The Best Direct Mail Strategies for Painting Contractors

Since we’ve focused on Neighborhood Domination with offline initiatives this month, I thought our coverage wouldn’t be complete without the wisdom from our talented partners at The Best Postcards on stellar strategies and big trends for 2025.
Ashley Bussard, partner at The Best Postcards, walked me through how data-driven techniques and advanced tracking have evolved in direct mail, making it an even more effective marketing vehicle for painting contractors. She shared key strategies utilized by home service industry pros and discussed how their services have grown to meet a new landscape.
Target Audience
“For one thing, targeting is really important. Make sure you’re mailing to the right people,” said Bussard. If you don’t have a data whiz on staff, don’t worry, The Best Postcards has a data analytics team who can tell you a ton about your customers.
“When we are introduced to a new company, we get a customer list from them. Our data department can then create a demographics report that includes how much money their average client makes, the average value of the homes they paint, etc. We also build a heat map which is a representation of the exact carrier routes you should target based on the number of jobs that you’ve done on any given route.”
Go Hyper-Local
If you have vehicle wraps and yard signs, then chances are the neighbors of your customers have seen your logo (another reason to keep the job site clean and road rage at home). By going hyper-local you can build on all those brand impressions with direct mail delivered to the neighborhoods you’ve been working with. “This also builds on the trust that you’ve already built with their neighbors,” says Bussard.
Multiple Response Options and Tracking
You have the space, so use it wisely. Be sure to include multiple response options: phone number, website, and even throw in a QR code to give prospects even faster access. QR codes to specially created landing pages or microsites allow you to track direct responses from the mailer.
If you don’t want to go through all the work of creating a trackable place to send your new-found clients, The Best Postcards can still give you a pretty solid idea of how many of your new customers were in the direct mail campaign.
“We know the mail piece is more often than not guiding the recipient to the internet, and not everyone is going to enter a tracking number. For years we noticed that Google was getting a lot of credit for people who were reacting to direct mail pieces, so we decided to use our data techniques to create better tracking.”
Today you can send a list of your new customers back to The Best Postcards and they will scrub it against your send lists to tell you which of the new customers received a mailer, how many mailers, and what mailer they received. Now you have data!
Frequency
“While we still see direct response, direct mail is a branding exercise. It’s meant to make you a household name, and that’s done with frequency,” says Bussard. If you have the choice between a single expensive spend and multiple inexpensive spends — go with frequency.
While direct mail certainly won’t be your only marketing strategy this year, it presents a unique and valuable opportunity. Bussard says, “Our goal isn’t that a homeowner searches for ‘painter near me’. We want our customers to be branded so well that customers search for them by name.”
To learn more about The Best Postcards, visit www.thebestpostcards.com.