Case Study: Door Hangers vs Mailers

I have been work­ing with a paint­ing con­trac­tor on the west coast for a cou­ple of years now whose main source of leads came from door hang­ers, cus­tomers and refer­rals when I start­ed. I was a lit­tle sur­prised that he was receiv­ing leads from door hang­ers. I had mix results from oth­er painters pass­ing out door hangers.  The client need­ed more leads in order to grow his over­all rev­enue. He had a big 3 year growth plan. In fact, 2017 the goal is $4 mil­lion (which we are on track to hit). We have a lot of mar­ket­ing items we are doing now to gen­er­ate more leads. For the sake of this quick post, I’ll focus on door hang­ers and mail­ers. Over the past 18 months, we’ve increased the amount of door hang­ers being dis­trib­uted and have had a very con­sis­tent direct mail cam­paign. The door hang­ers were also redesigned to be more con­sis­tent with his brand. Door hang­ers go out on a dai­ly basis through­out the year. Direct mail goes out month­ly. We’ve recent­ly saved a bit of mon­ey by switch­ing from a cus­tom mail­ing list ($.50+) to a mass mail­ing list (under $.20 each). The amount of leads are about the same, but the cost of leads for mail­ers con­tin­ues to drop, (cus­tom list $400 – 500 a lead and mass mail­ing list under $200 a lead) because we are sav­ing on doing a larg­er quan­ti­ty of mail­ers. Sur­pris­ing­ly the door hang­ers are bring­ing in the most leads and sales over the mail­ers. As we approach the halfway point of 2017, their aver­age door hang­er sale is over $9k. The aver­age mail­er sale is close to $7k. The cost per lead for the door hang­er is at $140, and the cost per mail­er lead varies a lit­tle based on the types of mail­ers we have done. The total aver­age is $360 per lead in 2017 which has actu­al­ly dropped since we start­ed mail­ers 18 months ago. Though the cost for mail­ers seems high, the com­pa­ny sold close to a half mil­lion in sales in 2016 and spent around $50k on direct mail. So we con­tin­ue to do direct mail to hit our tar­get lead and sales goals.

What Works Best

After 18 months of track­ing two sources, the door hang­ing def­i­nite­ly is the cheap­er and bet­ter option. One thing that has been help­ful for this com­pa­ny is that they’ve branched out to offer more than just paint­ing ser­vices. They’ve been get­ting ​“foot in the door” leads. When they go out and bid a small pres­sure wash­ing project, the paint­ing com­pa­ny is able to say, ​“We build decks too!” or ​“We repair dry rot!” This has helped increase their clos­ing rate on both the hang­ers and mail­ers. If you are locat­ed in a mar­ket that allows walk­ing neigh­bor­hoods and door hang­ers are legal, give it a try. They key is con­sis­ten­cy on your mar­ket­ing. Oh, and if you want to be even more aggres­sive, knock­ing on doors to get leads can help boost the num­ber of leads even more! That requires a bit more train­ing and strat­e­gy. Note about lead cost: Lead cost varies based on the source of the lead. Most paint­ing com­pa­nies have an aver­age over­all lead cost of $100 or less. Your repeat and refer­rals leads are obvi­ous­ly the cheap­est. So don’t be too con­cerns if a door hang­er lead cost $100 – 200 range. If you have a good sales process and you bid prof­itabil­i­ty, you’ll be fine!