Your Postcard Sits in Their Kitchen for 17 Days. Here's How to Make It Get the Call

Chris Foster (00:00.00)
Direct mail stays in the house for 17 days. Direct mail retargeting has proven to be the highest return on ad spend of any channel I’ve seen.

Jared Tangir (00:09.06)
I went to ChatGPT and asked for non-private equity plumbers near me.

Chris Foster (00:13.50)
That’s the exact search that I did.

Jared Tangir (00:20.34)
What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the Elevated Trade Secrets podcast, the podcast for home service business owners who are serious about building something real. I’m your host, Jared Tangir, CEO of Elevated Audience. And today I’ve got Chris Foster, Chief Evangelist from PostcardMania and the host of Everywhere Small Business Podcast joining me. So let’s get into it. Chris, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. I always like to start. Give us a little bit about your background. Start shortly after you got out of diapers until how you got here today.

Chris Foster (00:48.24)
You got it. Thanks so much. It’s so great to be here, Jared. So, yeah, I’ve been in the direct marketing industry for decades and decades and decades. I’ve been around. And so traditionally, you know, focused on a variety of different business help, right? Small business, mid-market, enterprise, direct-to-consumer, and was a longstanding employee for a direct marketing company for a while. I joined PostcardMania about six months ago to be their chief evangelist. So what does that mean? Well, really, Jared, I focus on education and partnerships to advance our mission to help one million small businesses grow through education, marketing, and technology. So PostcardMania, for listeners who don’t know it, is the number one direct marketing platform for small businesses with over 130,000 plus clients.

We serve them with direct mail and additional digital services, really anything they need to direct market themselves. And home services is a huge part. HVAC, lawn care, roofing, construction, pool, landscape, all of it. Those are all the industries that we really serve predominantly. And we understand those businesses really well. Look, we know that most home services businesses, most of them are going to be under 20 employees. Some, most of those are maybe under 10 employees. And you have a marketing person that wears a lot of hats, or the owner is the marketing person, or they had a hire that does it part-time, right? So they don’t have the time, effort, energy to devote to real marketing to promote their business, which, of course, you have to do, right?

If you don’t promote, you’re not going to grow. So working with folks like Elevated as a strategic partner to say, look, we can help craft a website, your digital strategy, because, look, you’re installing HVAC systems. Why would you ever know about digital marketing? It’s too confusing. It’s too crazy. It changes too rapidly. And besides, your job is to not only service your customers, but to build your business. And so what we do at PostcardMania, kind of like what you do at Elevated, to step in as a strategic partner and a marketing partner and a marketing department for them to help them promote. And so my role at PostcardMania, Jared, is to get the education out, right?

It’s to help them learn how to do it. It’s to help them learn some basic fundamentals so that even if they aren’t doing it themselves, they understand why we’re doing it. Because so oftentimes, the small business owner will say, well, what do I do? Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Just, well, that’s good. But really, what’s better is if you know why you’re doing certain things. And so my role on that side of it is truly on the education side. So I’ve taught at UCSD Extension for a decade plus on brand strategy. I’ve hosted hundreds of webinars and webcasts, done dozens and dozens of presentations.

And really, my role is as educator is to bring some of these marketing principles that they need to know and break it down so that it’s simple to understand. So when they’re in, they understand when they go to market, why they’re doing it. Because we all know that an educated customer is always going to be a more successful customer. So anyway, that’s my role. And that’s why I’m here on the show.

Jared Tangir (04:00.88)
100%. Well, I’m super glad you’re here because I’ve been really excited to talk to you. I had a great meeting last week or the week before with some of your colleagues, because we’ve been looking for a great partner for our clients to help them with some of their direct mail needs, right? Digital is great. It serves a ton of purposes. But direct mail is just is another platform. It’s another tool in the tool belt, especially when it comes to reactivating your customer database, making sure your customers are scheduling their maintenance appointments, targeting new customers, especially with how, you know, my email inbox is full of more junk than my postal mailbox these days, right?

It used to be the opposite. Right now, I get more junk email and I actually look through everything in my mailbox.

Chris Foster (04:48.16)
Sure. So I have some stats for you on that.

Jared Tangir (04:51.28)
I love stats.

Chris Foster (04:52.46)
All right. If you love stats, I’ll throw some out. You and me and everyone listening receive about 120 emails per day on average. About 95% of phone calls go unanswered because people don’t understand or recognize the business. And we receive about 5,000 plus digital impressions a day from a variety of different outlets, your website, your connected television, your mobile phone, your Facebook feeds, all of those are populated with ads. And so to your point about receiving so many emails, I know that in my Gmail account, if there’s an email that goes below the fold, poof, poof, Jared, it’s gone. It disappears. I never see it again.

But I’m getting 120 emails a day, right? There’s no way I can keep in touch with all of them. And so you have to have an email. Of course you do, because you’ve got to keep it front and it’s affordable and all that stuff. But your customers are inundated with emails just like you and I are. Whereas with direct mail, on average, we get about two to five direct mail pieces a day on average. What does that mean? That means there’s less competition for attention. And what else does that mean? That means that you have a moment of receiving mail as a user, as a recipient.

There are three things you can do when you get mail, Jared. One, you can toss it out immediately, right? But while you’re tossing it out, you’re still looking at it. Two, you can drop whatever you’re doing and act on it right then and there. You’re coming in. Forget the groceries. Forget the kids. I’m not going to feed the cats. I’m going to scan this QR code right now. And I’m going to call right now. Oh, rarely happens. Three, most likely, is that you set that mailer aside because you’re like, huh? Huh, that’s cool. I’m going to keep that. You put it on the table. You put it on the refrigerator.

Kind of the island, wherever. You kind of collect that stuff. And on average, Jared, direct mail stays in the house for 17 days. Really? That’s on average. Yeah, that’s a USPS stat. Wow. So it just hangs around, right? Until you’re ready to act on it. And so meanwhile, you’re getting these digital impressions and you still have this direct mail piece that has that presence, right? We call it the stopping power, right? You have this power of the direct mail and you have this digital presence, but the direct mail just hangs around to remind that user and is usually a vehicle for them to act. So, yes, direct mail in comparison to digital has been actually proven to be more effective, especially for acquisition.

Because I guarantee you that if you get an email from someone that you don’t know, are you going to open it? No. No. Of course you won’t.

Jared Tangir (07:27.32)
I have an AI agent that filters all that out for me.

Chris Foster (07:29.66)
So there you go. Come on.

Jared Tangir (07:31.36)
I’m not even going to see it.

Chris Foster (07:31.72)
Exactly. You don’t even see it. So the idea for acquisition, direct mail still is the highest performing channel that’s out there. I like to use the analogy that you said earlier, there are so many digital channels that are out there and it’s easy for a small business owner to get lost in the weeds of all this digital communication. Whereas direct mail is like this oak in the forest. It’s never gone away. It might not be the sexiest, but it’s still predominantly the most effective.

Jared Tangir (07:59.42)
100%. In fact, I’ll share a little story with you. We actually switched. We’ve been doing cold email ourselves for years and it generated, it was high volume, low output. But recently we started sending handwritten letters to prospects. So we built a list of the top 100 companies we want to work with and we’re sending them handwritten letters. And our response rates are actually really good. And that was what kind of pivoted us to have these conversations with our clients. And ultimately the timing of you guys calling us was great because a big challenge in home services, especially for companies that have a membership program, is actually getting the members to schedule their service appointments.

Chris Foster (08:40.24)
100%.

Jared Tangir (08:40.88)
They’re like, oh, okay, great. I know. They pay every month for their two service calls or their one service call. They don’t actually ever schedule it. Right? And the value to a home service business is getting into the home. We actually are starting like, let’s do some postcard mailers. Right? Let’s get in front of them where they’re, you know, because you’re emailing and you’re calling. You’re catching them at a bad time. Your email is going below the fold. It’s not a priority. Oh, I’ll leave it unread. I’ll get back to it. But again, you know, what’s one more way we can get in front of them?

So I would love to hear from you. Right? So that’s using postcards or print mail for your warm audience. But what about for cold audiences? Every door direct mail, you know, EDDM is kind of like the hot button topic, but it’s not as effective as some of the other strategies that PostcardMania offers. So what are your top favorites?

Chris Foster (09:28.54)
Oh, thank you for asking. I’d like to touch on briefly reaching out to existing members, because one of the things that we’re able to do now with direct mail, that wasn’t possible before, but is now, especially through our technology, is what we call automated direct mail. What that means is that if you have someone on membership and you’re like, oh, man, I’ve got to remember to send this mailer out as a reminder. You don’t need to do that anymore. You can actually send it in an automated way. So it’s personalized. You can have their name. You have their address. And you schedule that within the system, and it automatically sends out the card.

So the automated direct mail makes it so much easier. It’s like sending automated email, only it’s a more effective direct mail piece. So to your point, Jared, on the existing members, automated direct mail, absolutely the way to go. It’s a set it and forget it, and you get those appointments, and you get those calls saying, great, thank you so much. I appreciate that reminder. Come on in and service my AC, please. So touch on the automated direct mail. Now, when it comes to cold prospecting, every door direct mail, or EDDM, serves a very good purpose. Those are typically for businesses that want to saturate a mail carrier route, which actually mail carrier route is the actual route that your post person actually walks.

Like when you see your post person go from door to door, he or she is going on the mail carrier route, which is slightly different than a zip code. A zip code could be bigger than the mail carrier route, depending on the zip code, right? Or you could have multiple zip codes on the single carrier route, depending on where you live, whether you’re more rural versus urban. So every door direct mail focuses on a zip code or carrier route level where it says, I’m going to just hit everybody on that house. I’m just going to blanket them with these cards. Now, it’s more affordable, but it’s less targeted.

So a couple things with every door direct mail that are great about it is that it hits every door in that area. The weakness is that you don’t track that delivery. You don’t necessarily segment which of those homes would get a card versus not. So in a targeted mailing, for example, you can set aside, you know, different list segments like age of house or household income, or maybe age of occupants or maybe presence of children, right? So if you’re in an HVAC business and you’re like, I really just want to target these older homes because I really want to sell new AC units. So I want to target homes that are 15 plus years old.

Maybe the homeowner is 55 plus because they haven’t changed it. Or maybe, you know what? I really want to focus on families because I know a lot of these families are needing this AC unit because their kids are going to go crazy. It doesn’t work.

Jared Tangir (12:15.88)
Can you target homeowners versus renters?

Chris Foster (12:18.66)
Absolutely. And so you can target homeowners versus renters. You can target square footage of house, age of home. And so these are things where if you say, you know what, I really, if, for example, in your HVAC business, you really want to focus on vacuum, right? Cleaning the air, filtering the air. And you say, I want to focus on families with pets because that’s a no brainer because of course they need a better system. You can actually focus on that, right? So that maybe is more target. It’s a little bit more expensive, but that’s okay because the value of your customer is so high in home services, right?

The average order value, the average lifetime value is so high that spending a little bit more to get the right and more highly qualified lead is 100% worth it. So I usually recommend, especially in home services, focus on a target and mailing list versus EDDM is absolutely great for your local pizza shop. It’s great for a local restaurant that’s just trying to gain exposure or they’re not trying to segment and figure out who’s a better customer or not. You can’t do that if you’re a pizza shop. Everybody’s a customer. All their customers are created equally.

Jared Tangir (13:30.00)
All their customers are created equally.

Chris Foster (13:31.52)
But for HVAC and home services, that’s not the case.

Jared Tangir (13:34.22)
Right. So one of the things I learned that you guys do that I think is pretty cool and pretty unique, a little bit creepy, but still worth it, is the website to mailbox.

Chris Foster (13:42.58)
100%. That’s not creepy at all. It’s beautiful.

Jared Tangir (13:45.00)
Yeah. I love it. I love it.

Chris Foster (13:47.72)
I’ll tell you what that’s about because, you know, you said it’s kind of creepy because, gosh, you know, the idea, folks, is that you go to a website and you don’t buy and you tool around. We’re able to capture a good portion of those folks and match them to postal address and send targeted direct mail to those website visitors who didn’t complete the conversion action, either farm filler or the like. Now, you as a consumer are experiencing this every hour of every day on the digital side. Do you ever notice when you get an ad for the website that you recently visit or Facebook posts like 15 minutes after you visit that site?

It’s the same thing.

Jared Tangir (14:26.22)
God forbid I want to check out a new pair of sneakers. I have to buy them. Yeah.

Chris Foster (14:31.48)
Because they’re going to be marketing to you forever. So that’s just part of the retargeting. And the reason that works and it’s so effective is that you’ve already expressed an interest. So what we’re able to do is to take that to a higher level of engagement with direct mail retargeting so that you’re able to retarget those folks with the message. They already expressed an interest and they get the card. They’re like, yeah, you know what? I’m already I’m doing what normal people do. I go to a website, I check it out. And then what I do, bro, I go to other websites that look just like yours.

Right. I go three or four or five different tabs. Everybody does it. And your customers are doing it, too. So

Jared Tangir (15:10.30)
the phone rings, the kid’s school called, somebody’s sick, you get distracted and you go back and start a new search.

Chris Foster (15:16.48)
A hundred percent. You’re not ready. And you’re not ready to complete the sale and buy at the moment. And so what direct mail retargeting does, it takes advantage of all the powerful stuff that direct mail has in terms of engagement. And response rate. But targets those folks who already expressed an interest. And in all the years that I’ve been doing direct marketing, direct mail retargeting has proven to be the highest return on ad spend of any channel I’ve seen.

Jared Tangir (15:41.80)
Is that a relatively new tool or has it been around for a while? Well,

Chris Foster (15:45.48)
it’s been around for a bit. But what we’ve done in PostcardMania is operationalizes so that for you as a business owner and marketer, it’s a no brainer. It’s a set and forget. If you get three, five, 10, 15, 20 visitors a day and you’re mailing five to 10 cards a day or three cards a day, that’s fine. Right. But what we’ve done is we’ve specialized in the operation so that it goes out every day. You set it once, it’s done. And we actually include it also in our complete package of everywhere small business, which is the direct mail plus the digital services on top.

And we’ve kind of nested in the direct mail retargeting as part of it because it is so valuable.

Jared Tangir (16:25.62)
Wow, that’s awesome. So PostcardMania offers a ton of targeting strategies, you know, especially when it comes to mail. What are your top three?

Chris Foster (16:35.64)
Well, the top product in terms of effectiveness is what I just mentioned. It’s called the everywhere small business. So that everywhere small business takes your direct mail program and then layers on meta and Google ads. And if you want to upgrade YouTube and connect to TV as well. And then also adds in and like I said, it nests and tucks in the website retargeting website to mailbox. So really what you’re doing is you’re having that initial outreach, a push of direct, what we call multi-channel or omni-channel direct marketing. And then we do digital retargeting to the people who visit the website, direct mail retargeting to people who visit the website.

So as a business, you’re kind of getting the full customer journey marketing toolkit in one tool, right? So it’s kind of like putting a toolkit on like a belt, like a tool belt. And instead of having a belt that is just a single strap, you’ve got a belt with all your tools. That’s what this thing is for your marketing side. So I love that. My other favorite product slash service is what I talked about earlier called automated direct mail. So what we call smart touch automated mailing is able to integrate with Salesforce or HubSpot or Jabber or Housecall Pro or other CRM systems to integrate perfectly in with those contacts.

So you can launch automated direct mail as easily as you do email. Only it’s the high response, high power, high touch of direct mail. And it’s super easy to set up. The fields can be personalized to name and things like that. So that automated direct mail is a fantastic program. And then the third product that I would recommend that I love is relatively new, but it’s AIO optimization or artificial intelligent optimization services. So the reason that that’s important, folks, and we have a webinar on this on October 27th as a note, is that you’re doing search engine optimization now. And elevated, I’m sure, provides a lot.

Some of these things, right, where you have to get found based on those unpaid organic search results. But ahead of those unpaid organic search results are a lot of other paid search results, sponsored ads that are kind of at the top, right? You can’t avoid them. What people are doing now, though, is they’re searching more using chat GPT or Claude or Gemini or Copilot or other artificial intelligence searches. And here’s how that’s different. In the past, it would say roofers near me or HVAC near me. Now, someone says, my AC unit is the original model built in 1998. It seems to work, but there are small parts that make it fail sometimes.

I don’t want to replace my whole system. I just want to get it looked at and fixed. Who’s the best, most reputable AC business out there that will just come out and look at my AC unit without giving me a full $15,000 project? Estimate. Super specific, right? Or, for example, if you’re in a roofing, I have a Sartillo tile roof. I have a handful of tiles that are broken. I don’t want to get a whole new roof. What’s my best approach? Question mark. And these new artificial intelligence searches will scour the websites and all other types of sources very, very quickly and pull back what they’re seeing as the most relevant and the most connected answer.

So AIO is almost like answer intelligence optimization, right? Because that’s actually what they’re doing. And for you as a business, you might not know how to do that. So we’re able to do that from a service perspective. And even if you don’t use us and use Elevated or some other business, please, if you’re listening, please talk to your team at Elevated. Ask them about

Jared Tangir (20:28.54)
any team. Talk to your marketing partner, right?

Chris Foster (20:31.70)
Talk to your marketing partner about artificial intelligence optimization. Because, gang, you have to be on that. Because if you wait six months, you’re actually going to be behind. Because the curve of adoption for consumers is going like a hockey stick. And it’s changing every two to three months. And I know people say, oh, it doesn’t change that fast. Gang, this is changing that fast. And understanding how your website can be best seen by answering those questions that people will naturally ask, that’s going to be very important for your business in 2027.

Jared Tangir (21:02.20)
Oh, 100%. We actually, you know, we always called SEO. We help you get found online, right? Now with the answer engine optimization, AEO, GEO, whatever you want to call it, we say we help you get recommended, right? Because that’s what it is. It’s recommendations, right? So whether it’s an AI overview, ChatGPT, or Claude. And beyond, like, the importance of giving the LLMs, the, you know, the AI services, full context around your business. Private equity, huge player in home services right now. The, a lot, most of our clients are non-PE, right? They’re family owned and locally operated. And we’re actually seeing, and in the calls that our clients are getting, that customers are saying, oh, well, I went to ChatGPT and asked for non-private equity plumbers near me.

Chris Foster (21:51.30)
Nice. Local family owned plumbers.

Jared Tangir (21:53.66)
Correct. Right?

Chris Foster (21:54.72)
Yeah, that’s awesome. And I will tell you, Jared, I’m going to jump in real quick, if you don’t mind, because my comment is so relevant to what you just said. That’s the exact search that I did. Mm-hmm. What you talked about as a trend, that was my exact experience.

Jared Tangir (22:37.80)
Yeah. And, and it, it’s really not that difficult, right? Anybody listening can actually help coach the AI models with a really, write a one-page article about why XYZ business is maintaining family ownership, right? Or why XYZ business is rejecting private equity. Or however you want to phrase it or go about it. We did this for two clients. I love it. And before we published it, they were not, like, when we ran those test queries in ChatGPT, other businesses were recommended, published these articles. We got one of them to actually create a YouTube video based on a script that we gave them or bullet talking points.

And boom. Boom. Now, all of a sudden, when people are looking for family-owned, locally operated contractors in those two, and they’re major metrics. One was Austin and one was Denver. Really that simple. But I think the big takeaway, and I’m curious to hear your point on it, is just be explicit. Don’t assume that an AI is going to be, they’re intelligent, but they’re very dumb, right? Unless you tell it exactly who you are, what you do, and what your principles are, you can’t assume that it’s going to know.

Chris Foster (23:45.42)
A hundred percent. It’s not going to know. So, the one thing that we’ve learned and that we’re all learning to get as a marketing industry, just as a business ecosystem, is that answer engine optimization, which I like the new phrase that they call it, because what they’re looking for is providing answers for real questions from people, right? So, oftentimes, as a human, you would talk to your neighbor and be like, hey, man, I’ve got this, I’ve got a chip on my roof. I was looking at it, and I’ve got a couple of tiles that are broken. I don’t want to get a whole new roof.

Do you think I can just get a little section of that? Like, yeah, I think you can. Do you know anybody? No, I don’t. Do you know anybody? Having that conversation, but millions of opportunities out there. And so, to Jared’s point about specificity, really think about what your unique selling position is in the industry. They call it a USP. What makes you so important? And I still think that it’s the idea of if you’re local and you’re family-owned, I guarantee you that is a winning position in the marketplace. People want now. People now want to support their local businesses.

Jared Tangir (24:59.60)
Oh, 100%. And I think it becomes undervalued, right? And I actually just released a podcast episode with a second-generation owner of a home service company. I think it’s pretty interesting that, you know, the trades are really shrinking as far as tradespeople, right? When was the last time you had a late 20s, early 30s electrician, plumber, roofer, right? HVAC tech out to your house, right? They’re my age, 40s, 50s, 60s. It’s not going to be long before we were paying $950 an hour for a plumber because the trades, there’s only going to be one per 30 models, right? And I exaggerate there a little bit.

But these owners that are aging, you know, that have been doing it for 50 years have two choices, right? They can sell to private equity. They can sell to another local business or they can pass it down to their children. But I think we’re kind of going off on a tangent here.

Chris Foster (26:01.96)
No, you know what? I think that that’s actually a really important point. My hunch is that a lot of your listeners are nodding their heads. It is what they call right now in the macroeconomic scheme the great wealth transfer. So you have this entire baby boomer generation and a large portion of those baby boomer generation folks own trades businesses, right? So your point about what do I do with this and now there are entire businesses completely focused on helping service companies get the highest valuation possible so they can be sold to a private equity. And private equity folks are saying, I can buy 8, 10, 12 of these businesses in this local area and completely dominate.

If I can collect three to five different independently owned plumbing businesses and consolidate them all, I have the entire market, right? Oh, and then I can do this for construction. Oh, I could do this for roofing, right? So they’re going to follow the money. And what we also know from a macroeconomic perspective is that baby boomers are not leaving their houses. Now it’s impacting the housing shortage and all that kind of stuff. But from an opportunity perspective, and I did a whole webinar on home services, it is the best time to be in home services. The next five to 10 years are going to be lucrative for those folks because baby boomers are staying in their house, which means more maintenance.

Jared Tangir (27:21.54)
Yep. 100%. Let’s bring it back around to the marketing conversation. How do business owners that want to grow and scale, right? How do they leverage both digital and non-digital tactics to help them hit their next revenue target, right? Or expand their service area, right? Google business profiles generate hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars per month, right? And it’s becoming increasingly harder to spin up more Google business profiles for more service areas, right? Right. Google’s cracking down on how they verify them. There are ways to do it. We do it. You know, I’m sure you do it. We do it successfully. But there’s other ways to say, okay, my Google business profile will get me about six to eight miles around my desk.

But how do I expand my service area to 20, 30 miles beyond maybe, you know, Google ads is one, local service ads maybe. But what are your both digital, non-digital?

Chris Foster (28:20.22)
I think it’s a combination of both. In today’s world, human beings will look at a variety of different channels. They’re going to go online. They’re going to do the searches like we just talked about using chat. They’re going to visit your website. They’re going to check out your Facebook. And they’re going to see who you are. They’re definitely going to read reviews 100% because they want to see what other people are telling me about you. They want to look at your Instagram feeds, right? They want to get to know you as people. And one of the challenges for small business owners now, especially in the trades, is most of them don’t want to be on camera.

Most of them don’t want to talk to, right? But part of that is getting out of your shell and being like, hey, I’m doing this job and I’m doing this job. And here’s what I found that these guys hadn’t cleaned their blades in a while. And a lot of people are nervous about cleaning their blades. But here’s what you can do to clean the blades of your AC unit. Just take this blah. That way it preserves. It gets to know you. It shows that you’re helpful. It shows that you’re knowledgeable. It shows that you’re trying to get money from folks, but you’re actually trying to give advice.

There are now, as you know, I’m sure, millions of YouTube videos done by plumbers to show you how to do basic plumbing in your house. Because they know that people are watching and they’re giving that information out there. So to your point, Jared, doing those digital touches is really important. Making them authentic is really important. And then when you add direct mail, you can target the homes that you’re trying to get into. Right. That’s why it’s a targeted mail piece versus EDDM is so much better because you can say, I really want to focus on these baby boomers now that are, you know, 60 plus.

And that there are homes that are 20 years old that are worth X amount of dollars and X amount of square feet. That’s my business. And then you can wrap a message around that targeting to say, we specialize in older homes. I treat you like I treat my own dad. Right. I mean, these types of messages that you can focus based on the target audience that you’re marketing to. Because the marriage of targeting and message is really what makes the response rates go higher. And the other thing that makes the response rates go higher, which is actually even more important, Jared, is consistency. We just had our growth summit a couple of weeks ago.

And I layered in consistency is the key to marketing. Consistency is the key to marketing. Consistency is the key to marketing. I’m going to repeat myself, be redundant, say the same thing over and over again. And consistency is the key. It just is because that’s what actually creates the impression in the minds of your customers. A, that you’re stable. B, that you’re around. But C, that they think of you when they think of the service. Look, there’s a very true and widely known statement that generally only 5% of the market are actually ready to buy at any given time.

Jared Tangir (31:11.76)
It goes back to brand building, right?

Chris Foster (31:14.00)
It goes back to brand building. And that means that 95% of your market’s not ready to buy. They’ll consider you. And they’ll think of you. And they’ll have you as top of mind. So the consistency is going to be the key to making sure that you’re seen. So to answer your question about what they need to do, be consistent. Be in every channel. And line up a message with their target audience as best as they can so that it’s more relevant and the response rates are higher.

Jared Tangir (31:40.98)
100%. Love that. When it comes to some of the strategic targeted mailer campaigns, right? I’m not an expert in this by any means. Do you have to lead with an offer? Just like you do on a channel like Meta, right? Because we don’t know if they have a leak, right? We don’t know if they have an old HVAC system. We’re guessing. We’re trying to make a strategic decision. But do you lead with an offer? What kind of creative, right? What kind of media are you sending? How do you stand out? What kind of strategies work best in that channel?

Chris Foster (32:12.00)
And if you do want to get into really great detail at postcardmania.com, you can find the 13 elements of a successful postcard. It kind of details all the, I call the devices. Because, you know, if you’re in a Facebook post, you have to have a big fat button that does something. Either learn more or find out more or get a quote or get an estimate or something. You have a headline. You have an image. You have this small little three inch by four inch, two inch, whatever graphic panel on your phone to work with. So every media that you have has that, right? If you have a connected television ad, well, it’s 15, 30, or 60 seconds, right?

And in that time, you have to tell a quick story with visuals and with audio and message and video and all this stuff. So every single media channel has a format or what I call devices that help a user see the information and then act on it. It’s very intentional. Even though you don’t know it, the people who create them know that this is in there. The same thing is true with the direct mail piece. The devices on the direct mail piece drive higher response. For example, you need a very strong headline and the headline needs to clearly articulate your unique selling proposition and more importantly, the benefit, right?

The benefit of something is how it makes you feel better. First, the feature is kind of what it is. For example, if you say feel comfortable all summer long, well, that’s a benefit. The feature is reliable HV, super quiet, always on maintenance, you know, membership, right? Those are the features, right? So focusing on a benefit versus a feature is really important. And then on the card itself, you asked about leading with an officer, lead 100%. You have to have an offer because people just do. Even if the offer is something you always do, treat it like an offer to excite that user to say, yeah, I’m going to do this.

I want to take advantage. And also make sure to have calls to action as in tell them exactly what to do. If you want them to call and that’s the number one thing you want them to call, well, gang, have a big phone number. So they call if you want them, if you want them to go online to schedule an estimate or appointment, no problem. Have a QR code that takes them right to the form. So they go online. If you want them to visit your YouTube channel, have a QR code to go to your YouTube channel. Right. So whatever you really, really want them to do, you put that as the call to action on the card.

And then like we talked about earlier, you’ve got to show reviews. You’ve got to show something that indicates you’ve got five stars, four stars, whatever that is, so that there’s a trustworthiness that happens. They call it in the marketing world, social proof. But really, really what it means is, hey, other people are saying good things about me. Just don’t trust me and my chest thumping. Right. So there’s some specific things that you have. And of course, you want to make the card look nice. The colors look strong. And there’s contrasting color with the call to action. And no stock images. No stock images. Right. You know, the photo of the, I think that if you are a family owned business, lean in to that.

Show a photo of you. Show a photo of your family. Maybe have like your signature. This is Jacob. Maybe have a shot of you and your dog. I’ll tell you why this comes into play. We have a pressure washing customer and he started with just himself and he had a photo of him in his truck. Oh, Jared sits with us after that. It was a photo of he and his wife in his truck. And in 2027, it’s going to be he and his wife and his little baby. Right.

Jared Tangir (35:42.20)
That’s awesome.

Chris Foster (35:43.02)
It’s awesome. Because they’re

Jared Tangir (35:44.26)
so cool.

Chris Foster (35:45.52)
And they’re a family business. Right. They’re a family business. Show that off. Again, people nowadays in the we love Amazon because we get stuff super fast and it’s easy to return. It’s the easiest thing in the world. So all of our kind of efficiencies can go to these large corporations because they do it so well. But in contrast, we also now want to lean in and work with family owned businesses for services because that’s kind of the antidote. Right. And so lean into that as part of your messaging. That’s what I would recommend.

Jared Tangir (36:22.78)
A hundred percent. And you want to trust the company that you’re bringing because they’re coming into your home. Right. It’s a vulnerable situation. Right. So I think that that’s super powerful. What about voluntary versus involuntary services? This is a conversation we have with our clients all the time. They’re like, oh, I want to, you know, it’s the shoulder season. We’re a little bit slow. Right. We’re between heating and cooling or, you know, water heaters aren’t working this hard right now. So they’re not going down. We always say, OK, well, what’s a voluntary service that we can push right now? What can we run a killer offer on?

Maybe like duct cleaning. Right. Or a killer deal on a on a tankless water heater swap. But let’s let’s just run like a hypothetical situation where you’re a plumber and you want to do more drain cleanings. How do you go about what channels? What’s your offer? Let’s do a little marketing role play strategy.

Chris Foster (37:12.08)
I think probably what I would do is have some type of message that says that you’re always on. You’re always ready for a drain clean. Right. Right. Drain cleaning as a homeowner. I’ll tell you. S. U. C. K. S. It’s the worst. Right. And you don’t know if something’s backing up. You do what everybody does. Great. I’m going to buy some liquid plumber.

Jared Tangir (37:39.30)
It’s the worst.

Chris Foster (37:39.84)
Oh, far. It’s. It didn’t work. OK, I’m going to get my hand. I’m going to dig in. Oh, I can’t find a thing. I’m going to go to Home Depot and buy a snake. Ah, this is not working. It’s still. And then your wife is saying, honey, what’s happening? It’s cooling up around my ankles. This is not. This is not happening. Right. What are you doing about it? So if you have, for example, a card, this is always on drain cleaning. Right. With a big number that’s dedicated just for drain cleaning. That is, you know, so it’s not. And have a price to say, you know, 95 bucks or one ninety nine or whatever that is so that it’s not a heart aid for me to say, oh, my gosh, I don’t want to call a plumber because they’re going to come out and charge me three thousand dollars.

No, no, no, no. Have something really simple and dedicated. Maybe have a phone number or a QR code that goes exactly to that, which then pings you on an alert on your phone to say, hey, someone wants a drain cleaning right now. That way you have a dedicated thing for it. That would be something that’d be pretty cool. Right. Where it’s like to totally selective, a specific promotion. And the reason direct mail works so great in that is that you send the card out and you don’t have an offer expiration date. You just say, keep this card for always on drain cleaning. Right. And this is a never ending offer.

Jared Tangir (38:59.46)
And I bet EDDM might actually work for that because I know a lot of leases have like the renter is responsible for repairs under five hundred dollars. Sure. Right. Right. So an EDDM campaign send that out. Right. Eighty nine dollar drain cleaning. One of our clients does eighty nine dollar drain cleaning with camera inspection. Right.

Chris Foster (39:18.74)
That’s awesome. That is that is a great offer because it’s super affordable. And and it just and you just as long as you say, keep this card, because the offer never expires.

Jared Tangir (39:28.88)
That’s the key. I never thought of that one.

Chris Foster (39:30.60)
Yeah, it’s a great offer. And so if you start thinking about things like that, it could be that if you do, you know, gutters roofing and it is your gutter cleaning and maybe. And maybe you say, gosh, my gutter cleaning is free with a roof inspection. Right. Right. So let me look at your roof. I’m going to inspect and tell you honestly what this thing is like. And I’ll clean your gutters for free. Right. Something where you can it’s worth it for you to get in front of that customer, because, for example, imagine this. You put that offer out where someone says, yeah, I’d like to someone look at my roof.

I might not be ready to repair it right now. Not a problem. But if you go to that house, you meet that person, you put them in your database and then you can market to them every month using automated direct mail. It’s a buck. Send a cart out. Right. Over the course of a year, you spend 12 bucks. Right. It’s nothing for that customer. And if that customer says, yeah, I really now need your new roof repair. You know that roof repair is going to be 5, 10, 15 K.

Jared Tangir (40:30.08)
Yeah, at least. Right. The return on, if you look at the return on active return on investment and the cost of customer acquisition cost, it makes sense every day of the week. It’s always in your favor. There’s, it’s a pretty common strategy, but the new homeowner campaigns, right? Especially like roofers, plumbers, HVAC techs, painters would probably be a great one. What, who works west with those, the new homeowners of the moving campaigns? What industry do you think those work best for?

Chris Foster (40:56.58)
It’s a great question. For me, landscape is perfect for new movers, new homeowners, because as soon as you go someplace else, you have to have a new local landscaper. And that’s a great way to get in touch. What we find with the new mover data is that a, we can send new home buyers every day and new movers on that daily, weekly basis. But what we found is that consumers are spending more in those first days of move in than they will for months and years afterwards. So there’s a precious pocket of time right up until move day. And then about 30 to 45 days after move day, where they’re spending eight to $10,000 on a variety of services.

And also they found that once you choose a brand, you’re more likely to stick with that brand. They did some studies. Dotcom did some studies when they said that in a typical move event, consumers are making about 70 different brand choices. Oh, it’s fatiguing. Right. So if you as a home services company can get in front of them, you remove that decision making, right? It’s right there. It’s easy for them to make that decision because they see that you’re there. So the new home buyer, new mover is a fantastic program. I love it.

Jared Tangir (42:08.06)
Yeah. Love that. I have one more, one more prepared for you. And then if there’s anything else you want to discuss, I’m happy to leave it open-ended. One of the things that we focus on when we see our competitors are getting, when our clients’ competitors are bidding on their brand name, we have to launch a brand protection strategy, right? Sure. And it’s never fun to tell a client, hey, you need to spend $2,000, $3,000, $5,000 a month just to make sure people already searching for you are going to click on you. Right. Right. What happens a lot of times is a customer just didn’t store their phone number and they go to Google and they type the brand because they just want the phone number, right?

Where what we’re working on strategizing with your team is some sort of a mailer with whether it be a sticker or refrigerator magnet, something that would, that the homeowner can keep in their home that provides value, right? Like with like a calendar on it or a sports calendar. What are your thoughts on that?

Chris Foster (42:59.84)
I think those are excellent. I think that some old school refrigerator magnet that has a calendar updated, that has a phone number that keeps your brand in front of folks is a great way to go. So people, despite all the technical things and, you know, online calendars and the like, people still live in their homes. And so if you’ve got a way to do that, I think that’s a great idea. I also like these ideas, like I said, of the keep this card, because if you give them a compelling reason just for it to hang around in the house, it’s worth it because it’s one of these things that constantly just is persisting around and then it feels weird not to have it there.

So then everybody in the house keeps it. So I think that’s a great strategy, Jared. I like that idea. Again, keeping it local, keeping it very community oriented. You know, if you have, for example, in my neighborhood, Terra Santa, we have various things at the Terra Santa Community Park, right? It’s Oktoberfest. It’s back to school. It’s a fall harvest or whatever that is. That’s kind of fun to put on a cart, right? In terms of the calendar. So it’s not these big national holidays, but it’s what’s happening locally. So those are all things that you can do to, again, stay in front and, again, remind them that you’re local and you’re part of the fabric of the community.

Jared Tangir (44:12.52)
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I didn’t come up with it. I stole it from my real estate agent because every year he sends me a calendar with the I’m from Philadelphia, the Eagle schedule. It goes up on the side of the refrigerator. I don’t have any intent of buying or selling a house anytime soon, but his name is up there right above the Philadelphia Eagle schedule for the season. Of course, and you’re thinking about it. That’s awesome. So I think that those type of strategies, they can be deployed across all different kinds of verticals. 100%. Yeah. Awesome. Well, before we wrap up for today, is there anything else you wanted to cover you think would be valuable for the listeners?

Chris Foster (44:44.94)
Yeah, I think the most, thanks for asking, Jared. First of all, and secondly, thanks for having me on. I think what’s really important for home services companies is that they think of marketing not as a spend. Everyone says, well, what should I spend on marketing? What’s my budget? Right. Right. And they think of it as a dollar amount that they apply. And a lot of them think about it as with uncertainty. Right. And I’m really worried because I say, gosh, you know, I spent $10,000 on Facebook for three months and I don’t get any leads. I don’t know what happened to my money, bud.

Or so. Oh, man, I’ve got to write this check for something that’s going to happen in the future. And I’m not exactly sure what’s going to happen because I know that if I spend money on equipment, I actually hold that equipment in my hand when I make that transaction. Right. So this idea of uncertainty is something that I would like our listeners to kind of push down, right, to overcome that barrier because marketing works. How do I know marketing works? Well, PostcardMania now is a hundred plus million dollar company with over 400 employees. And we weren’t always like that. We have 10 employees, five employees, and then we had 11 employees.

Now we had 20 employees in our entire business is helping businesses market. If we were not successful in marketing for the businesses, we wouldn’t have a business. If marketing didn’t work, we wouldn’t exist. Marketing works. It does. Poor marketing or more importantly, inconsistent marketing doesn’t work. But consistent marketing that uses best practices of, you know, clear, you know, unique selling proposition and great message, easy call to action, a compelling offer targeted to the right audience that works. Otherwise, the entire industry wouldn’t be around. So what I can tell you is that if you think of marketing just as an expense, that mindset will limit you in terms of what you need to do to actually grow your business.

If you want to grow, if you don’t want to grow, not a problem in your steady state. But if you do want to grow your business, then investing in marketing and more importantly, thinking of marketing as an investment for the future changes how you think about your business and puts you in what I call a growth mindset. SBA.gov says if you’re about a million dollars, you should be spending at least 8% of your top line million dollars on marketing itself. But that’s actually just to maintain. That’s not to grow. If you want to grow, we recommend 12 to 17% of your annual revenue goes into marketing because you need to spend more to get that result.

Right. If you say, I want to grow, you know, 10% per year, but I’m only going to spend 5% of my revenue on marketing. Bro, it’s not going to happen. You’re not going to grow. You’re not going to grow 10%, right? You’ll probably have to spend 15 to 18% of your top line revenue to grow that 8 to 10%. It’s disproportionate. But it’s not scary because once you find you start growing, man, things become possible. And what we’re on a mission, Jared, is to help these small businesses grow because if they grow through using marketing, education, technology, right, they use the services from Elevated and from PostcardMania.

And through that growth, they get to hire one more person. They get to hire an apprentice. They get to hire a lead, right? They get to hire maybe another field rep or another technician. Well, suddenly you’ve created employment for someone else and you’ve changed that person’s life. And if we can do this across 10, 100,000, a million small businesses nationwide, we can change the face of the American economy and create an uplift and an upward spiral for our communities because we all know that small businesses are the backbone of the American economy and the backbone of these communities. So that’s why for me, there’s almost a moral imperative to grow because that way you can offer employment and change somebody’s life.

So to do that, think about marketing as an investment and having a growth mindset and a belief that you can grow. To me, it’s the best place to start.

Jared Tangir (48:54.86)
Well, I can’t think of a better way to wrap up our episode with what you just shared because it’s motivational, it’s inspirational, and it’s 100% accurate. So thank you so much for that, Chris. If our listeners want to get in touch with you or get in touch with PostcardMania, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Chris Foster (49:12.80)
Great question. Postcardmania.com. Easiest thing in the world. You’ll see forms there and we’ve got our phone number there. Also, too, we are looking for guests on our own Everywhere Small Business podcast. So if you have a small business and you’re growing and you’d love to talk about your story, I’ve had several landscape folks on already, landscape businesses, which has been great. You can email me at podcast at postcardmania.com and I’d love to talk to you about the growth of your business.

Jared Tangir (49:39.16)
Awesome. Well, if you need Chris, get in touch. He just shared with you how. Thank you so much for tuning in. We’ll see you on the next one.

Chris Foster (49:45.86)
Thanks, Jared. Thanks, Jared.