Alright let’s take a look at voice broadcasts and how you might want to consider using them to market your handyman business. Voice broadcast is when you upload a list of telephone numbers and you upload an audio recording of what you want to say when someone answers the phone, or what you want to say when somebody’s answering machine answers the phone, and you can have two different messages. The systems can tell if it’s a live person answering of if it’s an answering machine. And then you have those messages blasted out to the people usually a matter of minutes. You can have thousands of people contacted in an hour or something like that, with your message basically talking about what you’ve got going on. So if you wanted to go and contact your list of contacts and personally invite them to your holiday party, or invite them to an event you’re having, or something like that, voice broadcasts might be an effective way to get that message out. It’s dirt-cheap to do, really inexpensive, I think it’s like $.04 or something like that per minute of outgoing calls. So like $.04 or $.05, somewhere in that ballpark.
It’s usually two-step marketing, because you usually can’t get the full message out, so you usually have to have them call or go to the website, or something like that if they’re interested. Basically you upload your list to a company on the web. You either call in and record your audio, using your telephone, to their company. Or you upload an audio file from your computer to their website, and then they’ll actually do the broadcast for you.
It’s pretty scalable, although there are concerns about doing it like the do-not-call laws. So you want to make sure you watch that, you want to make sure that you know the people, they know you, that it would not be an intrusion for them to receive your phone call. It could be very effective, especially if it’s the answering machine one. If they get it live, some people going to be turned off because it’s a recording. But if it’s on your answering machine, if you do it right, it sounds just like you called up and talked to them specifically and left a message just on their machine. So it can be very effective in that way and it’s really inexpensive to do. So if you’ve got a need for voice broadcast, it can be done. Not that it’s the best outbound marketing campaign, but it’s good to relay messages to existing client bases, especially if they know, like, and trust you already. And it’s a very quick way to do that.
One way you could easily use it is if you were following up on another thing, like an event you were trying to get people to come to. You could say, “Hey listen, I sent out this letter to you the other day but I want to remind you that the meeting is tomorrow night, and hope to see you there. Thanks so much.” And then you just let it go. So it could be an effective way use voice broadcast inexpensively.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information on how to effectively communicate and engage more clients for your handyman business.
So let’s talk about some types of direct mail that you might want to consider using to market your handyman business. Newsletter, we want to definitely emphasize that. The thing that we’ve talked about a lot today is putting out your newsletter, and we definitely do that using direct mail. Another thing is postcards. The small post cards I mentioned from the U.S. Postal Service, like I told you, it’s low-end, about $.30 in order to get those mailed out. You can also do bigger postcards, including oversized postcards, to get your message out that way too. I’ve used those as well.
Cooperative mailings, we’ve talked a little bit about the free flyer method. Well one of the ways to get that flyer out is to use direct mail. So you find three other business owners, you get them all to come together, put all their marketing pieces on your one share piece, each getting one-fourth of it. And they’re paying a third of the printing costs and a third of the mailing costs in order to get that out, it becomes free for you. So that’s cooperative mailing. Another example of cooperative mailing is like those “Val-packs” or money mailers or things of that nature, where you’ve got a box of coupons, 50, 100, all those different things on there. And you can go ahead and use those things in order to get those mailings out. I have not had good luck with those, some businesses do, you could definitely test them and see. But I’d be more tempted to do direct mail to my own list than I would to use cooperative mailings in order to do that. So you could go ahead and do a test with that, so definitely something to consider.
Another things is flyers would be another type of direct mail. You could use a flyer in order to get that out and instead of doing door-to-door delivery, you could use direct mail. You could have it be a single fold-over or a tri-fold and get those done, and that would be a great additional way to do direct mail.
Here’s another type of direct mail and that is letters. So you could use handwritten letters, and I can go through an entire strategy on how to use a handwritten yellow letter that looks like it’s on a legal pad. It’s highly effective, one of the most responsive marketing pieces I’ve ever done for using direct mail. But you can also regular letters. You could use a letter just relaying social information or information of a personal nature, as a reminder of business, and of course a call to action at the end. But you can also letters as, like we’re going to talk about here, an event invitation. You can write a letter inviting people to a holiday party or a barbeque, or some type of volunteer or charitable event. So you could do that.
I will take just a moment here to talk about this handwritten yellow letter, and share with you how you could use this in your own business. So first I’ll explain exactly what it is and briefly how to do it, and then I’ll give you one or two ideas on how you may be able to implement it. One of the most effective direct mail marketing campaigns we’ve ever done were handwritten yellow letters. And they were not all handwritten, but I’ll tell you how they were made. So imagine a yellow legal pad, and you rip out a sheet of paper and then on that you hand-write out a message in script to somebody about a particular product or service. And so we would actually do this. We would take out a white sheet of paper, put the yellow legal paper behind it so that you could see the lines through your white piece of paper. Then on the white piece of paper, you write out your message, but you leave up some key blank pieces of information. So you do “Dear” and then you leave a blank space. And when we were doing these, we where actually using them on a real state investing business. And we were targeting a very select group of houses that we were interested in buying. And so the message was something like, “I’m interested in buying your property located at,” and then you’d leave a blank spot to fill it in later, “if you’re interested in selling you’re property, please give me a call at blah blah blah,” and you have the entire message written out on a white sheet of paper that would match up to the lines if you photocopied that white sheet of paper onto the yellow sheet of paper. Then we’d take the white sheet of paper with the original and we would photocopy off 100 copies onto the yellow legal pad, so that it looked like it was printed right onto the yellow legal pad in our own handwriting. Then we would go through and one by one, hand-write in just the name of the person and the address of the person. So it looked like it was a personal letter on yellow paper, in our own handwriting, with their mail merge name and address, so you’re only writing the name and address on each one. Fold that up and put it into a hand-addressed envelope with a live stamp and with some cheesy address label. And that actually got an extremely high response for us.
Now could you go and do that instead of doing flyers to a particular neighborhood, on houses that you think would have a good basements to finish, or are particularly good candidates for a particular project? Sure. You can go do a hand-addressed, handwritten yellow letter out to those guys, talking about the projects of what you do, and that your team has done several on the area, or whatever is true for you, and then send those out. They tend to get a much higher response than something that’s typed and looks mass produced. So, just something to consider when you’re looking at direct mail.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn more about choosing the right direct mail strategy to boost your handyman business clients? Take a look at “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Now I’ll talk about direct mail for your handyman business. Direct mail is anything you put into the U.S. Postal Service in order to have delivered door to door. It is almost always going to be – well I shouldn’t say that. It is a lot of times going to be one-step marketing to get your message out completely in the direct mail piece. There are some exceptions. For example postcards, postcards are very cost-effective to send out and they are usually two-step marketing, where you have a telephone number and or a website on there where they can get additional information.
How to get it done? I am a huge advocate of either using the U.S. Postal service, click-to-mail where you upload your mailing list, you upload your marketing piece, they’ll do all the printing, they’ll do all the addressing if you want to do mail merge, which is putting the name and address or name and some other piece of data into the mailing piece where it reads like, “Hi Joey, I’ve noticed that you have a house at 1234 Main Street. If you’re interested in having us do repairs on it, let me know.” You can actually do those with the click-to-mail service. They’ll do full mail merge with that, so you can actually use the U.S. Postal Service to get it done. You can also use a mailing house to get it done. I personally tend to use the click-to-mail service, I’m very comfortable with it, it’s very easy for me to use, it’s very cost-effective. But if you’re not comfortable doing that yourself, mailing house is probably next step, have it done for you. I’m not a big fan of having you do direct mail yourself. I don’t think that most business owners have the patience to do it consistently enough, where it’s going to be effective. You’re going to want to have someone else do it, or have it easily done, so that you’re not licking stamps, folding envelopes and all that other stuff which can really drag on you. I’ve done it enough times to know you don’t want to do it.
Cost to get it done – relatively cheap to do it through click-to-mail, of course you want to get a quote through your mailing house. There’s so many variables, but I will tell you that the low end of post card stuff that you’re looking to do, you’re probably looking at around $.33 per post card to get out. And that would include printing on the post card, the postage on the post card and everything to get it in the mail. The only thing it wouldn’t include which you have already would be your mailing list cost. But since you’re usually going to be mailing to your in-house list, then that would already be paid for by you when you did your marketing in order to get the name to begin with. If you were going to do a saturation mailing where you’re mailing to an entire neighborhood, you may have to pay some money in order to get that list, and you’d do some mailing list broker in order to get that. Names usually run about $.05 to $.10 each for most mailing lists unless you can highly specific, using lots of selects.
Scalability – there are few things that are as scalable as direct mail. So it’s highly scalable, it’s also very fast. You put it in the mail, six or seven days later it hits the mail, you get some new business from it, so you can take the profits you made from that business and do another mailing. So it’s really, really quick. Very quick turn-around time if you’re using direct mail. It’s also very effective, it’s becoming more effective even, because fewer people are using direct mail. People are moving to the internet because they don’t realize the power of direct mail. And so there’s an opportunity for you to be one of the few people still using direct mail effectively. I think it’s highly effective, like I told you before, that some people say it’s 20 times more effective than email. I’m not sure if it’s that high, but I do believe it’s significantly higher than email as far as effectiveness goes.
Concerns and other things to be aware of – not much like I think of. Direct mail is great and you can pretty much mail anyone. There’s not a do-not-mail list or anything like that. So it’s a really good resource for getting your information and doing sales. The U.S. Postal Service is one of the greatest salespeople in the world. For a very small fee, they’ll deliver a six-page sales letter for less than $.70 including all the printing and everything. So you can really cost-effectively get your entire marketing message out to people. When you compare it to what it cost have another salesperson doing that same job, it is very cost-effective.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn more about the best direct marketing strategies to make your handyman business successful? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright, we talked a little about pay-per-click before, but I want to go into some detail about a couple of different companies that we’re going to use here in a minute. So let’s talk about what pay-per-click is. If you have an ad that appears on a website, and whenever someone clicks on that ad you agree to pay that website a certain amount of money in exchange for them sending the visitor to a certain page on your website, that’s pay-per-click. It’s almost always two steps. You’re never going to get, well I shouldn’t say never, but you’re hardly ever going to be all to have an opportunity to have your full page ad if you’re there and you’re doing pay-per-click. Usually they’re little like classified-ad type ads on there, where someone clicks on it and then they go to your website to get more information. And on that website page, they’ve got the full message so it’s almost always two steps.
How to get it done? You usually go to the website that’s offering the service. They’ll have an interface, you log in, you put up your ad, they tell you how much you need to pay, you put it in your credit card information or debit card information and they’re going to bill you as it comes out in a certain payment period. Some will ask you to pay in advance, some will ask you to pay in arrears, it really depends on how it’s set up.
How much does it cost to get done? It varies usually based on supply and demand. So if you a very competitive keyword, and you’ve got a lot of other people bidding on that, you can expect to pay more per click; if you’ve got a relatively under-served market, low competition, you can expect to get your clicks for very inexpensive, what’s inexpensive? I think the low end of most pay-per-click models now is about $.10 per click. A decent amount in the medium price range is probably $.50 to $1.50 per click. And some of the more expensive ones can be upwards of $15, $30 per click for some very highly competitive, highly lucrative markets where a lead is worth a lot of money. So just think about that. Handyman stuff is probably going to be in the $.50 to $1.50 range for most markets. Some markets may have a couple of aggressive guys that are bidding pretty heavy, but I would imagine most of those guys are going to be in that range.
Scalability — it scales to certain point. There’s only a finite number of people searching for a very particular keyword. So there’s only so many people searching for “kitchen remodel Denver,” in a given month, so it’s not scalable in terms of that. But you can have lots of different niches, each one going to its own specialized landing page where you’ve got a very specific ad on there. So in that way, it’s nice and scalable and nice and segmented, so you can focus on a variety of niches and have it be a very good, very tight market-to-message match. So that the ad you’re running in order to find “Denver kitchen remodeling” is very specific for that, versus “Denver prepare your house for sale” type of stuff, or “looking for Denver real estate investors that need a handyman.” So you can really tailor it down and do very effective things like that, but there really is only a limited number that you can do.
So I think that’s going to be it as far as pay-per-click. Let me give some example of some pay-per-click companies. There’s one thing that’s kind of nagging at me here and I’m trying to remember what it was. There was something I was thinking about telling you about pay-per-click. One thing that I could tell you about pay-per-click, I’m not sure if this is it or not, one thing is that in a lot of areas, you could do geographical targeting. So you can have your ad show up and have it only show up for people that are looking in Denver, or people looking in Miami, or people looking in New York, or on Long Island, or somewhere in Texas, or you can actually go and focus in on very tight geographical areas which makes it very effective for doing targeted marketing for localized businesses. So, something to consider with that.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. For more tips on how to incorporate pay-per-click marketing into a growth strategy for your handyman business, I strongly recommend that you check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright let’s talk about flyers and using them in your handyman business. Flyers basically have a one-page flyer that’s got information about a particular product or service or widget that you’re marketing, special report, whatever it is that you’re trying to get out there in your marketing message. You can use direct mail in order to send flyers. You can do them door to door. So let say you’re working on painting or finishing basements, and you find a neighborhood that’s relatively new, probably has a lot of basement that need to be finished. You could do door-to-door marketing, offering that particular service. Let’s say you’re offering sprinkler blowouts or some other service like that, definitely do that, at a certain time of year, door-to-door marketing. You can do inserts in newspapers with flyers as well.
Flyers tend to be one-step marketing although they definitely could be two-step marketing if you can’t get your entire message out on the front back of a 8 ½ X 11 flyer. So a lot of times, they’ll be one-step. But you could do two-step, put your telephone number with the specific extension for those flyers on there. You can also use flyers to put your website on there as a second step as well, and you can put a specific address for the flyer. So if it’s a special offer you can put in your domain name-slash-spring blowouts for these spring — although it wouldn’t be in the spring, fall blowout for your fall sprinkler blowout, if you’re offering that service, or home prep, or home sold, or whatever it’s you’re trying to do. Then you can have a specific marketing message on that page, and then you know if people go to that page on your website, it’s probably because they found this flyer and they were going to that page. And then you can measure the response on your website and use a separate extension on the phone as well.
How to get it done? To print up flyers is easy, you go down to your local copy shop and have them printed. Some people will suggest you go to a printer to have a certain amount printed. Experience has shown that, print up only what you need even if you’re going to get a discount a discount on the next number. Because more often than not, you’ll never get the next ones out, at least that’s what my experience shows. So I’ll save you some money and some shelf space by telling you, only print what you know what you’re going to get out that time, and you can always go back down to the printer and have more printed up.
You can have it actually put out by people, I hire people to do flyer delivery. So I’ll go post an ad on Craigslist and hire someone to do flyer delivery for me, have them fill out a very simple independent contractor agreement. Tell them what they’re going to pay, give them the flyers to give them a map, I print up a map of where I wanted to do it. And I highlight the map with a highlighter in the streets I want them to cover. I tell them to call me when they’re about to start, call me when they’re done. And then I usually drive by the area they were supposed to put out the flyers and make sure that I see flyers on most of the doors on the streets I told them to do. When I was a kid, my father used to hire people to do flyers to buy and sell houses. And you hire kids a lot of times, and the kids would literally go and dump the flyers in the trash can in front the 7-Eleven, wait three hours, and then go to the pick-up spot and the flyers would never be delivered. So the reason I actually have them call me when they’re done and then we drive through the neighborhoods is based on experience on having people throw away flyers we printed up for them, and then expect to be paid for the work. So you definitely want to go drive those streets to make sure they’re getting done. I usually pay, in case you’re wondering, between $8 and $10 per hundred flyers or per hour, depending on how I feel. A lot of it depends on how far apart the houses are. But you should be able to get, if your houses are pretty close together, about a hundred flyers done in an hour. That’s at a good pace. That’s not walking for leisure. It’s walking for work. So that’s about the cost.
Scalability: yeah, flyers are great and they are scalable to a certain degree. They are cheaper than direct mail to get out. A lot of people find them more intrusive than direct mail, but they also get more attention than direct mail. The nice thing about direct mail is the post office is usually not going to scream if you decide to do them major mailing. They’ll just accept your money and they’ll actually deliver every single message in the mailbox. There’s a lot of overhead in managing delivering flyers, and there’s a little bit of feedback you’re going to get, flack from people who – and by the way, you’re not suppose to put flyers on people who have “No soliciting” signs on their door, I wouldn’t bother – and make sure that you’re not going to neighborhoods that are “No Soliciting at all.” There are entire neighborhoods and subdivisions in some areas where there’s no soliciting at all, including flyers. And in those areas, just go and do direct mail. Direct mail is highly effective, if you’re going to do saturation mailing for there anyway. It is more expensive; in order to get a flyer out, you’re talking about a relatively nominal rate, $.10 per flyer, something like that, $.07 per flyer for paying $7 per hour, or $7 per thousand. I’m sorry, per hundred. Plus the cost of the printing which could be a nickel or something like that. So you’re talking about $.12 per, with direct mail it’s going to cost a little bit more with the postage in order to get that out. But it might be worth a little bit to not have those headaches when you’re doing saturation mailings, which is saturating entire neighborhood with marketing.
As far as effectiveness, I’ve had really good luck with flyers in a lot of businesses, by the way. So when I’ve actually had lots of flyers come for a variety of businesses myself, and business owners I’ve talked to that have done it, have had good luck with it as well. So I would recommend flyers. They’re cheap and they generate some good media business and some good prospects at your list.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn more about how to increase the visibility of your handyman business with flyers? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
Alright, let’s talk about fax broadcasts. Fax broadcast is when you upload a list of faxes, hopefully from people that you know and have requested information from you via fax, although some people are getting pretty risky uploading numbers from faxes that they purchase and then doing broadcast to those guys. I do not recommend that. But you can upload a list of faxes to the people that you already have a pre-existing business relationship with, and have requested to receive information by fax from you, and do that. So let’s say you’re working with a bunch of real estate agents, and they have given you their fax numbers, and occasionally you send out an update to them about something that’s going on that’s urgent and important, and you want them to receive it via fax, you can use a fax broadcast in order to get that out to them. It’s usually big enough where you can do it in one step, although you can put a telephone number on there and the website.
How to get it done? You just go online and use the fax broadcast service. I don’t do a lot of fax broadcasts, so you can go find one that you’re willing to work with. You upload your list, you upload the fax you want to send out, and they actually do it for you. And it’s cheap. I think it’s like $.05, $.10 per fax, to get it out there, it’s very inexpensive. So you can go ahead and do that.
As far as scalability goes, yeah if you have a ton of fax numbers, it’s extremely scalable, you can do a ton. But the idea of getting a whole bunch of fax numbers just seems kind of foreign, unless you’re going to buy them from people and then you’re doing unsolicited commercial faxes which, it’s my understanding of a law – and I’m not totally up on these fax laws – it’s my understanding of a law that there are fines that, if somebody really wanted to press to take you to court and stuff like that, they could actually collect some nominal fee for each fax that they received. Not that they’d collect on everybody, unless the attorney general or whatever it is decided they were going to go after you for all of them. So I wouldn’t mess around with doing unsolicited commercial faxes. But fax into your own internal list, if you had a really important message and it was appropriate for you to send the fax to, sure you could do that. I’ve done faxes before in our business for wholesale deals. So, it’s something to consider.
Let’s see. Effectiveness – we talked about that, there are few things that get your attention more than a fax coming across, so it’s probably effective in that regard, especially when you compare it to cost. But how effective is it to think that you’re really going to consistently send out fax broadcasts to people? I’m not sure it’s going to be a big part of most people’s business model, especially in a handyman business.
Concerns and other things to be aware of – I talked to you about unsolicited faxes. I would not buy fax numbers. I’ve mentioned that like six times.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn specific strategies for using fax broadcast strategically to enhance the profile of your handyman business? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
