What makes direct mail suck right now to many roofers? Well, many roofers have tried it once, and it didn’t work for them, so they’ve concluded that it’s ineffective.
Well, like any marketing campaign, the common spray and pray approach won’t work for direct mail marketing, you need a solid plan, and you need to stay consistent in order to see the plan through.
So exactly what works? Today we’ll dive into David Carroll of Dope Marketing’s five proven pillars for an innovative direct mail for roofing marketing strategy (one that doesn’t suck!)
1. Automation of Mail Follow-up
There are two steps to getting the most out of automated mailing:
Step 1: Maximize Automation
Most successful businesses today use a CRM to manage their day-to-day operations. You can integrate with your CRM to send direct mail at no minimum order. You can send out mail to one specific address or through an automated campaign that would send postcards out to all of the neighbors as well.
You can also use trigger-based automation to send out your postcards. And that’s based on things you’re currently doing so as not to interrupt your workflow.
For example, let’s say ABC Roofing sends out one of their representatives to get on a roof, mark it up, and get it approved. After getting that job approved, 25 postcards go to the neighbors saying, “We just got your neighbor approved for a new roof!” or however it’d sound exciting.
It’s best to use a template so you can plug in whatever verbiage that works with your brand and company, educating homeowners on what you’re doing around the neighborhood.
Step 2: Schedule their Job
You want to be able to provide homeowners with enough trust in your company immediately. So, when you mark a current job as “started” on that day of approval, be sure to follow up with the neighbors. Try out an automated campaign—for example, “Sorry! Pardon the dust and noise, we’re working in the area!”
The key to this publicity strategy is the intentionality of your brand’s signage in that particular area. You want the residents to see, hear, and feel your brand everywhere! You want to be noticeable – on banners, the good-looking trucks, ads here and there, and things like that.
A Harvard Business School study concluded that getting someone to recognize your brand takes 7 to 11 publicity touches. Plus, all brand touches aren’t the same—there are high and low-value touches.
Some companies do one to three touches, and they’re like, “why isn’t my marketing working?” You might have to align your efforts as well as spread them out.
2. Automate Postcards (with No Minimum Order)
You can also send handwritten direct mail to the neighbors around your client’s house with no minimum order. It informs them that you’ve got a strategy that works and can help them achieve their goals.
Let’s say you have an established workflow like this:
- A lead comes in,
- An estimate is given,
- The estimate is approved,
- Job is scheduled,
- Work starts,
- Work is completed,
- Work is paid.
The fact is, some version of this process is currently happening in any business. So, you can take any portion of that and educate the neighbors on what’s happening.
⭐️ Pro Tip: Also another good trick is to integrate your direct mail with gifts. Take Dirty Dough—the biggest cookie franchise in the country, for example. You can send them out as gifts after a completed job. To make it better, you can put a custom insert in the box of cookies so that it’s personalized. So every time one gets a completed job, they get a customized gift 🍪
3. Maximize Proximity with Zip Codes
You can’t be everywhere and want an exponential growth rate simultaneously. Instead, don’t you think it’s a better marketing approach to double down your focus on the neighbors of your current jobs?
It’s the remarkable trait we humans have – our relativity and predictability. We naturally gravitate towards, and are more comfortable around, people we have things in common with.
So when you want to spend your marketing dollars, here are steps to a simple exercise you can use:
- Go into your CRM (it’s best starting from the last year)
- Do an expo for your customers
- Highlight the whole spreadsheet
- Go to ‘data’ in excel and click on ‘sort’ (sort by zip codes)
- Then count how many jobs you did in each zip code last year, and take the top three, where you performed the highest.
Those three zip codes tell you everything you need to know and can guide you on where to focus your marketing dollars.
4. Leverage on Human Nature (Give Freebies!)
Everyone wants something free! And you know one thing that’s worth more than cash right now? Gas! If a roofer told you, “I’ll give you a $50 gas card for letting me get on your roof to perform an inspection” (assuming they’d do a good job), would you let them? Yes! Right now, many people now consider a $50 gas card more valuable than a $50 bill.
Or it may be something else, something you think your average homeowner would want.
Here’s one exercise that comes in handy on this:
- List five things you don’t like to do at your house. Let’s say you don’t want to: clean out your car, clean out your gutters, do laundry, mow your lawn, or anything else
- Draw a line down the paper, separating the page into two
- On the adjacent side, make a matching list of people in your local area you know capable of these duties or a business that does any of them.
- Discuss with any of these people, take an offer from them, put it on a postcard, and send it to homeowners (in your top 3 zip codes that we mentioned earlier).
With this, watch out for unprecedented results! You’re building a referral partner base and aligning more accurately with them. Most importantly, you’re going into the psychology of a homeowner and saying, “I own a home. I hate doing this stuff too. What if I gave you this service for free if you let me do my job?”
5. Don’t Pull off Levers:
Finally, here’s a common misconception in the roofing industry. You don’t have to close down a method you’ve observed to be effective in a bid to try out another.
Successful people are those that crank different levers to give a synergistic effect. They maximize various opportunities, which all add up to produce groundbreaking results.
Final Thoughts
We hope we’ve been able to revive your hopes in direct mail marketing. That it still works! Your company’s direct mail marketing will always be ahead if you’re willing to test out these different strategies.
Plus, implementing NOT ONE, but all of these points and more (having a problem-solving mindset) is what makes for real, lasting success in direct mail roofing marketing.
