Your lawn care business direct mail can vary greatly within a single town.
Are you sending out the same piece of direct mail multiple times per year to the same area? Well our friend Tom made a good point here in the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum that your lawn care business direct mail pieces can actually vary quite a bit if you pay attention to the needs of your potential lawn care customers depending on the area they live in. I asked Tom about his direct market mailings.
Steve: “If you could put together your dream marketing campaign concept what would you do differently?”
Tom: “As far as Direct Mail: I would Target in on a specific area every week to 2 weeks. Not concentrate on the WHOLE metro area. I would take it one zipcode at a time. Analyze the needs in each area and focus my mail pieces on them. I would concentrate my efforts on tightening the routes to help make the techs more effecient. Currently we cover about 70 zipcodes. Out of that, 20 of them have a good to decent penetration rate. We could make it even better by focus on it. I would rotate focusing on each area about 3 - 4 times a year.”
Steve: “What kinds of things are you thinking about that could differ from area to area? How much could one zip code area’s needs differ from another? What kinds of things are you thinking about?”
Tom: “For example: In the NE part of the city the ground is mostly a Sandy Loam. In the SW part it is Clay. Just like in any city there are areas where the homes are more high class. Those areas normally have more to their landscaping. We could offer a special on Plant Health Care. Each area has something distinctive about them, so I would focus on that quality. On the east side the homes are older and smaller. On the North side they are expanding and new subdivisions are popping up all the time. Each area has more of one type of grass than the other. We could put a focus in the spring on Bermuda Hydroseeding for the area where bermuda grass is most popular. In the fall we could focus on the Fescue Hydroseeding for the area where fescue is most popular.”