Cleaning Business Flyers: Are They Worth the Investment?
- November 30, 2018
- By: Vonigo
We’ve talked at length about various digital marketing strategies for cleaning businesses. But what about good old fashioned printing? Let’s take a look at cleaning business flyers. Are they worth the paper they’re printed on? (Sorry, couldn’t resist)
Design
Before you worry about printing, you need a design. Getting your flyer properly designed is worth the investment. If you are creating printed assets, they have to make an impression. A poorly designed piece would have the opposite of the desired effect of making you look good.
If you don’t have in-house designers or know anyone you can hire locally, you can always hire a freelancer. Sites like Upwork and Fiverr have loads of talented freelancers in all price ranges. Their work and their service ratings are on display, which will help you select a designer.
Printing
We could dedicate an entire article to the printing process, but we won’t bore with you all the details here. When it does come time to print though, there are a lot of decisions to make:
- What kind of paper or card stock are you printing on?
- What size will the flyer be?
- Which colors will you use (actually this is a design question, but it affects printing choices and costs too)?
- Digital or offset printing?
- How many? And so on…
Digital prints from your local copy center might not be the lowest cost solution. Tell your local printer what you’re hoping to do, and get price quotes and recommendations from them.
Mailing
One method of distributing your flyer is by mail. The postal service will likely be able to offer you a low per unit price in order to distribute flyers to your chosen neighborhoods.
Generally, you choose your delivery area by selecting the ZIP codes that you want to deliver to. This is worth careful consideration. Are the homes or businesses in that area likely to purchase your service? Will they be the right kind of customers for you if they do? Where you choose to deliver your flyers can have a very big impact on the results.
Newspaper
Another popular flyer distribution method is with a local newspaper. As with mailing, you should be offered some amount of control over what areas your flyer is distributed to, but expect to have a lot less control than selecting by individual ZIP code.
Door Hangers
A final method of flyer distribution is by hanging them on the doorknobs of the neighborhoods you want to book jobs in. For example, when your company books a job in a desirable neighborhood or building, you can distribute door hangers to the neighbors and try to land more business in the area.
It’s more profitable to consolidate all of your booked jobs in one area, and using door hangers can help you focus your marketing to very specific homes and areas.
Offers
To help make cleaning business flyers more effective in generating a response, it helps a lot if they have an offer associated with them.
Don’t discount your service to the point where it isn’t profitable. Consider an introductory offer — for example, one hour of free cleaning, a first-visit discount, or some other attractive giveaway that will help you attract new bookings.
Budgeting
And now the moment we’ve been waiting for. How much will they cost? And in fact even more importantly, how well will they work? The answer comes down to your customer acquisition cost (CAC) using flyers.
To start with, it’s better to think of cleaning business flyers as a long-term investment. If you do, you can justify spending a bit more on design, on print stock and printing volume. The more you print, the lower the cost per unit, so design a flyer you can use over the long term, up to a year.
When budgeting for any marketing or advertising opportunity, you may have some idea of what you’re willing to pay to acquire a new customer. With flyers, it may be difficult to guess at this amount the first time you try it, but there are a few ways you can track your success and give you an idea of how effective your flyers are.
Tracking the Results of Cleaning Business Flyers
Tracking the success of cleaning business flyers can be tricky. Customers don’t always volunteer the information that they heard about you on a flyer. There are a number of ways you can track them though.
Tracking is easiest when you have an online booking program. Customers are either already tracked, or can select where they heard about you from in an online form.
One way to get a clearer picture of the sales performance of your cleaning business flyers is to use a specific discount code during the booking process, or to list a flyer specific URL on your flyer.
If you’re willing to spend a total of $50 to acquire a new customer and you’re offering a discount already, how many flyers do you have to distribute to get to your next sale? And what is the cost of each flyer you printed when you factor in design, printing, and distribution?
Use Cleaning Business Software with Online Booking
Whether you’re buying advertising or printing flyers, cleaning business software can you help you track where your customers are coming from. Want to learn more about how software with online booking can help you grow your cleaning business? Book a free, private demo of Vonigo.