing space and they're ginormous over multiple state operation, private equity owned. I think they're doing 200 million plus across their locations. And every, oh, probably every 45 days or so, I get the same piece of mail from them in my mailbox. And I've read it many times now, right? Like I noticed that every time it comes in, but I finally said, man, if they're sending this exact same thing every single time, there has to be a reason. Like I understand these guys have big pockets, but they're still not just wasting money, right? So I dove into it a little deeper. And I was like, all right, let's break this down a little bit. It's not a postcard. It's not in a newspaper. It's not a magazine. It's a piece of paper. Now it's not like a piece of paper like you would use in your printer. It's heavier. It's like 70 pound thick paper, but it's still a piece of paper. Eight and a half by 11, a white page. It's got their logo at the top. And I'm gonna read you what it says, okay? And I use this word for word in our business to test this to see how it works. So I'm actually reading off mine right now. So it's good afternoon. And it's in letter form, just literally on an eight and a half by 11. Good afternoon. We will be doing roofing in gutter projects for some of your neighbors in the next week or so. Since our equipment and crews will be in your neighborhood, I can offer you a discount if we schedule an appointment today. Please call the phone number as soon as possible to schedule a free inspection, an estimate, special financing available. And we offer military and senior discounts. And then right below that, that's just typed out. Right below that in a handwritten font, okay? Now this is actually printed, but you wouldn't be able to tell you. You would think I hand wrote this. It says, "Give me a ring. We would love to help you too with the phone number." And then it says my name, Matt, okay? And then below at the bottom just has the website address and it says, "Roof replacement, roof repair gutters." Now if you want to actually see what I'm talking about, I'll actually put the link to that in the show notes so you can just click the link. This week, it'll take you to the service industry coach website product page for this, but you'll at least get to see what I'm talking about so you're not like trying to imagine this. On the backside, it's blank. It's just got postage for every door direct mail on it. It's literally a piece of paper. Now you can mail this two ways. You can mail it just flat like a normal piece of paper or you can fold it like a hot dog and you can mail it that way. Now they do hot dog style. I said, "Hmm, I want to try flat because I think flats either gonna make it on the bottom or the top of the mail, which has a better chance of being read." Now here's what I learned by sending these. We've sent out 4,000 over the last few weeks, which is honestly still a really small test size. We're gonna be doing probably between 20 and 50,000 of these over the next month or two. Probably next two months, we'll do around probably 20,000, 30,000 of these. And if they continue to hold the return that we're getting, the sky's the limit. I'm gonna go insane on these things. But here's what I learned. Because it's on a piece of paper and because of the way it's typed out and then also has handwritten font on it, every single call that we have gotten on these. Not some, all of them thought that somebody, meaning me, Matt, because my name's on it, went and put this inside of their mailbox. Now, I'm gonna tell you a funny story and then I'm gonna tell you the success stories. The first phone call we got from this was an old lady. And she goes, she goes, first off, if you guys were a good roofing company, you would know that I don't need a roof and you wouldn't have put this in my mailbox. So right away, I'm thinking, okay, she thinks that we put this in there by hand. Then she goes, second off, putting things in my mailbox is illegal. So I got on the phone with her, I'm talking to her. And I asked her for her address and she's like, my address doesn't matter. I'm not telling you where I live. I was like, well, it would help me if I knew that way, I can talk to the person that was in your neighborhood, that way they never do this again. She's like, no, you're not gonna single somebody out. You're gonna talk to your entire company and you're gonna tell them all that this is unacceptable. So then I go, man, can I ask you a quick question? Was by chance that like a white piece of paper? And she's like, yeah, it was. And I said, can you just flip that over for me real quick? She said, yeah. And I said, you see the postage in the top right? She's like, and you can just hear it in her voice. Instant panic that she knows she looks like a moron. I go, that piece of paper was put in your mailbox by the postal service because our company paid to mail those. You were not singled out. Nobody touched your mailbox except the mail person. And she literally just goes, well, well, well, just leave me alone and then hung up the phone. Okay, that was our first experience, our very first phone call with us, which then I instantly go, man, is everyone gonna think we put these in their mailbox? Are we gonna get a bunch of pissed off people? Long story short, the answer was no. We haven't had any other negative phone calls. However, all the phone calls we got asked for me personally because my name is on the flyer. And they all thought we put it in their mailbox, but nobody was mad. Now, here's why I like that is because it stands out from all the other quote unquote junk mail that people get. Now, I'm a die hard postcard guy. They work, especially if you're consistent, you do large volume and you do it every 30 days to the same neighborhood. You guys have heard me preach this for years. But I will also tell you that there's other people doing lots of direct mail postcards, right? And so sometimes it might get hidden, quote unquote, in the mail and be considered junk mail where this piece of paper stands out and people read it because they don't think it's a part of what the mail person dropped off and they think somebody else put it in there. And so they take the time to read it. Now, I say all that to say this, this specific and this kind of goes against my rules, this doesn't even have like a real offer on it. I guess you could somewhat call an offer like, hey, if you schedule an appointment today, we'll give you a neighborhood discount, like that's kind of an offer, but it's by no means a strong one. The only reason I ran this word for word how it was is because that's how that competitor was doing it. And it's working. And so long story short is we're going to offer this in our store now because it's a little bit more affordable than postcards. The postage is the same with every direct mail, but for those of you that want to even change it up, like we're going to rotate this in our lineup. So one month we'll do these, one month we'll do postcards, one month we'll do these will probably change up the offer, one month we'll do postcards. It just gives you different options and a different look inside of the mailbox. And like I said, they're slightly more affordable than like a six and a half by nine postcard, okay? And the cool thing is is they're ginormous, right? It's a full page, it's a full sheet of paper. So they're way bigger than a postcard as well. Now, we're getting roughly a quarter percent return on this first mailing. If you guys have heard me for an extended period of time, you know that direct mail on average, when done consistently every 30 days to the same routes, you can probably expect depending on your service a quarter to a half a percent return rate. Now, roofing's a high ticket service. You could expect a lower return on your marketing spend because a, not as many people have the money. They don't have $20,000 or they don't want to spend $20,000. But if your power washing house is for $4,500, $600, you're gonna have a higher call rate on these, right? So the fact that we have around a quarter percent return rate is really good, especially on the first mailing ever. Like these homeowners have never gotten a mail piece from us before. And so it makes me wonder and honestly, makes me believe that if somebody with a lower ticket service, power washing, even like lower ticket like painting that's maybe, you know, a couple thousand dollars, these are going to crush for you guys. The trick will be to come up with a specific offer around the service that's hot, around the time of year you're mailing them and to be consistent to the same routes over and over and over. And so I put my money where my mouth is. I think that's one thing that makes me a lot different than every other quote unquote marketing company out there. Anything you buy from me, I've done. Like I don't have things in our print marketing store that don't work. Okay, I wouldn't sell you something I didn't believe in. If I don't believe in it, I don't have it listed. And so I'm gonna list this and offer this as another direct mail. And honestly, if you don't have money for direct mail, you could do these by hand too. Like we use these, like the leftovers, we use these as like five rounds or if we're doing a job and we need to hit a whole neighborhood that that house is in, we'll literally just roll them up and put them on the door handle. So if you want to put them out by hand, you totally can, it's a super affordable. And if you want to try something new for direct mail, you can do that as well. So it's a win, win. And I would encourage you guys, if you're doing any kind of print direct mail or by hand stuff, just test these out. Try them for a month and see what kind of return you get. I believe that they're gonna crush. So I just wanted to jump on here and share that with you guys because, you know, I'm not just gonna throw these on our print marketing store and have you guys buy them without me knowing. So I've tested them. We're going to continue to use them. We're getting a quarter percent return rate on our very first mailing with a high ticket service. That's incredible, by the way, you should try them too. All right, and if you guys have any other questions on this, on other marketing stuff, hit me up, okay? And as always, like the biggest thing, I don't care how many neighborhoods you're hitting or if you're doing a thousand, you know, a thousand postcards or door hangers a month or 50,000 a month. What I care about is that you're doing it every month, okay? Too many of you guys get stuck in this trap with marketing where you do, you know, 5,000 or 10,000 pieces of direct mail or door hangers. And then 30 days later, you don't do it again. And maybe your return was like, okay, but like, didn't get you super excited. It's because you didn't do it enough. And so like, I got a quarter percent return on this my first mailing. I'm pretty excited about that. But you know I'm more excited about doing it for another two, three, six, 12 months in a row and then seeing where my return is because I'll have built brand and we'll have tested new offers and we'll start honing the thing in more and more and more until it's an ATM machine. All right, and I want you guys to win. So I just want you to start to think like that with all sorts of marketing. It's not a one and done, it's not a two and done. It's a forever and done. So get rolling, start small, be consistent and let's win. Love you guys, I'll see you on the next episode. (upbeat music) Thank you for listening to this episode of the podcast. As always, if you need any help marketing your business or want to work with me directly doing one-on-one coaching, visit serviceindustrycoach.com. We'll see you on the next episode. (upbeat music)