3 Proven Strategies for Generating More Landscaping Customers this Spring

Guest Post: Postcard Mania

Introducing Joy Gendusa of Postcard Mania

Periodically, I’ll feature a guest post on my blog to help you, as a lawn care or landscaping company, see all of your options to getting more leads for your business. In this article, Joy Gendusa, founder of Postcard Mania, shares three proven strategies to help you generate more leads for the 2017 growing season.

Spring is just around the corner, and for the landscaping and lawn care industry, that means one thing…

Business is about to start booming!

What’s your plan for making sure your business gets its share of those jobs?

My company, PostcardMania, has helped more than 1180 landscaping and lawn care professionals with their marketing, and we track our clients’ campaign results — so we know what works.

And that’s why I’m here:

To help you generate more new customers this spring without reinventing the wheel!

So without further ado, here are three PROVEN strategies for successful landscaper marketing:

  1. Book $180,000 in new contracts with a targeted direct mail postcard campaign.

Postcards are a reliable, cost-effective lead generation tool for landscaping companies. Here are some stats to prove it:

  • 39% of consumers try a business for the first time because of direct mail (Direct Marketing Association)
  • 60% of direct mail recipients were influenced to visit a promoted website (USPS)
  • Direct mail outperforms all digital channels by nearly 600% (DMA)

Isn’t direct mail outdated in our increasingly digital world, you ask?

In a word — nope!

Check this out: 92% of Millennials (you know, the people you see glued to their smartphones 24/7) have been influenced to make a purchase because of direct mail they received, according to National Mortgage Professional magazine.

In fact:

One of my clients, a Colorado landscaping business, generated $180,000 in new jobs with their direct mail campaign!

They targeted owners of homes valued at $250,000 or more, which is the beauty of direct mail — you can market your business only to the people most likely to hire you!

That means:

No wasting marketing dollars reaching people who don’t need (or can’t afford) your services!

  1. Generate up to a 1,400% return on investment with a valuable offer.

Your prospects have no shortage of options when it comes to their landscaping and lawn care needs. You need to give them a reason to choose YOU!

Think about it this way:

You’re spending money on marketing, so you want to get the biggest bang for your marketing dollar. The way to do that?

Make your prospects an offer that is of high perceived value for them, but that doesn’t cost you too much.

Everybody wants to feel like they’re getting a great deal!

Here are the top four offers that my successful landscaping clients use on their postcards:

  1. 10-50% off a project or package
  2. Free estimate/analysis (paired with additional offers)
  3. First mow free
  4. Lawn maintenance packages starting at $90+/month

 

This client, a landscaper in Jupiter, FL, generated a 1,400% return on investment with their postcard that paired a free landscape audit with two other offers!

Whatever you choose to offer your prospects, remember this:

The potential revenue a loyal customer represents far outweighs whatever you gave away to generate the lead!

  1. Market consistently to bring in $108,000 in campaign revenue.

Repetition is a key component of any successful marketing campaign. That’s why you always see the same commercials over and over again on TV.

 

Think about how many times Bed, Bath and Beyond sends out their mailer with the 20% off coupon. Do you think they’re going broke doing that?

 

They’re not! They do it because it brings in money!

 

The first time you get that mailer, you may not need anything at Bed, Bath and Beyond. But the second or third time you get it, you might go, “Come to think of it, I could use a new set of sheets — and here’s a coupon!”

 

A majority of our successful green-industry clients — 60% — mail their postcards to the same recipients at least twice. One Illinois landscaper mailed to their list three times and generated $108,000 in new jobs!

 

There’s another way to increase your exposure with interested prospects…

 

You see, most of the people who receive your postcard and take an interest in your business will go directly to your website to learn more about you.

But according to Kissmetrics, 96% of those visitors are not ready to become customers right away. So they leave your website and go about their business — and possibly forget about you.

 

With Google follow-up ads, you stay in front of those prospects, reminding them of their interest until they become your customers! This kind of advertising (called remarketing or retargeting) has been shown to boost response by up to 400%, according to CMO.com!

 

What’s even better?

 

You can combine your direct mail postcards and Google follow-up ads into one simple, seamlessly integrated campaign with DirectMail2.0 and get that marketing repetition with zero extra effort on your part!

 

Here’s how it works:

 

The people who visit your website are “cookied” with an unobtrusive piece of coding that tells Google to show them your online banner ad. Then, as they browse the internet, they see your ad (which looks just like your postcard) on sites all across the Google Network (literally millions of sites)!

 

DirectMail2.0 also comes with mail tracking and call tracking, which shows you exactly how well your campaign is performing.

You simply log in to the online dashboard and you can see when your postcards get delivered, how many calls your postcards generate (you can also listen to the calls!), how many times people have seen your online ad and how many people click on it to get back to your website!

This Texas landscaping business sent out 10,000 postcards with DirectMail2.0, and over the course of their campaign they could see that:

  • 27 calls came into their call tracking number
  • 21 of those calls were from unique phone numbers
  • Their banner ads were shown 278,000 times
  • And 147 people clicked on their ad to go back to their website

 

Pretty amazing, right?

 

To learn more about DirectMail2.0 or to see how a direct mail campaign could work for your landscaping business, call 855-549-1313 for a FREE, no-obligation consultation. Or visit our website to see examples of landscaping postcards that are working for our clients right now!

 

Joy Gendusa is the Founder and CEO of PostcardMania. She grew her business from a small startup into an industry leader with only a phone, a computer and her own marketing savvy — NO capital injections or angel investors. Today, PostcardMania employs 200+ people and generates over $45 million annually. You can learn more about Joy’s journey and her marketing philosophy at PostcardMania.com.

 

 

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