7 Tips For Direct Response Marketing For Paint Contractors

Direct response marketing is designed to get some kind of immediate reaction from the people who see it, ideally in the form of the customer taking action on the offer.

Unlike most kinds of marketing, you’ll know pretty quickly if your campaign is working if you see your sales increasing shortly after your campaign launches.

This is because you’ll be making use of a “call to action,” and this encourages the people seeing it to request your services, or even to get a quote from you.

Here are 7 tips for direct response marketing for painting contractors:

1. Use Multi-Stage Direct Marketing To Warm Up Your Audience

For some people, it takes seeing a message a few times before it really connects with them.

For this kind of customer, you might want to consider what is called “multi-stage direct marketing” to get through to them.

What this means is that the first sort of ad that you show them doesn’t directly ask them to purchase services, but introduces you and what you do.

Once you see that they click through on that type of ad, you can then take it to the next level by asking them to subscribe to your newsletter.

They are now subscribed to your newsletter and since you can send a particular kind of email to them, you can talk up your services and offer them directly in your newsletter or an email campaign.

In the world of online shopping, a good example of this is when someone is adding things to their cart but then exit the website without purchasing.

They were almost customers, but something made them stop short of checking out — they abandoned their cart, in other words.

2. Get More Customers By Asking Existing Ones To Refer A Friend

Your possible customers don’t yet know you and have no reason to trust you — but they do trust their friends.

When your possible customers happen to be friends with your existing customers, this can have a great outcome.

This could be the case if you put some referral programs, or refer a friend programs into place.

One way to get your customers to brag about you is to offer a referral program, for example, “if you refer a customer to us we’ll give you a $50 gift card to a restaurant of your choosing!”

You could also offer to paint a room half off for each referral.

Take the Harry’s Razors company for an example — ten years ago, they didn’t exist and now they do a billion dollars in sales.

They started out by offering a pretty impressive referral program that was beyond simple — 5 referrals for free shaving cream, 10 for a free razor, 25 for a higher quality razor, and 50 to get shaving for a year.

Meanwhile, the people who were referred got 10% off their order — and this lead to 100,000 leads in a week!

Find your own way to get your customers to refer friends — who are your possible customers going to trust more than their friends?

[Related: Why Building an Email List is a MUST for Your Business ]

3. Focus On Your Customer

When companies make up their marketing plan, they tend to have a lot of things in mind — what they’re going to say, design, and more.

What the first thing you should do when you’re working on your direct response marketing campaign is to try to focus on your customers — or the customers you hope to have.

Think about what they want as customers — for you in most cases this involves getting superior paint work done — and show how you do that.

One way you could do this is to take some testimonials from past customers and put it in your marketing in a way that is aimed at future customers.

You could write “Jane needed to have her kitchen cabinets repainted — she thought she would need to get them replaced but we got them looking like new for a lot less than what she was going to pay for new cabinets.”

Another way that you can make sure that you’re focusing on your customer is to consider making your advertisements entertaining.

Even as a painting contractor, you can make ads that both tell your customers what you do but also make them laugh.

Here’s a funny ad I found for a paint company from Thailand — the ending certainly gave me a laugh and it made the paint being sold look good, too!

4. Make A Clear Call To Action

When practicing direct response marketing, make sure that your ads are pretty clear in terms of your call to action.

In other words, it should be obvious to a person looking at the ad what they need to do next.

Are they going to your website — and if you are sending them to a web site, does the website have a very specific purpose that will help you sell your services?

5. Work On Upselling

Among the things that you should be doing in your direct response marketing, think about upselling your services.

An example might be that if you are advertising your kitchen cabinet, they consider also getting their bathroom cabinets repainted for a discount.

Spotify does a great job of upselling, and they even have a product that is free (but comes with advertisements) — they tell customers that they are missing out on certain features that paid customers get.

6. Make It Easy To Respond

In your direct response marketing, you should make it easy enough to respond to you and not to hide the response area as some do.

If your marketing comes in the form of email, for example, make sure that your “from” email isn’t a ‘no-response’ email address but rather a simple email address.

You can put a link in your advertisements to your contact page and even write things like “or just give us a call” and put in your phone number.

7. Make Your Marketing Campaign Time Limited

Lastly, a really good way to get your marketing to motivate people to respond is to make it limited in time.

Think about the way that McDonald’s sells McRibs for a short period of time, and then doesn’t sell them for a few years.

Every time they bring it back, it’s such a big deal that it’s all over the news and people are blogging and tweeting about it and making memes.

Of course we can all only hope to be as popular as the McRib, you can still get a better response to your paint service ads by making your campaign limited in time.

This could be the sort of thing where you write that people can get a free upgrade to a better quality paint if they get services that week or in the next couple of weeks.

By putting a limit on your marketing, you will give a good reason for people to consider responding sooner.

Quick Recap:

1. To ease potential customers into being actual customers, use multi-stage direct marketing to warm up your audience.

2. Your greatest source of future customers may be the ones you previously served – get more customers by asking existing ones to refer a friend.

3. When you are working on your marketing, focus on your customer.

4. To avoid confusing your target audience, make a clear call to action.

5. You can service your customers better and increase your revenue when you work on upselling

6. To ensure you get as high of a response rate as possible, make it easy to respond.

7. Give your possible customers a sense of urgency and make your marketing campaign time limited.