Clean It Up
UK Window Cleaning Forum => Window Cleaning Forum => Topic started by: rl on December 04, 2009, 09:15:59 pm
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Hi all, apologies if this has already been asked, remember (i think it was matt) was getting 30,000 or so flyers delivered and was hoping for about 300 new customers from them. Was just wondering if they worked etc?
Cheers
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Hi rl,
I've put out, and had delivered a lot of leaflets, about 10,000 over the years I reckon, and the results are pretty disapointing. I'd say you'd be lucky to get a 1% success rate with them.
I reckon you're going to spend about £600 on those 30,000 leaflets (my last box of 5000 cost about £100; A5 size) and to get them delivered would cost about £100/£150 per 5000 leaflets, so another £600 to £900 quid.
If you think you're going to deliver them yourself, its not easy work delivering leaflets.
And 30,000 of them is just about every house in Lancashire; I think Chepstow has about 5000 houses; though it is small town.
I reckon you're better off buying some work and starting from there; or go door knocking.
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in 2007 i did a royal mail leaflet campaign of 120,000 spread over 4 months and while we did get alot of customers the result was overall dissapointing, that said there were several factors why, which we have learnt and have since had better results from leafleting.
imo the place leafleting works best is while your doorknocking, which is exactly why we are currently building a door knocking team to start next year.
this year we delivered 25,000 and had a good result, next year 30-40.
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Thanks for the replies.
I didn't think a response of 1% was too bad, if you spent say £1200 getting 30,000 leaflets printed and delivered and got 1% at an average price of £10 that'd be £3000 a month of work.
I think Lancashire has a few more houses than 30,000, think my town has half that number alone???
I agree (from my time on here) Door knocking together with leafleting does seem to be the best way, but i was intrigued as to if you could get 300 customers from mass leafleting or if it wouldn't work.
What % did you guys get from your leaflets alone do you think?
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expect between 0.4-1.5% depending on certain factors like
your leaflet design
if its being put out alone or with others
density and affluence of your chosen area
competition from other window cleaners.
time of year.
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i raked in a lot of work from leaflets ,but as tosh said,its gruelling work, its tough to do it everyday,. luckily i had a bit of cash so i paid a woman to do it. even though she looked like hattie jaques and wore flip-flops she slogged on and once i saw her doing it pushing a pram with a big kid in it too ! ;D
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cheers for that, is it just me or does even 0.4% not sound too bad a return. £1200 for 30,000 leaflets = 120 customers at £10 = £1200 worth of monthly work. And cheaper than employing a door knocker?
Again, I know nothing compared to you guys just saying what I think, which is probably way off the mark!
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i have 3 leafleters
one ive had for 3 years is 75 years old retired postman, hes great.
second guy i spotted leafleting one day while i was out cleaning i asked him if he would do it for me to and he does.
last, is a girl i was at school with, got her by advertising on facebook.
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rl you not off the mark but you have to remember 1 thing about those 120 customers as a result of leafleting. they will be spread out
the more you drive the less you earn fact
if you got those 120 from door knocking or a combination they would be much tighter, and this is the key.
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lee02, do you door knock as well or mostly leaflet? Do you think you could build a round from scratch (albeit spread out) from leafleting alone?
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i paid my leafleter ten quid an hour,this encouraged a good slog effort and i paid her daily and i gave her a streetmap which she coloured in with a markerpen as she went along. somedays this brought in dozens of new work,other days perhaps only 6 . i think it depends who your target customers are ,i do the ordinary houses ,non high priced mostly council .
mate, the only way your going to find out ,is to either hit the streets yourself or find a slogger to do it
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i built my business from scratch by just leafleting for the first 3 years. alone.
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cheers for the advice,
I know it's the only way i'm going to findo out, have been trying to decide if i'm going to take the plunge and get going, just trying to find enough hours in the day to try and get going whilst having a full time job.
I was wondering if I put out say 30,000 leaflets delivered by someone else (whilst i'm working), if i'd get enought work to be able to pack in my job and make the jump straight to w/c without having to try and juggle both w/c and job. No point in thinking about it if it's not going to work, but if it would work it could be the solution for me.
:-\
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rl, email me on lee@pryors-uk.com
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cheers for the advice,
I know it's the only way i'm going to findo out, have been trying to decide if i'm going to take the plunge and get going, just trying to find enough hours in the day to try and get going whilst having a full time job.
I was wondering if I put out say 30,000 leaflets delivered by someone else (whilst i'm working), if i'd get enought work to be able to pack in my job and make the jump straight to w/c without having to try and juggle both w/c and job. No point in thinking about it if it's not going to work, but if it would work it could be the solution for me.
:-\
Just a thought: Nearly everyone I know who has started a successful small business has started part-time and built it up bit by bit until they had enough to go full-time.
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I have over 300 customers on me book's and all from leaflet drop's by myself. Just got another 10,000 done so ready to blitz house's in new year. Sometime's people call me 6 month's down the line cos they kept me flyer. It's hard graft but cos it's me own buisness it's worth it. ;D
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iv just starting trying build a round from scratch and sent out 1000 leaflets on one estate where i live and off that iv got 3 regular customers iv had 3 other jobs that i advertised on the leaflet gutters and facia cleans,got more customers from word of mouth alone,iv just ordered 5000 leaflets to go out again
so my % is less than 1% think its 0.3% of regulars but have had bonuses out of them,i want to buy a small round start with but nothing out there so id suggest you try buy one to then do the leaflets aswell
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I've been looking at the mathematics of this. For someone who doesn't want to knock on doors (there are plenty) this stacks up.
Royal Mail will deliver 10,000 leaflets for £500. Might be more expensive than employing yourself, but they are not going to end up dumped in a stream. Add £120 printing cost. Total £620.
The most common response rate I see quoted on here is around 1-1.5%. Assume 1%. 100 customers at £10 returns £1,000 (of turnover) in month one. The effort repays itself in the first month. There are companies marketing out there that would kill for that kind of return.
That can then become the core for growing your round. Livery on your van will lead to more business. Give people a free wash if they refer a neighbour (offer it after the neighbour's third wash and you're not damaging your cashflow or taking on one-offs). Leaflet the ten houses either side of your customers every third time you do them referring to which house you're currently doing.
By the way, if you live in a city, 10,000 houses is an area roughly a mile and a half to two miles square, so it's not terribly spread out.
PW
yes its true that they do actually deliver them or is it????? no in fact its not. turns out 10000 of mine were not delivered due to staff sickness and so on. they just send them to be recycled and werent going to tell me, in the end after making a fuss for nearly 12 months i got a refund on the printing and delivery cost for that 10000. still would have preffered them to be delivered.
for those that are interested the total cost was £7500.00 and we added £70,000.00 to our anual turnover which i supppose is ok but was not the 150k i was looking for. however there was a large learning curve along the way and if we did it again i know we could achieve over 100k
and yes i would do it again in fact we plan to in 2011, its more likely to be 2 drops of 60,000 leaflets spread over a longer time.
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I've been looking at the mathematics of this. For someone who doesn't want to knock on doors (there are plenty) this stacks up.
Royal Mail will deliver 10,000 leaflets for £500. Might be more expensive than employing yourself, but they are not going to end up dumped in a stream. Add £120 printing cost. Total £620.
The most common response rate I see quoted on here is around 1-1.5%. Assume 1%. 100 customers at £10 returns £1,000 (of turnover) in month one. The effort repays itself in the first month. There are companies marketing out there that would kill for that kind of return.
That can then become the core for growing your round. Livery on your van will lead to more business. Give people a free wash if they refer a neighbour (offer it after the neighbour's third wash and you're not damaging your cashflow or taking on one-offs). Leaflet the ten houses either side of your customers every third time you do them referring to which house you're currently doing.
By the way, if you live in a city, 10,000 houses is an area roughly a mile and a half to two miles square, so it's not terribly spread out.
PW
Depending on the area your £10 average could be a problem.
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iv just starting trying build a round from scratch and sent out 1000 leaflets on one estate where i live and off that iv got 3 regular customers iv had 3 other jobs that i advertised on the leaflet gutters and facia cleans,got more customers from word of mouth alone,iv just ordered 5000 leaflets to go out again
so my % is less than 1% think its 0.3% of regulars but have had bonuses out of them,i want to buy a small round start with but nothing out there so id suggest you try buy one to then do the leaflets aswell
my best leaflet drop was 3 jobs out of 100 leaflets. i then put 1 leaflet in a papershop window for 20p per week and got a £200 gutter cleaning job at a country house near my village
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My experience is that leaflets work best when they are dropped in one area say 5-6 times. The first few wont get noticed, however the 4th-6th have a greater chance of being responded to.
One off advertising doesn't work in any area of life, that is why companies have repeat adverts on TV and in the paper.
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door knocking with leaflts is best as has been said.... but leaflets can work if youhit the right area...
I have done a leaflet drop of 100 houses and had 0% success :(......but I have also leafleted 100 hoses and had 16% success.... but I must emphasise this was extremely lucky as I hit the right area at the right time ;D
I know that the amount of each drop seems small... but thats because I am fussy and target specific property types 8)
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hi guys, sorry for leaving you to it last night, had to get to bed, ready for a day at the trafford centre today with the wife, :-[
Thanks for all the replies.
0.3% does seem lower than most other figures, anyone else had any results this low?
£10 (i think) is the average for a semi, round here.
lee02 will email you when I get a bit more time, thanks for the help, how many leaflets did you put out for the £7500? and what were the reasons the response rate was lower than you were hoping for?
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I find I spent some time in the property game were we used a team of lealfleters. We did not get much success. We would phone testers clients in each area and found many leaflets were not been delivered. We printed the same number on each leaflet and would ask the client to check if they had the lucky number .No one ever won. But we did not loose. WE would always send them to streets we had clients or friend in to check if the job was down.We changed to self deliver and our results whet up dramatically.
In my w /c bus I get 2-3 new customers per 100 leaflets with out knocking and I do from time to time have bad days were I get nothing.
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rl read my previous posts in this thread the number is there.
email me for a chat, i might give you the advice for free that took me years and thousands to learn
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Hi rl yes it was me lol
I have only been able to have 20,000 leaflets delivered to date.
We have gained alot of customers but no way near as much as I had hoped for, but saying that we have gained loads of gutter cleans.
I expect that some of the potential customers have kept hold of the flyers til the new year.
Having another 15,000 dropped at the end of January.
I think next year will be a good one for us all. (unemployment is slowing down)
I agree with sunshine, some areas need dropping a few times before people have the confidence to ring, as they usually think that we are one hit wonders lol.
I have picked quite a few customers from my website, its proving to be more successful down here than in Leicester.
Matt
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Hi rl yes it was me lol
I have only been able to have 20,000 leaflets delivered to date.
We have gained alot of customers but no way near as much as I had hoped for, but saying that we have gained loads of gutter cleans.
I expect that some of the potential customers have kept hold of the flyers til the new year.
Having another 15,000 dropped at the end of January.
I think next year will be a good one for us all. (unemployment is slowing down)
I agree with sunshine, some areas need dropping a few times before people have the confidence to ring, as they usually think that we are one hit wonders lol.
I have picked quite a few customers from my website, its proving to be more successful down here than in Leicester.
Matt
So out of the 20,000 leaflets, how many regular customers have you got? And how many one offs?
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cheers matt.
Would be interested to know the figures. What % success, how much the flyers were to be printed and delivered and how much regular work you got from them. If you don't want to post them on here my email is mini2007@operamail.com or if you don't want to say thats fine!
Good luck with the next batch of leaflets.
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86 regular customers, only 12 of those are 8 weekly the rest are 4 weekly, had 7 one off's, 16 gutter cleans and 2 conservatory roofs those were from leaflets, gained another 11 from door knocking and 7 from the website.
Matt
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86 regular customers, only 12 of those are 8 weekly the rest are 4 weekly, had 7 one off's, 16 gutter cleans and 2 conservatory roofs those were from leaflets, gained another 11 from door knocking and 7 from the website.
so if thats from 20000 leaflets your success rate is 0.4% or thereabout for regulars,how many houses did you roughly knock on for the 11 customers
Matt
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about 250
Matt
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86 regular customers, only 12 of those are 8 weekly the rest are 4 weekly, had 7 one off's, 16 gutter cleans and 2 conservatory roofs those were from leaflets, gained another 11 from door knocking and 7 from the website.
Matt
Thats a very good return m8, who ever looks at that has to agree, unless they are £1 per houses which I doubt very much speaking with you. 86 regular paying people and the chance of more to follow..
Well done and keep it up m8.
Ian
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I've been looking at the mathematics of this. For someone who doesn't want to knock on doors (there are plenty) this stacks up.
Royal Mail will deliver 10,000 leaflets for £500. Might be more expensive than employing yourself, but they are not going to end up dumped in a stream. Add £120 printing cost. Total £620.
The most common response rate I see quoted on here is around 1-1.5%. Assume 1%. 100 customers at £10 returns £1,000 (of turnover) in month one. The effort repays itself in the first month. There are companies marketing out there that would kill for that kind of return.
That can then become the core for growing your round. Livery on your van will lead to more business. Give people a free wash if they refer a neighbour (offer it after the neighbour's third wash and you're not damaging your cashflow or taking on one-offs). Leaflet the ten houses either side of your customers every third time you do them referring to which house you're currently doing.
By the way, if you live in a city, 10,000 houses is an area roughly a mile and a half to two miles square, so it's not terribly spread out.
PW
yes its true that they do actually deliver them or is it????? no in fact its not. turns out 10000 of mine were not delivered due to staff sickness and so on. they just send them to be recycled and werent going to tell me, in the end after making a fuss for nearly 12 months i got a refund on the printing and delivery cost for that 10000. still would have preffered them to be delivered.
for those that are interested the total cost was £7500.00 and we added £70,000.00 to our anual turnover which i supppose is ok but was not the 150k i was looking for. however there was a large learning curve along the way and if we did it again i know we could achieve over 100k
and yes i would do it again in fact we plan to in 2011, its more likely to be 2 drops of 60,000 leaflets spread over a longer time.
I remember your leaflet campaign Lee. I got one through my door - from the Royal Mail I think. I was quite impressed with the design.
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overall, my return rate on leaflets is 2% to 4% sometimes higher, its that..... every time i deliver , regardless of area.
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Gazza, can I have a copy too:
toshisba@yahoo.co.uk
Cheers! ;D
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overall, my return rate on leaflets is 2% to 4% sometimes higher, its that..... every time i deliver , regardless of area.
Thats a fantastic return Gazzasp8
Do you fancy sending me a copy design@windowwashers.co.uk ?
Ian
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When I first started 3 1/2 years ago I was getting about 3% overall, in my area where I've now lived for 22 years I never had a door knock from a window cleaner or a leaflet, but over the past 2 years though I've been knocked and leafletted numerous times, so obviously there are loads more getting into window cleaning now.
Any leaflets/doorknocks now have probably already been canvassed over the last month or so, that needs to be taken into account:(
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gazza if your emailing the leaflet i wouldnt mind taking a look at your design thanks
cozziekiller@hotmail.co.uk
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Gazza, can I have a copy too ,
darren_charman_talk21.com
Thanks
Darren
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the point raised earlier that the leaflets that royal mail deliver will get there and not end up in a stream,I know a postie who burns a lot of flyers rather than deliver them,and I would be very surprised if he is the exception,If you are honest with yourselves,we all would be happy for the posties/leaflet droppers to dump/burn 99% of the crap that comes through our letter boxes each day!!
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gazza any chance in sending me one as well please
stemoney@hotmail.com
ta mate
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GAZZA,
Could i trouble you for a copy too?
fraser1968@hotmail.co.uk
Thanks
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Gazza,
I am busy putting together a new flyer plus some other things at the moment so would be very interested to hear (or see) what works so well for you.
Neil
info@purerclean.co.uk
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Gazza it may be an idea to just post it on here to save you sending out loads of e-mails.
I leafleted one area in town, maybe about 300 houses and got nothing, so I quickly decided that I need to door knock and drop leaflets for the not at homes and this works a treat for me. But as has been said a few times on this forum it's all about repatition, if I leaflet the houses around where I have customers every few months I'll probably pick up more each drop.
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send me one too please gazza ;D
matt@pure-windowcleaning.co.uk
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send me one too please gazza ;D
matt@pure-windowcleaning.co.uk
Don't send me one. I'll borrow his. ;D
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send me one too please gazza ;D
matt@pure-windowcleaning.co.uk
Don't send me one. I'll borrow his. ;D
Will Matt get done for copyright infringement then? ;D
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Hi Gazza,
Can I get a quick look at your flyer too. amayzenglaze@yahoo.co.uk
Regards, Andrew
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the point raised earlier that the leaflets that royal mail deliver will get there and not end up in a stream,I know a postie who burns a lot of flyers rather than deliver them,and I would be very surprised if he is the exception,If you are honest with yourselves,we all would be happy for the posties/leaflet droppers to dump/burn 99% of the crap that comes through our letter boxes each day!!
burn them on a bonfire ?or in a woodburner? thered be a lot of ash to get rid of but i spose he might save a few quid on his heating bills ?? ;D
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well done matt,
goodluck.
did you do your own website?
I like the weathere forecast link, was thinking of doing that myself, how do you get the 4 day forecast to come up, i was just going to give a link to bbc forecast.
thanks lee
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Ive just ordered 5000 new full colour flyers yesterday and cant wait until they are ready, i will be door knocking with 99% of them and will put the rest into shops that i know will keep them on the counter and give them to customers who come into the shop, i find full colour is better as it catches the eye of potential custies, ok when you aint got the cash to start with you have to use 1 colour like i did but thats just for information, people dont look at information they want to see a picture first to make them look.
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hey roger,
Where are you getting your leaflets done at? how much are the costing you? you should post them on here so we can slag......wait i mean help you with them lol!!
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well done matt,
goodluck.
did you do your own website?
I like the weathere forecast link, was thinking of doing that myself, how do you get the 4 day forecast to come up, i was just going to give a link to bbc forecast.
thanks lee
hi Lee, I have the weather forecast as a tool on my website builder program, I use microsoft office live.
Matt
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any chance of a copy gazza richypol@hotmail.co.uk
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hey roger,
Where are you getting your leaflets done at? how much are the costing you? you should post them on here so we can slag......wait i mean help you with them lol!!
place local to me £150 for 5000 in A5 full colour, eye design its called, new place and i know the guy, hes also going to get me to clean his windows outside in new year so happy days :)
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thats a very good price!!! i paid £235 for the equivalent up here!! you got any photos of the leaflets?
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they are being designed as i type this, not in a big rush for them tbh, as i only want them ready for new year, if i get them before that then its alright. check out his site www.eyedesignni.com to see for yourself :)
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thats alot i thought iv just brought some of a guy from ebay a5 full colour 5000 for £97 with postage and he designed them for me i told him what write on them and he added photos to suit
i got quotes from shops and they are double what iv paid