Should You Use a Deadline When Marketing To Window Cleaning Prospects?
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.
What To Do When It’s Raining…
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
Creating a Free Website
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 more…
Which Flyers Work The Best…
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. 
)
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 more…
How To Adopt The Business Mindset
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 more…
5.88Webhosting.com: A New Hosting Service
Hi Everyone:
We finally launched our much anticipated hosting plan where we’re providing high quality and inexpensive webhosting for service business owners and managers who need to host their websites.
Many folks have asked me over the past few years where they should host their websites. Although there are many hosting companies around (some good and some bad), they all seem to have one thing in common…and that is that the world is their market. In other words, they go after any and all customers which means that they have to offer multiple plans and multiple options for the many different types of customers that are out there. And this my friends, is enough to make your head spin. 
What I’ve done at 5.88Webhosting.com is simplify hosting by providing… (click the link below to continue)
The Importance of Yard Signs…
Hey All,
I hope you are having a super day today.
I love talking to window cleaners on the phone for a number of reasons, but one of those reasons is because I get some great ideas to talk about on this blog. Recently I spoke to a window cleaner who is really seeing excellent results from his signs in his window cleaning business, so I thought this would be a great topic to talk about.
He bought 100 signs for $544 which is an excellent deal. $5.44 per sign? Whew. Each sign even comes up with a stand. The signs themselves are the kind that the politicians use. Not too fancy looking, but for $5.44 per sign, it’s a wise investment.
Anyway…what he does is he asks every customer who he does a window washing job for whether he can keep one of his signs in their yard for 5 days. He hasn’t had a customer say “no” yet. He even had one customer tell him they were having a party so they’ll need to take the sign down during the party, but they’ll put it back up the day after the party. And lo and behold…they did! Brian went cruising by the house the day after the party and there was his sign.
After 5 days he’ll go to the customer’s house and pick the sign up. But just imagine the exposure that he is receiving during this 5 day stretch. He said he’s growing his customer base nicely just from his sign efforts. He is doing no other marketing method at all currently. I really don’t recommend just relaying on signs as you’ll certainly see more results from taking a more proactive approach (flyers, postcards, etc). And brian will be the first to agree with that. But the point is that using signs in your business work!
I had a conversation with a window cleaner a couple of weeks ago who basically said that he doesn’t have any yard signs because he has a magnetic sign on his vehicle. He went on to say that since he parks his car in front of customer’s house while he’s working on the window cleaning job, that’s good enough. I respectively disagree.
Have you ever heard of banner blindness? This refers to when a visitor to a website tunes out any banners or advertisements on a webpage. They just flat out ignore the ads and focus on the content. Banner advertisements don’t work as well as they did back in the 90′s because we’ve become so used to them that we don’t even see them anymore. Thus the term “banner blindness”.
This is what happens when someone drives down the street or walks down the sidewalk and sees your magnetic sign on your car. It’s part of the vehicle and they don’t pay a great deal of attention to it. It blends in. On the other hand, with a standalone yard sign sitting in a front yard all by itself, it’s noticeable. Way more noticeable than a vehicle magnetic sign.
Picture yourself driving down the street. You see a car in the street in front of a house which happens to have magnetic signs on it. Which signage do you think you’ll notice first? The magnetic signs as you’re driving by or a standalone yard sign by itself in someone’s yard? The yard sign is an item that doesn’t belong there, so therefore it stands out more. Make sense?
So the long and the short of it is that having some yard signs is one of those important “must have” silent advertising partners.
Contact some local sign shops and see what kind of pricing you can get. Buy a few dozen signs with the goal of using the “leave behind” strategy for some great yard sign exposure. Not every customer will say “yes” to you leaving one of your signs in their yard, but no biggie. It only takes a few signs to experience a higher call volume. Literally hundreds or perhaps thousands of potential customers could be traveling past your signs.
Another thought to keep in mind here is that let’s say the actual sign doesn’t generate the call, but they receive a flyer from you shortly after they see one of your signs. This is what exposure will do for you. Again, they might not call as a result of your sign, but because of the sign, they may be prompted to call you after receiving one of your flyers because they have been exposed to your business more than once which is ultra important. As I’ve written about before on this blog and have mentioned to folks in phone calls, the response rates increase with the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and up exposures.
So yard signs are a great way to get that exposure w/o a lot of effort on your part. Take care and have a great day.
To Your Success,
Steve
Initial Costs For Your Window Cleaning Business…
Hi All,
I hope everyone is having a fine weekend and a big happy Easter to everyone out there in window washing land.
We’ve been busy over here putting the finishing touches on a hosting service we’ll be providing to window cleaners and other service businesses, so stay tuned for that.
And 3 Bears Window Cleaning Directory is going to go through some major restructuring over the next few weeks with a new name, a new look, and enhanced functionality for the search engines. We’ll keep you posted on this as well.
I’ve learned a lot about search engine optimization over the last few years in addition to buying the necessary software to achieve high rankings, so I’m going to pull out all the stops when it comes to getting window cleaners who are listed on the directory ranked high so that they can be found when prospects in their town are looking for window cleaners. So now is the time to create a listing for yourself if you haven’t already at 3 Bears Window Cleaning Directory.
Ok….I recently was sent an email asking about costs to get started in the window cleaning business. This is actually a hard question to answer because it really depends on how a person’s financial situation is, but hopefully you’ll benefit from the answer.
Steve,
I received everything and have read the manual twice since I received it. Nice job. I have looked at a lot of businesses over the years and owned 3 different ones and I must admit you seem to be dead on when it comes to the window cleaning business. My career has been spent in sales and marketing roles so i really enjoyed all the tribal knowledge on the marketing side.
I do have one question as I look at planning my entrance to this business. Assuming I follow your process to the letter and I will, what do you think would be a good solid amount of working capital to start out with? Just for the record I would not be taking out any salary of any kind. Just covering all expenses and supporting the marketing campaigns your recommend. Can you give me a good estimate? I am playing around with some numbers but I figured you might be able to give me some ballpark figure so I might use it as a benchmark.
Best regards,
John
My Response:
Hi John,
I appreciate your comments most definitely.
The capital question is a good one, but it’s a tough one to answer because I don’t know how deep your pocketbook is. ) There are so many ways to get started with some methods (like postcards for example) costing a bit more vs other methods (flyers) that are less expensive. So I always recommend that for folks who are starting on a shoe string budget, you really can’t go wrong with flyer distribution. They’re inexpensive to print and they provide a quick return. It’s almost immediate. What I would do this saturday is hire a couple of neighborhood kids, pay ‘em 20 bucks each, drive ‘em to a good subdivision filled with your target prospects, and let ‘em distribute for you. A great investment.
Even after I had postcard campaigns going on autopilot though, I still continued to distribute flyers every saturday at 9am. No more than 4 hours later, on average 1000 flyers was distributed. So if you do that consistently with 4000 going out each month for the first 6 months (and even beyond), it’ll build you a really nice customer base.
If you didn’t want to do any flyer distributions though and you had a few more bucks on hand, I wholeheartedly believe that postcards is the way to go. I do want to say that you should have (time and money permitting) as many marketing methods in place as you can. But with this said, postcard mailings really pack a punch. If you set it up properly (info. in chapter 7) and are willing to be consistent with it, the rewards from postcards are excellent.
In terms of marketing, for $110 (not counting window cleaning supplies), you could be out the door with 1000 flyers (including printing and 3 people to distribute @ $20 each) Postcards are a tad more expensive, but I’ve seen some good pricing at gotprint.com and psprint.com. The last time I checked, gotprint has 5000 postcards for around 100 bucks and psprint has ‘em for $106 after the 25% discount they have going ’til april30th. Regardless where you buy ‘em, buying 5000 postcards at a clip will save you some good money.
The other costs involved are for things like signs, t-shirts, polo shirt, bus. cards, letterhead, etc. So if you decide to get it all up front, it might run another $250 to $300 max. Personally i would get the bare minimium needed to create a solid impression to prospects and pay for the rest from job profits. Just a thought though.
I hope this helps a little bit. If you have any additional questions, please let me know. Thanks again for your comments for sure. Have a great day.
Regards,
Steve
256-546-2446
