Create Lawn Care Flyers or Direct Mail: Tips & Templates
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We all want more lawn care customers and most businesses are bringing in the lion’s share of the work through online marketing. However, it is never a good idea to rely on all of your leads coming from any one source. When planning your marketing strategy there are a couple of old-school methods that can still bring you in some extra customers.
So if you were going to put some money into flyers or direct mail advertising it would pay to do a bit of research and decide in advance which one would be more profitable for your business. I am going to talk about the best approach for both methods and give a few marketing tips on the way.
What Are Flyers?
Flyers have been around for a long time. It involves designing a card with some informative and engaging information about your lawn care or landscaping business with a call to action at the end. (usually a phone number). You can get thousands of these printed at a reasonable price from places like Vistaprint. These are great for targeting areas with large foot traffic and busy places like shops etc.
What Is Direct Mail?
Direct mail is a bit different. It is usually in the form of postcards that can be mailed directly to the houses in your chosen area. This method is more expensive as it involves paying for both the printing and the postage. However, on the upside, you can target areas in the most profitable areas for your lawn mowing business.
Key Takeaways
- Understand the pros and cons of lawn care flyers and direct mail
- Design marketing materials that effectively promote your business
- Target the right audience to maximize response rates and ROI
Lawn Care Flyers or Direct Mail Where to start
The Basics of Direct Mail Marketing Campaigns
One of the best things about direct mail marketing is that you get to target the audience in the area that you want. By choosing an area like this it allows you to customize the marketing message towards your ideal customer. This will result in a better response rate and the added benefit of reducing your traveling time.
The Role of Lawn Care Flyers in Your Marketing Strategy
Flyers or brochures are cheap to make and can be handed out on busy streets or left with shops. In some countries, you can deliver them straight into customers’ mailboxes. However, in the USA this is not allowed by law as the postbox is the property of the US postal service. Restrictions for attaching flyers, posters, etc. to a mailbox. One way around this is to use a door hanger or target areas with mail slots built directly into the front door.
Designing Effective Marketing Materials
Now before you go out and throw something together for your lawn care business and send it to the printers, we do need to do a bit of planning beforehand. You only get one chance at a first impression so you need to get your design right the first time. Below is a good video that covers the four main points of a well-designed flyer.
Key Elements of a Successful Flyer or Direct Mail Design
These are the elements that you will find in the most successful flyers or direct mail postcards.
Attention-grabbing design.
You should use bright and bold colors with an eye-catching design. Use high-quality images and big easy-to-read text. People are busy these days and are not going to even look at a mailer with hard-to-read text.
Highlight the Benefits (not the features)
Be clear and describe the benefits of your service. You could do that with bullet points or checkboxes. Let the customer know from the start how they will benefit from your service.
Remember that it is all about them and their wants and they want benefits, not features. Not sure what the difference is? Here are some examples from Hubspot where you will find the full article.
Include a Call to Action (CTA)
It is amazing how many businesses forget to do this. Have a simple call to action on all of your marketing pieces. This could be something like “Call Us Now for a Free Quote” or “Call today”. You could even offer a discount if they mention the flyer. This will double your amount of calls at least.
Include Contact Details
Make sure to include your phone number, email, and website. You want to make it easy for them to get hold of you.
Finally, if you do have not the skills then hire a graphic designer or use a brochure template that you can find on a site like Canva where you can choose a professional design and just fill in the blanks.
Demographics and Lawn Care Services
Keep in mind the demographics of the market that you are targeting. If you were targeting an area mainly populated by retirees then your message would be different than it would for young professionals. Keep your target market in mind when designing your direct mailer to get better results.
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Using EDDM for Localized Mailing
One good way of targeting a local market is to use a service like Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM). This is a service that is owned by the USPS and allows you to target a zip code or carrier route. This could be a highly effect way to reach your target market.
For your lawn care marketing efforts to be successful, you need to target the best potential clients with the right message.
Maximizing Response Rates and ROI
These are the two things that you need to keep an eye on with any marketing. You can’t just throw money at something and hope that it will stick. Here are some of the ways that I make sure I maximize my response rate which will increase my return on investment (ROI)
Special Offers and Call-to-Actions
One of the most common ways to increase response rates is to offer special deals and promotions. You could offer a discount to new regular customers or a free lawn maintenance assessment. If you do make some kind of offer, it will work better with a cut-off date or limited to the first ten customers, etc.
A call-to-action (CTA) is important too. Just remember to make it front and center. Don’t hide it and don’t include more than one. Although you might feel that this will get you more leads. It is counterproductive to have more than one CTA. People will take one action without thinking too hard but if you give them a choice a lot will procrastinate and it will end up in the bin.
Analyzing the Effectiveness of Campaigns
As I said earlier you cannot just throw money at marketing. You need to know what is working otherwise you could be throwing your money into a black hole. You need to know what methods are working for you and what is not. Then you take the budget from the areas where it is not working and put it into your methods with the highest ROI.
Here are some other ways you can keep track of your results with both flyers and direct mail.
Ask the customer
This may sound obvious but hardly anyone ever does it. When new clients call, make it one of your standard questions such as name, address, phone, regular or one-off job, any dogs, and finally “just out of interest, where about did you find my number?” Ask this question for a few months and you will know exactly how well your marketing is going.
The customer tells you
This can be done in a couple of ways. One way is to have them mention the flyer of the direct mail piece in order to get the special offer. This works well.
The other method is to change the discount on your different promotions and the type of discount they ask for will let you know where they saw your offer.
Use different phone numbers
This is highly effective however it does come at a cost. First, you have to get a different number and then forward it to your main number. You will be able to keep track of exactly where your calls are coming from but you will have to pay for those forwarding numbers for a long time otherwise you may miss calls. You can use a company like KoalaCalling to manage this for you.
Summary
Now we have covered lawn care flyers versus direct mail for marketing a lawn care business. Flyers can be distributed in busy areas at a low cost but cannot be mailed directly to homes. Direct mail involves mailing postcards directly to targeted neighborhoods, allowing businesses to customize their message but at a higher printing and postage cost.
We have given tips for designing effective marketing materials like highlighting benefits over features and including a clear call-to-action and also discuss strategies for maximizing response rates and ROI, such as offering promotions, analyzing campaign data by asking customers how they found the business and using different phone numbers to track results from different marketing channels. Now that we have covered this you should be able to determine which approach may work best for your business.
Learn more…
Flyers and direct mail are not the only way to find new customers. In this article, I discuss my favorite methods to get new customers fast.
Ever wonder how to plan your marketing? In this article, I talk about How A Successful lawn mowing Marketing Plan Can Quadruple Your Customer Growth.
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