A recent email from a fellow window cleaner:

Hi Steve,

I collected the program from my post office box today!

A couple of things I noticed in the marketing section:
Here (in Australia) you are not allowed to approach houses and put advertising material in door jams, on door handles or under mats, etc. But you are allowed to put material (non postage) directly in mailboxes!

A quick question: As I will be a new business starting out, with the flyers is it a good idea to put an offer and deadline on them to get more of a direct response? E.g. 10% off your 1st service, offer ends dd/mm/yyyy.

The reason I ask this is that I previously ran my own personal fitness studio and after some trial & error we got a better response when we put an offer and deadline on our advertising.

Cheers,
Jim

My Response:

Hi Jim,

Good morning and I’m glad everything arrived safe and sound. I look forward to working with you as we build you a successful window cleaning business.

That’s great that you have the ability to put non postage items in mailboxes. Excellent. That’s actually better than what we’re able to do here in the States. We have to walk to their door which adds additional time to our marketing process.

I personally would not offer a deadline when you’re first getting started with your first batch of flyers, postcards, etc. The reason is because you want to go back into the exact same neighborhood multple times. This is where you will see the most success. One time flyer distributions/mailings simply won’t generate the highest rate of return. People need to see your message multiple times. So if you put a deadline on your first flyer/postcard, what will you put on your second? See what I mean? You’ve kind of hurt your marketing efforts into that area again because I’m not sure what you can do to top the previously offered discount/deadline unless it’s a bigger discount or an extended deadline. So for now, I’d recommend that you don’t use a discount/deadline.

With that said though, I would encourage you to test this concept out in the future. It’s definitely worth a test for sure. Each area is different. So if you have a twist that you’d like to add to your marketing message, you should always test it out and see if it works for you. But I wouldn’t recommend it right out of the starting gate. I would recommend that you simply use the materials that I’ve provided you “as is” (change the company name/phone number of course) and run with ‘em. They’ve all been proven to work over and over again.

I agree that you will most definitely get a better response generally speaking when there is a deadline to an offer. People are procrastinators by nature, so they need to be motivated to act. Deadlines will typically make someone take action. I use deadlines all the time on my websites. The problem though is that if you have picked out a few ideal areas to market your window cleaning service and you focus your efforts in those areas, I’m not sure how you can continually mention a deadline. After awhile, people won’t take it serious because they’ll know the next flyer/postcard you give them in 3 or 4 weeks will have another deadline on it. :) Just some thoughts to think about.

Take care for now and please keep in touch. I look forward to working with you once again. Have a great day.

Regards,

Steve

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Hi Steve,

I have a question. I consulted How To Start Your Own Residential Window Washing Business, but didn’t find anything on this particular subject. Up here in NE Ohio, we get a fair amount of rain (Trivia: last year we got more rain than Seattle and Ohio is noted as being the second cloudiest state in the country). On Monday and Thursday, I have jobs scheduled and currently, the weather forecast is calling for possible showers. What do you recommend that I tell the customer?

Hope all is well with you.

BTW – if you ever need a testimonial for your website, you can count me in.

John Blystone

My Response:

Hi John,

Good morning. Ah…the good ‘ole rain question. :o ) This can be a tough one to address and I don’t think there’s any right answer, but I’ll explain what I did when it rained in my area. Keep in mind that florida had lots of rain in the summer, so it was a situation that I had to contend with also.

Anyway…what I did was go to the job as planned regardless what the forecast may say unless I woke up in the morning and it was pouring out. The reason is because you can still clean windows if it’s raining. The homeowner will still have clean windows after the rain stops. The only difference is that if it’s raining, it makes it harder for you to double check your work after cleaning each window. So all you’re really able to do is wet, scrape, rewet, squeegee, towel, and move to the next.

As a side note, if I was at the job site and it really started coming down in buckets, I would move my operation inside the home. Hopefully it would stop raining by the time I was ready to do the outside again. It didn’t always work out like that though, so on occasion it would be necessary to pack up with plans to come back and finish the job the next day. What determined this was how hard it was raining. I really didn’t want to come back and finish up, so it would have to be raining really hard for me to abandon the job and come back the next day. Sometimes there wasn’t any choice though.

I’m not sure if any of the above helps, but that’s how I approached rain. So again, regardless what the forecast may call for in terms of rain, I still showed up at the job unless it was really, really raining hard in the morning before I started my day. Rain showers are no big deal. It’s the torrential downpours that’ll put a crimp in your schedule.

Sometimes of course the homeowner may not want their windows cleaned if rain is in the forecast. I would try and talk ‘em out of rescheduling if they called me in this situation by explaining to them that their windows will still be clean. I mean rain or no rain, they’ll still end up with clean windows. Sometimes this worked, sometimes it didn’t. I will say though that my work week was monday through thursday with friday set aside for estimates, so if my schedule needed to be juggled due to inclement weather, I could finish up a job on friday if I needed to.

Thanks for your offer on a testimonial. I appreciate it. A few sentences would be super. Thanks again. Take care and have a great day.

Regards,

Steve

Hi All,

Good morning. I’m back with you today to talk about the process of getting a website online for your window cleaning business.

We started this series of articles by first discussing domain names: how/where to buy it, how to save money (use a coupon code) when buying it, etc. That blog post is here if you haven’t read that yet.

Next we talked about editing the DNS information at your registrar (the place where you purchased your domain name from).

Today we’ll talk about the actual website itself as far as creating one. There are a number of ways to create websites all the way from free methods to paying for expensive web designers.
Read the rest of this entry

Hi All,

I hope everyone is having a super day today. Below is an email I recently received. Thought you might benefit from the question/answer. Take care for now.

Regards,

Steve

Hi Steve

Well, I waited a whole yr, but I am ready now!  I didn’t have the proper vehicle, still don’t actually, I have a very small sports car, so that still poses a big problem. I already market for another business, going door to door, I should have already been advertising for windows all along. I hit about 1500 single family houses a week , so I figure that is a good place to start.

I was wondering if there was a way to get copies of the flyers so I can take them in for mass production? Never mind…I was able to  find the flyers u sent me. My question is this…I notice on your master copy there is no mention of price, I am assuming you believe this is the best way to go?  I have read a few others saying this was not the way to go.  I hope you don’t take my question as critical .

I’m just starting out and want to get the best possible response from my 1000 flyers, which flyer do you think would be best to start with?

Thanks,

Mike

My Response:

Hi Mike,

Good morning.  And it’s good to hear that you’re ready to roll.

And that’s a great way to start as far as hitting 1500 homes a week.  Make sure though that these homes are in your target market.  I’m not sure what other business you’re doing, but if the markets aren’t the same, then you could run into some issues with not getting the proper amt of response from your window cleaning marketing to those 1500 homes.

As far as flyers, have you downloaded the flyers yet from the “materials” webpage?  You can visit http://www.yourwindowcleaningbiz.com/materials.htm and download some flyers for editing.  You were previously emailed the username/password. If you get the flyers printed up in bulk like maybe 1000 at a time, it shouldn’t cost you more than 4 to 5 cents each.

Oh…I see your second email where you found the flyers already.  Cool.  :o )

Right, my philosophy in my business is that I didn’t want to make it about price. You need to be careful that you don’t turn your business into Read the rest of this entry

Hi Everyone,

This morning I just released the manual How To Adopt The Business Mindset. If you’re a past purchaser of my window cleaning program, you’ll be able to download it for FREE at the materials webpage here.

This 41 page manual discusses the “Business Mindset”. Actually there are 20 business mindsets that I talk about. Each and every one of them are important to adopt and to live by if you want to experience the ultimate success in your window cleaning business.

Chapters include:
Read the rest of this entry

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