Being Romantic Stifles Growth Opportunities - Ep.047

Hey everyone, this is Mike Andes and you're listening to the Landscape Business course podcast and today we are going to be talking about eddm, that stands for every door Direct Marketing, if you haven't heard of it already, if you're not in the course and you haven't heard about this, this is going to be a game changer, I think for some people. And the reason I'm talking about today is if you've listened to the podcast, you know how much I am a fan of Facebook ads. And another part of what you might know, especially if you listen to Business Bootcamp podcast, is that I'm really not romantic about any marketing platform. I just choose, I just pick the one that's working the best. I find out which one's working the best for me and then I just go all in on it. So we've done that for Facebook ads for the past year and I still believe that it's still super good. I still think it has another year or two of being underpriced. However, just recently.

We are one of the local newspapers that is in our area. We had done a little bit advertising for them and I got some prices for printing from them and it was amazing. I was amazed how cheap it was to print high volume flyers with them. And so usually if you say go to a UPS store or something like somewhere like that to print off like a double sided color piece of paper on like some decently glossed paper, you're looking at 50 cents or so, right? For a page that's double sided, full color, back and front. And so it's not very economical to number one print that and then again envelope and a stamp and all of that, by the end of it you're paying over a dollar just to send a piece of mail to someone for, for an advertisement. And that's really bad, really bad to be sending a dollar out to every potential client. Now just recently.

I found someone that can print these things off for literally 5 cents, front and back, full color and on good paper, glossy paper. And so that's really cool. But then if you're in the course and you've listened to podcasts a lot, you've heard me talking about eddm, which is, stands for every door Direct Marketing, which is essentially you can choose if you go to just Google, EdDM, USPS and they have a website on there where you can choose certain mail routes and usually those are neighborhoods of areas in your county or your city and you can target them based upon age, demographic and also income level and Then it also breaks down the age, like as far as how many people are underneath. I think it's 44 and things like that. So it breaks it down. It actually gives you like some really good metrics to work with. And so it's super valuable just literally if you don't go on there and buy actually like buy mail routes and buy the actual marketing part. Even if you don't use it for that, even if you just go on there and use it for the pure statistics of it to know which areas of your county are higher net worth individuals, older individuals, just kind of getting the landscape of where you're at is super, super valuable information that you get on there for free. Now what's really cool is instead of sending, like I said, it's not very cheap to print them one at a time. It's definitely not cheap to send them to mail them one at a time because you're looking at an envelope, then you got to do postage. Like a stamp alone is like 40 something cents now. And then you got to put their address on it and the whole bit by the end of it, with labor included and everything, you're like $1.50 plus. And so one way to reduce that price is the printing cost. So I figured that out recently. I didn't know it was 5 cents. I used to think I could get it like 8, 9 cents per double sided color piece of paper. Now you can get that for five. That's awesome. And then every door, direct marketing, usually the prices are between 15 and 21 cents per address. And essentially all you do is you print out a bunch of them. You bund make bundles of 100, fold them up, take them to the post office, just hand them a big stack of them. You don't have to put any mailing addresses on there, you don't have to put them in envelopes, you just take them all. And then what they do is they give those to the delivery drivers of each route and say, hey, put this in every single address on your route. And so because it's more efficient because they don't have to sort the mail, they don't have to look at the addresses, they don't have to make sure that Matt goes in the right box. They just literally take one, you know, piece of paper, one flyer or one postcard, whatever you want to put in there. Because they have just size dimension of 12 by 12, anything inside that you can send. And then like I think it's like 3 ounces, anything less than that, so like you can Send quite a bit. And you, you send it just take a stack of these in stacks of 100. And usually these routes in my area are like seven, like between six and 700, maybe 800, 900 mailing addresses. So you send them, you know, give them like eight or nine packs of 100 and then they take them on each carrier for each route, takes these and then puts one in every single address. And so it's way more efficient for the postal service. And thus they hand those price savings down to you. And so you end up only paying, like I said, 15 to 21 cents per address depending on the exact demographic. So like I said, I'm not romantic about Facebook ads or any other medium. And I haven't used mailing like this for over a year probably and like a year and a half probably doing so much Facebook ads, which we've seen huge progress in. Now I'm gonna try this thing out, this eddm, I've done it before years ago, I've probably done this four or five times now. And you can actually if the course members, if you go to your modules and go to the bonus section, the documents and added miscellaneous attachments, you'll see the latest I just put up there today is two of the flyers that we're sending out, one of the flyers we are sending out right now. So first of all I'm sending out 10,000 flyers and I'm targeting, using the USPS EDDM tool, I'm targeting neighborhoods that have an average net income or household income, sorry, that is over $70,000. And so these are areas that are a little higher affluent and can have money. And the reason I'm targeting those individuals is because the what of what I'm trying to sell, it's not just regular lawn care and mowing service that everyone needs is the fact that I am trying to actually market putting greens. And then so that's one reason why I'm targeting that certain kind of net worth income level bracket is because putting greens aren't cheap. They're an investment that takes five years to pay themselves off. And usually the people that have the time to use those putting greens would be someone that is a little more influent retired, older demographics. So I look at that as well on the EDM tool. And so yeah, that's one, one fly that we're sending out. And if you go course members, if you go on there, you can see what I did as far as I put the start date that we're going to be starting to put these Artificial greens and turfs in, and essentially trying to get people to book out early, giving them an incentive to book during the winter, which keeps our guys busier during the winter. And then essentially, I give a cost breakdown of what the cost of installing a regular lawn with grasses and then irrigation, the initial upfront cost, as well as the maintenance cost every year with maintaining the irrigation, fertilizing, coreration, thatching, all of the stuff that goes into that. And I assume that, like, the irrigation doesn't break, that there's not moles or insects or grubs or anything in their lawn, et cetera. And I take all that into account, and I do the breakdown over 10 years of how much they would save if they use artificial turf. And then I have pictures. And so that's one of the flyers. The other flyers, literally, if you go on there, if you go on the course, you can see this one as well. It's just a picture of our team. And then the entire page is just customer testimonials. I took the most recent, like, four or five customer testimonials, the ones that are in depth, that talk a lot about the company, not just, like, we recommend these people. They are great. Like, actual ones that they talk about our job, things that specifically happened, highlighted certain portions of our customer service or our work ethic or kind of figuring things out for them. And so we put an entire page together, and then at the bottom, all it says is, like, you know, call us for a free estimate, and we can do your trees, we can do your lawn, we can do your landscaping. And just. And then literally, that part is, you know, 5% of the page, 95% of it is just customer testimonials. Just. And it gives the name of the individual and where they're from as far as, like, what city in our county. And so, yeah, I'm gonna see how it works. Like I said, we're gonna try it out, we're gonna test it out. I'm not romantic about any sort of marketing method, and I don't think you should be either. I feel like you should constantly testing the waters and constantly be tasting different areas of marketing. Find the one that works, capitalize on it. But even once you do that, like, even though we've capitalized on Facebook ads and they've been hit, I don't get complacent. I still test. Like, I'm. When I say test, I'm spending, like, a couple hundred bucks here, a couple hundred bucks there, just seeing what works. And then when I find something like right now, this EDDM thing, I see this price reduction and I can get the printing down for and I see like this 15, 20% reduction in price. I can jump on that and see if now the ROI is interesting enough to do this. And so I will obviously report back to you guys on how that's doing. Like you said, course members, you can check out those exact flyers and see what they're looking like. And the big thing is you just gotta taste it. You have to see what's working and tweak it, play with it, see what you gotta track your roi. You gotta track what the customer lifetime value is. See what type of clients are coming from different types of marketing. Cause not all clients are created equal. Some are worth way more, yet the volume of them might come in smaller quantities from a certain type of marketing. And so for instance, Facebook ads generates lots of leads, but some of those aren't valid. Some of them don't really work out very good. Sometimes they are out of your target demographic as far as region and where you want to be working. And so it shaves down the value perhaps of that lead. Whereas an EDDM lead. The reason I'm focusing on this, even though I'm going to pay way more, I know I'll pay way more per lead. The customer acquisition cost is going to be much higher. I feel that, and like I said, is just my hypothesis is that because I can target demographics so keenly and I can target where the flyers are going, what day they're gonna go, and really go after a certain segment in the population as far as age and income, that I can get a much more qualified lead that is going to be a higher net worth individual that can afford a higher ticket item like a putting green. And so even though for Facebook ads it's killed it for cleanups and lawn care, I'm wondering now, okay, can I use this EDDM model, Spend much more on my customer acquisition cost, but make up for it because I'll attract those bigger price ticket items. So it's gonna be interesting. I'll obviously report back to you guys as far as how that is all going. But I encourage you test out different ways of marketing. There is no one way that is dead, literally. Today I called and I asked one of our local news stations about radio ads. I've never done radio ads. I feel like there's a possibility that might work. And this is the thing. When I say I'm not romantic about, I'm not, it's not so much that I like, I Do or do not like certain mediums better? I do. I like video a lot more than text, et cetera. Right. However, if text, if that is the cheapest per lead or the cheapest per customer acquisition, like, if that's gonna bring my customer acquisition cost down, I. I'm not romantic. Oh, I like video. I'm gonna spend more on video. When text is the thing that's the cheapest, the best bang for your buck. And so I'm interested in not what's working best, not necessarily what even makes my brand look better or what makes me look better. I'm looking at what is the dollars per lead, what is the customer lifetime value from those leads that are generated? And then making my marketing decisions based upon the numbers, too many people get wrapped up in, you know, they like a certain newspaper, so they put a bunch of ads in there, or they've done their little classified ad for 20 years straight, so they keep doing that. Or they've done craigslist ads, and they keep doing that. Or they have always done door hangers, and they still do that, but they fail to go test out all the other marketing methods and find out that in their niche, their town, their county, one of those is drastically underpriced, whereas others might be drastically overpriced because there's too much competition driving that price of that marketing dollar. Those marketing dollars up, and you got to. What I would do is test out the market, figure out what's gonna work for you. Obviously, this takes some budget. This takes a little. This isn't for a company that is only making 15, 20 grand a year. You know, if you're making a couple hundred thousand at least though, a year, you have $5,000 that you can go play with. And I don't mean just like, go kick around. You're gonna be, like, making solid business decisions on each one of these different ways. That. And I just genuinely believe that 1 out of the 10 different marketing methods, you will hit a guerrilla marketing tactic like putting out flyers or putting out door hangers or putting out yard signs or making or doing some sort of publicity stunt in your local neighborhood or doing something like maybe you put that money towards a vehicle wrap or something like that, and seeing what marketing method drives the dollars and then double down on it, yet knowing that there's possibly something else better out there. So you want to keep trying things out. Facebook ads has been killing it for us, and we really, really focused on that last spring. Haven't done a whole lot over the summer because we've Been so busy, I don't really need the influx of leads when you're so far behind. It's like, why generate more leads when they are gonna say no? Because they gotta wait so long. So now we're starting to kick up in the kind of marketing, getting ready for winter and things like that. And so we're pumping the dollars in. And so it's gonna be a lot of new stuff coming up, a lot of new market.

On the course. For everyone that's on the course. We will probably make an entirely new marketing module. We'll keep the one that's there. We'll make an entirely new one this winter. And so I'm gonna be making, showing exactly how to make these flyers, how to do the eddm. We'll go over that exact route, what ones you should be focusing on, how to create your flyers for the edm, how to make the postcards for the eddm. And then also we'll be looking at Facebook ads much, much more in depth. There is a video on there showing you guys exactly how to do that to do. But I'm gonna go really, really deep on what, who to target, how to get really, really clean leads from Facebook ads. And so like I said over this winter, when I get some more time, I'm gonna make it an entirely new module of for the marketing on the course as well as, like I've said before, the employee and training module and all of that that we use still for our company, but I'm gonna upgrade that, make it look a lot better, make it more in depth, etc. So really, really looking forward to this winter. I' I'm looking forward to the spring because I know our company is going to grow a lot. We have our second location that is starting to grow and that is gaining kind of like the publicity of just being there. The big sign next to the big road and all of that next spring is me big in that market. It's a new market we've never gone into. And then just we're going to be going into artificial turf and things like that. So it's going to be a big, big spring. But I'm even a little bit more excited about this winter because I'm going to have some more time. I'm going to be doing that new marketing module, doing the new employee training module for you all and then also just adding a whole lot more content on the course. And so if you haven't already, landscapebusinesscourse.com you can become a course member. You get the free Lawn Pro software? Well, it's not free. It's just it's part of the $247, which is the cost of the Lawn Pro software. So check it out. Landscape businesscourse.com and I look forward to it. So thank you all for listening. I really appreciate so many of the course members have been joining up. I think today, let me look here. There's been three. Three, four. No, three. Just three today. Three course members joined the day and just been an ongoing process continually. And it's just a lot of fun to have so many people joining up in the community asking questions. And as always, if you do have a question for me, landscapebusinesscoursemail.com or mikendscapebusinesscourse.com thank you so much. And I'll talk to you next time. Until then, be great. Nothing else pays.