Marketing your carpet cleaning business with leaflets
Getting Your Leaflets Delivered
Leaflets can be a great way of marketing your carpet cleaning business. And don’t think this is just for low value customers, the right leaflet in the right area is just as effective in attracting high-end customers too.
While the response rate for leaflets will differ depending on current market demand, deliver a good leaflet and it should always generate work.
To make leaflets work for carpet cleaning, there are two essential things you need:
- A leaflet design that works.
- A reliable way to get your leaflets delivered.
Get either of the above wrong, and leaflet delivery won’t work for you, which is why many carpet cleaners try leaflets and give up too soon.
In this article we’re going to look at the different ways you can get your leaflets delivered. You can have the best design in the world, but if your leaflets aren’t delivered it won’t make your phone ring.
Deliver Leaflets Yourself
Combine some good healthy exercise and some good marketing at the same time. Delivering leaflets yourself can also be a good way to see if your leaflet design works, before committing to hiring a delivery service to deliver many thousands of leaflets.
It can also be a good way to try out different leaflet designs. If you’re leaflet’s a complete flop, at least you haven’t paid to print and deliver thousands of them.Â
Delivering leaflets yourself, of course, is the most reliable way possible of making sure that your leaflets have been delivered. You can target exactly the areas and homes you want to work in. It’s a very targeted way of marketing your carpet cleaning business.
All you pay for are the leaflets themselves, which you could even print at home on a laser printer (some well known carpet cleaning ‘leaflets’ are actually more like letters, printed in just one colour). You don’t necessarily need glossy full colour print, especially when you’re working out what works and what doesn’t. it’s always the content that’s most important).
Have your elevator pitch ready
There are always opportunities to speak to potential customers too – so be prepared for this and have your elevator pitch prepared, you should always be looking for opportunities to speak to potential customers.
Be friendly and smile at everyone you meet. Wear logo’d clothing to let people know you’re from the carpet cleaning company on the leaflet. If you don’t have logo’d workwear, it doesn’t cost much and is well worth the investment – preferably with a large logo on the back with your company name and the words ‘carpet cleaning’, so that it can be seen from a distance.
Be prepared for a low response (maybe around 0.4% if you’re delivering yourself). If you’re delivering leaflets yourself, you won’t be able to deliver enough to generate lots of enquiries. But with a good leaflet, it’s reassuring to know that you can always generate work if you need to. So if you’ve got free timetable space, it’s always a good fail safe to have in your toolkit.
Royal Mail door to door
Pay the Royal Mail’s ‘Door to Door’ leaflet delivery service – this will be much more expensive, but you can scale up and deliver as many leaflets as you want.
Don’t expect the response rate to be as high as when delivering yourself. And don’t commit to large deliveries until you know you have a leaflet and response rate that works. You’ll need to carefully track your response rate and the value of the sales your leaflets bring in.Â
Also bear in mind that response rates go up and down at different times of year and also on other factors e.g. If another carpet cleaner has just leafleted the same area (targeting different areas each mailing can spread out this risk), or response rates tend be lower just before and during bank and school holidays.
Use a leaflet delivery service
If you can find a reliable leaflet delivery service, this can be a lot cheaper than the Royal Mail, but the results can also be less consistent.
Make sure you ask how the provider checks that the leaflets are actually being delivered. Make sure there’s a map showing which roads to be delivered to, and don’t be afraid to knock on a few doors to ask if your leaflet has been delivered. Even then, leaflet delivery can be difficult to check e.g. what if the delivery person only delivered to certain properties on the road?
Employ part time leaflet delivery staff
Students, parents who need to work around school hours, and retired people can all make good leaflet deliverers.
If you can drop them off and collect them a few hours later (or arrange transport), this makes the job more appealing to people who don’t have transport, and can also help improve response rates (if you drop off and collect, there’s a much better chance the leaflets will get delivered).
One carpet cleaner employed a helper he took to each job, who helped set-up, and then delivered leaflets to the surrounding area while the carpets were being cleaned.
You could also partner up with non-competing local businesses, who could pay you to deliver their leaflets at the same time (or vice versa), which could mean that your leaflets end up being delivered at a much lower cost.
But there are downsides to this. Even employing just one leaflet delivery person can mean a lot of extra work – you’ll have to think about all the issues that go with being an employer, plan out what areas to deliver to, possibly arrange transport, make sure you have enough leaflets to deliver, and check that your leaflets are being delivered, as well as the time involved in cooperating with other companies, if you decide to deliver leaflets for other people too.
Paying the deliverer a bonus for each job booked can work well too. If you’re really lucky you could strike gold and end up with a delivery person who can generate a lot of work for you.
Hand leaflets out
One carpet cleaner regularly attended car boot sales with his carpet cleaning machine and a stack of leaflets (you’ll want to match the location to the type of customer you want to target). This carpet cleaner was always busy.
Use your imagination and there are all sorts of locations you could try something similar. Match the location to your target customer. And don’t just hand leaflets out. Your aim is to get talking to as many people as you can. Make a connection and they’re much more likely to keep your leaflet and remember you, or ideally ask you for a quote straight away.
Conclusion
Despite the power of the internet and social media, leaflets are still a great tool for generating carpet cleaning leads. You can deliver leaflets yourself to generate a few jobs each week, at little cost other than your own time (which also counts as exercise time!).
Or, if you can find a reliable way to deliver lots of leaflets, you can generate as many enquiries as you need. Either way, a good leaflet is always a valuable tool to have in your tool for marketing your carpet cleaning business.