I know what you’re thinking. “Door hangers and mailers? That stuff’s dead.”
Wrong.
I have friends who have built massive, massive companies on postcards. People think it doesn’t work anymore, but it’s one of the most effective marketing strategies we use at Pest Badger.
The problem isn’t that door hangers and mailers don’t work. The problem is that most people do them completely wrong.
The Difference Between Door Hangers and Postcards
Let me break it down real simple.
Door hangers are pretty simple. You hang them on people’s doors. You put them in the door slots, in between the door jambs, wherever they will stay. I wouldn’t recommend putting too many in mailboxes because you don’t want to get fined.
You need a team of kids or a church group or whoever. Or yourself. Or you hire companies to just go hang door hangers. If you have that sales guy who’s just not very good but still needs a job, hire that guy.
Postcards are basically the same thing, just delivered in a different way. It’s a postcard that gets mailed to you versus a door hanger you put on the door.
There are companies that help you design these. There are companies that help you send these out. But again, you can do these all by yourself. Pretty simple.
Are They Designed the Same?
I’m constantly testing. They’re all going to have different offers, different headlines. They’re all going to be different for different times of year also.
People will buy one stack of them and go put these things out. Let’s say they have a “weed-free lawn” offer and they’re trying to put them out in July and August. People don’t really care about weed-free lawns at that point. You know what I’m talking about?
Timing is very important for these things too, just like with all marketing. You want to make sure that you’re doing these things at the right season. That’s when they’re going to be way more effective.
Like I said earlier, the weather can even affect the effectiveness of your door hangers and your mailers.
The Critical Elements Every Postcard Must Have
Here’s what most people get wrong. They’re missing critical elements that make these things convert.
1. Your Branding (But Not at the Top)
They should still have your brand. Your brand colors. They have to have your same logo on there.
But I wouldn’t put it at the top of the thing because people don’t really care about your logo. They care about their problem and how you can solve it.
It should say very, very little about you. They should have to look to find you at the call to action at the end.
2. A Killer Headline
On both sides of postcards, both sides of door hangers, you need to have a headline.
It has to be a good headline. If it doesn’t work, then retest another headline.
Better yet, take two versions, split test them in the same rough neighborhood, split them up, see which one converts better. Find one that converts better, use that one. Then tweak that one, try another one, test that against that one.
It’s constant testing over and over and over again, just like any other marketing platform. You have to keep testing and testing and testing. Then you’ll find one that works and you just go all in on that one thing.
3. A Pain Point
You have to call out the audience. Same thing like on social media platforms. You have to have a pain point. How can you solve it?
4. An Offer
You’re going to have to have an offer on there. Every single mailer has to have an offer, and you can always adjust the offer too.
If you find a headline that works, start testing the offers with that same headline. See which offer works better than the other at certain times of the year.
5. Social Proof
You have to have social proof, which means make sure you have some reviews on there.
It’s always a good thing to have four or five reviews, or at least one review, and tie it back to that town.
If you say “Sally Smith, loved the service, Madison, Wisconsin,” now they know someone in their social circle, in the city they live in.
If you can get one of those people who have a million reviews on Google, those verified reviewers, reach out and see if it’s okay to put them on there. If you have four or five, especially the longer the review, the better. Really in-depth, especially if it’s tied to what you’re doing.
So let’s say you’re putting out a mosquito door hanger or every door direct mail piece, and you can get a review of the mosquito service that you offered at the time that you’re sending it out.
6. Urgency and Scarcity
Obviously you have to have urgency and scarcity, which is all the same marketing we’ve talked about.
How do you get urgency? It’s pretty simple. Your routes are filling up fast, right?
What’s scarcity? You only have a few left. We’re only taking the first 50 people and there’s only so many left. Build urgency, build scarcity.
7. Pictures That Connect
I didn’t even talk about pictures yet. Besides social proof, I love to have pictures, and you can test which pictures work best.
Teams always work well. A picture of you and your team, your team standing in front of your trucks, or just a truck.
If you have kids, you can have your kid on there with a little saying, a little bubble talk coming out of their face. Like what they’re saying about pest control or “my dad was able to help me with this.” Tiger marketing to things that people care about, which is kids, family, home, all those things.
8. Your USP
Obviously you need a USP on there, a unique selling proposition. Every single mailer that you send out should have a unique selling proposition on it too.
9. A Clear Call to Action
A call to action is simply: what do you want this customer to do?
Their whole lives they’ve been told to follow directions. So if you’re clear and concise and say, “Hey, call this number” or “text us at this” or “go to this URL and sign up here” or “scan this QR code,” whatever it takes to get them to that URL, you have to have a clear, concise call to action to make sure the customer knows what to do.
10. A Strong Guarantee
Some sort of guarantee, like risk reversals. How can you take all the risk away from the customer calling you? How can you make the offer so good that the customer can’t say no?
The worst thing that could happen is they could get a call and they get a bunch of free stuff, they could try your service. That’s the worst that could happen.
Make sure you have a good, solid guarantee without having the guarantee that everyone’s overused in the past. Like “ironclad, 200% guarantee.” I used to do it, it worked great back in the day, but things have changed. People don’t even really look at guarantees anymore because everyone has a guarantee.
So what can you make in your marketing that says the exact same thing without actually saying that? Just a different message.
How Much Volume Should You Send?
This comes down to budget. How much can you afford?
But if you’re just starting out and let’s say you want to buy 1,000 of them, I would say get 250 all different examples throughout the year instead of blast marketing 10,000 to 10,000 people once.
Hit that same customer multiple times throughout the year. They’ve seen you, they have different offers at different times of the year, and they just keep you top of mind at all times. When they have an issue, next thing you know, you’re who they call.
The Top of Mind Strategy
The customer keeps you top of mind whenever they’re having an issue. Even if they don’t have an issue and their friend has an issue, their friend talks about it.
They’re like, “I’ve seen this Pest Badger company 12 times. You should call them.”
You’re building trust. You’re building a brand.
We’re not sending these out for brand awareness. That’s not our plan. We’re not big enough companies to just go throw brand dollars around. We’re not Coca-Cola, we’re not Nike.
We have to make these things convert. They have to work for us.
The more time and effort you put in on the front side of this design and the testing that you do, the better your results.
I wouldn’t go buy a ton to start out with. Go buy 1,000 or whatever you can afford, 10,000. Do a couple of different versions, then send them out and see which ones convert well, then double down on those ones.
Always be testing. We’re still testing all the time.
Timing Is Everything
We found ones that work great. They work great in certain markets.
We have one market that has really bad grub issues in lawns. I know what time to hit those every single year and they crush.
Mosquitoes in specific areas around ponds and lakes. You’ve got to think through all this.
I’m talking about the marketing calendar a million times. Same thing with door hangers, same thing with postcards.
Go through your whole season. List all the issues that most of your customers are dealing with at those times of year. Create marketing pieces around those. Have it on the calendar when those things need to go out, who’s in charge of it, and who’s going to deploy them or which companies will deploy them.
How to Deploy Every Door Direct Mail
To mass send some of these things, it’s really, really easy.
You can go right onto USPS, the United States Postal Service. You’re going to go to their commercial section. You can just pick Every Door Direct Mail.
You’re going to pull up the Every Door Direct Mail campaign. You’re going to fill out your company information.
Then it’s going to give you a button. You’re putting in your zip code or your cities that you’re working in, and it’s going to pull up a bunch of real mail routes.
Pretty simple. You click on those routes and it’ll tell you everything that you need to know. It’s so detailed.
You go on there and start picking out your routes. It’s going to tell you their income level, if it’s residential or commercial, all these things that are in there that will help you define and find your customer avatar.
It’s funny because you could be in the same neighborhood, but different sides of the street are a different mail route. One would be income values like $200,000 plus, and the other side of the street is $50,000. Well, we know which side of the street you want to market to.
Then it’s going to tell you how many people are on that list, how many routes there are, how much they’re going to cost you.
The Bundling Trick
From there, it’s simple. You have to print off the sheets that they give you. Let’s say you have six bundles of 100 because they have to be bundled in packs of 50 or packs of 100. You drop them off, rubber band each single one.
Here’s a trick. Count the first 100 or first 50, whatever you want to do. Then make a stack and then just match the next stack the same height and just wrap those. Don’t count every single one of them. Just get close.
If they have one or two extra at the end of their mail route, they’ll probably toss them out or maybe they’ll give them to the next person. It doesn’t matter. That’s just a little cheat code for you.
Then from there, you just have to put your little bundle tag that they give you. You print it off, you can walk in, you can pay for it online, you can pay for it when you drop it off at the post office, you drop it off, and then they’ll deploy them for you.
You have to watch out because if you live in different cities that have a different postal code or route, sometimes they won’t transfer those postcards to another post office. You might have to drive all over God’s green earth.
But if you have a good post office with nice workers, usually they’ll get them up to the next post office. They’ll send them over for you.
Or Hire It Out
There are also companies that’ll do all this stuff for you. You can hire them to do everything for you. They’ll design it, they’ll do the marketing around it, and they’ll send it out for you. They’ll track everything.
I wouldn’t recommend starting out that way, but if you have the funds to do it, then do it.
The ChatGPT Cheat Code
ChatGPT is the coolest thing in the world for this.
You can ask ChatGPT which routes you should be mailing to at which times. It’ll give you the exact route information, the route timing. It’ll give you literally everything. You can create your own playbook if you want to.
You have to be very good at prompting. There’s some nuances to it. You can make it into an Excel spreadsheet, whatever you want it to do. It’ll literally do whatever you want it to do.
It’s a cheat code we didn’t have back in the day. We didn’t have YouTube back then either. I had to read books, like actually read books and actually get mentors.
Now you have YouTube and you have us to tell you exactly what to do. Go implement these strategies.
Don't Give Up Too Soon
Here’s what happens all the time. People send out one mass thing of 10,000 people. They get 100 people to respond. They get 10 people to convert. They say, “That was a waste of money.” They never do it again.
If you make a marketing calendar, stick with it and keep doing it over and over and over and over again. I promise that it’ll work.
You’ll send out one, not much happens. Second one, not much happens. Third one, a few calls. Fourth one, every time you send them out, it’s crazy the next day.
I’ve seen that in my business a lot too. It doesn’t always hit right away. Sometimes you get lucky and have one that just explodes, but it usually takes multiple, multiple times. People just see your brand over and over and over again.
How to Track Results
Obviously you’re going to want a specific phone number, not just for one postcard, but for all your postcards.
If you bought five different postcards, you want a different tracking number for every single one. For each one. Not the same number for all the different designs. You want a different tracking number for every single different one.
I’m not saying that the person is going to pick up the phone and call that number every single time because they’re not, but they do. So that’s an easy way to track it.
Then you’re going to want to have source codes in your CRM. If you’re not using a CRM, I’m not sure why you’re not. You need to be. You can afford not to be.
Get yourself a CRM. I don’t care what it is. Just get something that can track source codes.
Have a source code for every single flyer. When someone calls, ask them, “Which one did you get? I got the one with the squirrel with the nut in its mouth or whatever it is.” That one worked really, really well. Cool, track that.
Are they calling from there or did they go to a specific URL that you sent them to? A QR code or separate URL with a landing page, a form on it. These are the ones that converted.
It’s a lot of work to set up, I understand that, but these are things that you have to be looking for. You have to watch.
If you want to scale to the level that we’re at now or where we want to get to, because we’re still doing this stuff all the time, constantly testing and getting better.
The Branding Consistency Rule
Going back to branding 101, your messaging, your brand, your fonts, they have to be the same thing across all platforms. All platforms.
It’s funny because you give an agency one thing and then they’ll make an update on your website and it’s a different font. Wait, no, that’s not the font I use.
But the further it gets away from you, the more people who are involved, the less they notice these small things.
The font, the design, the character, all of that matters. Brand colors, characters, mascots, 100%. Yes.
That all has to resonate from trucks to door hangers to every door direct mail. That’s your brand at its finest.
You wouldn’t like Coke sending you a bottle that looks like Pepsi. That’s weird. Just something to think about.
Door Hangers and Postcards Still Work for Pest Control Companies
Mailers and door hangers are not dead. They still work. You can make a lot of money with these. Don’t give up on it.
Just like door knocking, just like Facebook ads, just like Google ads, whatever it may be, you have to learn, you have to test, you have to get good at it in order for these things to work.
This is not something that just takes a little thought. It does take conscious effort to make these convert.
But when you get it right, it’s one of the most profitable channels you’ll ever have.
If you want to see our templates and learn more strategies like this, join our free Facebook group, Pest Control Millionaires. We’ve got over 2,000 active members sharing what’s working right now.
And if you want the complete system for dominating your local market, grab a copy of Zip Code Kings. It’s the pest control marketing bible.
Start testing your mailers and door hangers today. This stuff’s not dead.
