Mass mailers are an effective, inexpensive, and highly targeted strategy to win new lawn care customers.
Hey Clippers! Dave Tucker here to talk about the power of the mailbox. And I don’t mean email: I mean actual mailboxes, where you get your snail mail. More specifically, we’re going to talk about mass mailers as a marketing tool for your lawn care business.
Here’s the basics on how it works. You design a pretty simple postcard promoting your lawn care business, maybe with a special offer. (Here’s my favorite strategy, the $20 offer.)
You get a few hundred—or a few thousand—copies made, depending on how big your reach is. Then you mail those postcards to each and every house within your target area.
In the age of email and TikTok, mass mailers may seem old school, but they are extremely effective. A mass mailer reaches your customers exactly where they need your services—at home.
And because you can limit your campaign to your target neighborhoods, you’re not paying to reach customers you don’t want. Best of all: They’re cheap. A few hundred postcards won’t set you back much!
But there’s a little debate among lawn care business owners about one particular detail: When should you send them?
There are three schools of thought:
Send out mass mailers in the spring.
The logic here is that you can catch people right at the beginning of the warmer months. It’s a smart move emotionally: Folks are happy to see a little green—dreading the reality of having to mow it.
You might even frame your message around that feeling: “Go play golf. We’ll take care of the yard.” Or maybe, “Summer is for making memories, not mowing.” Be creative!
Send out mass mailers at the end of the season.
One CLIP user waits until summer is winding down to send out his mailers. Here’s why: “We had more luck starting our sales effort in August for the next season. That was when most clients had dissatisfaction on their minds from the current summer’s work and were most likely to switch.”
In other words, hit ‘em when they’re unhappy with the guy currently mowing their lawn—or sick of doing it themselves.
This can also save you a little worry during the off season. If you lock down most of your clients before Labor Day, you don’t have to worry about a big marketing push come spring.
Send out mass mailers every quarter.
Want to skip the hemming and hawing over the best time of year for marketing? Take the brute force approach instead. The truth is, need can arise at any time. A fellow is just as likely to hire a lawn care professional in April as he is in August. With this strategy, you can make sure you’re the first person he calls.
Here’s what one CLIP user has to say about quarterly mailings: “You [can] keep your name in front of customers. When they do get dissatisfied, they call you, because you are always in front of them.”
Two tips for effective lawn care mass mailers.
The internet is full of snail mail marketing tips, and I encourage you to do a little research. But here are, in my opinion, the two most important tips I can give you:
- Buy a list. There are a bunch of places—including USPS—where you can buy lists of addresses for campaigns like this. You can target based on neighborhood, household income, home value, and lots of other criteria. This is much faster than trying to create a list by hand, and most mailhouses offer bulk rates.
- Keep track of your efforts. This doesn’t need to be an exact science. But make a point of asking your customers how they heard about you. It can help you determine whether your mailers—or other marketing efforts—are working. If a bunch of people mention your mailer, you’ll know it’s a great investment.
Do you use mass mailers to market your lawn care company? Tell us your strategies in the comments!
Until next time, keep clipping!
Dave