Direct Mail Marketing Guide for Contractors to Maximize ROI in 2025

Direct mail marketing is one of many channels that home services businesses use as part of a multichannel marketing strategy. When implemented effectively, it can be used to create brand awareness, acquire new customers, and increase retention. 

However, executing effective direct mail campaigns via online printing and marketing services (which many contracting businesses use) can typically be challenging and time-consuming, for three reasons:

1. Mailing lists are limited to “batching-and-blasting” a wide range of recipients with little opportunity to carefully segment target audiences that might actually respond.

2. There’s no easy way of tracking the ROI from your campaigns, so you can see what’s working and what’s not.

3. Trade-specific templates are scarce, as are specific business use-cases such as following up on unsold estimates or sending appointment reminders.

We designed ServiceTitan software for home service businesses so that contractors can execute their direct mail marketing campaigns quickly and directly from within the same platform they use to run the rest of their business.

This enables customizable direct mail templates tailored for contractor marketing. It also allows easy automation for hyper-targeted audiences, tracks campaigns in real-time, and requires no minimum print runs, so you can send just one postcard if needed.

In this article, we’ll discuss:

• What is direct mail marketing?

• 3 benefits of direct mail marketing

• 5 steps for creating effective direct mail campaigns

• Drawbacks of direct mail marketing without automation

• How ServiceTitan maximizes your ROI with hyper-targeted direct mail

What is direct mail marketing?

Direct mail marketing involves mailing marketing materials such as postcards, letters, catalogs, or brochures to someone's home. At 4.25%, postcards have one of the highest response rates from homeowners among commonly used formats (e.g. letter-sized envelopes).

There’s a misconception that direct mail marketing is outdated and not as effective as email marketing or social media. However, stats show they are more receptive to direct mail marketing than ever because people can feel overwhelmed by the volume of digital marketing ads.

Of course, direct mail shouldn’t be the only type of marketing you deploy. Most contractors use a multichannel approach that includes email marketing, strategic SEO, social media, and online ads such as Google Ads, but your contracting business should make it a part of an overall marketing strategy. Here’s why:

3 BENEFITS OF DIRECT MAIL MARKETING

Benefit #1: Direct Mail Offers Great ROI

Getting a good return on investment (ROI) is a major marketing success metric and influences important decisions regarding where to allocate marketing dollars. 

You can get serious value for your money with direct mail marketing. In fact, direct mail ROI is actually higher than ROI generated from paid search or display ads, and social media is only one percentage point higher. 

According to the 2023 State of Direct Mail, 74% of marketers agree that direct mail delivers the best ROI of any channel used — up from 67% in 2021. 81% of marketers who use a software platform for direct mail agree it delivers the best response rate of all the channels their company uses. This decreases to 70% for respondents who do not use a software platform. (Later on in this article, we’ll explain how using our software platform, ServiceTitan, can help you create, automate, and track your direct mailings.)

Benefit #2: Direct Mail is an Effective Brand Marketing Tool 

If your goal is to stay top of mind with your customers, direct mail gives you an excellent opportunity to do that. Direct mail open rates can be as high as 90%, a remarkable number when compared to open rates for email and SMS text. In addition, 42% of direct mail recipients scan their mail upon receiving it. That means there is a good chance your audience will view your message and remember your business when they need to make a call about a repair, service, or equipment installation.

Benefit #3: Direct Mail is Still Popular with Customers

Have you been excited to open your email lately? If not, you’re not alone. The USPS reports that the average household receives two direct mail pieces per day compared to 157 emails. Marketing emails flood our inboxes daily, making it hard to manage all the competing messages.

On average, people will keep a piece of mail for 17 days, giving ample time to view your message. In fact, 73% of consumers prefer direct mail because they can read it at their convenience.

5 Steps for Creating Effective Direct Mail Marketing Campaigns

Now that we’ve summarized the advantages of direct mail marketing, let’s dive into creating and sending campaigns that your customers will actually value receiving. 

Step 1: Craft Your Message

• Know your objective. Ask the question, “What is my goal?” Whether you want to inform customers about a service special or encourage them to replace older equipment, you need to have a clear objective.

• Tell your customers what to do. Don’t assume customers will know what they need to do. If you want them to call for HVAC maintenance or have their older home’s electrical wiring inspected, your call-to-action should make that clear.

• Keep it short. Don’t bury your message in excessive wording. Keep your copy short and fluff-free, especially if you’re doing postcard marketing where space is limited.

• Sell the benefits. For example, instead of focusing on a new water heater’s bells and whistles, focus on how it keeps customers from running out of hot water and lowers their energy bills, which is more appealing.

Step 2: Use Eye-Catching Design Details

• Source high-quality images. If possible, use your own photos instead of stock photos, as they look more authentic and less staged. Make sure your images are high-resolution so they don’t appear blurry in your mailings. 

• Choose easy-to-read fonts. Avoid using font colors in your copy that blend in with background colors or text sizes that are too small for customers (particularly older ones) to read. 

• Use a reputable printing service. Bleeding colors and streak marks look unprofessional, so look for a printing service that produces high-quality materials and is willing to provide samples of their work.

Step 3: Build Your Target Audience

• Start small. Sending blanket campaigns without testing smaller audiences first can lead to wasted marketing dollars. Send small campaigns first, so you can measure and analyze the results. Then, you can identify the demographics you want to target with your bigger campaigns later. 

• Segment your lists. Look for ways to fine-tune your audience. Try grouping customers who have open unsold estimates or customers with expiring memberships.

• Keep it relevant. Ensure your mailings are relevant to your customers’ needs or to certain traits, like the age of their home, geographic location, or current maintenance schedule. 

Pro tip: Boost your direct mail response rates by maintaining good contact list hygiene. Review your list annually to merge duplicates and assess unengaged contacts. Marketing to customers who never respond wastes both time and money.

Step 4: Schedule Your Campaigns Wisely

• Be timely. A mailing sent at the right time has the greatest probability of success. For example, try an automated campaign that is directed towards customers who’ve received an estimate and haven’t responded after a certain period of time.

• Leverage holidays. Seasonal holidays like Memorial Day and Labor Day work well for maintenance-reminder campaigns. You can also create campaigns around more fun, unorthodox holidays that are likely to get attention.

• Be consistent. Stick to a consistent mailing schedule. Consistency establishes your brand in your customers’ minds and makes them more likely to remember and trust you. 

Step 5: Track Your Results

• Use coupon codes. If your campaigns advertise discounts, include unique coupon codes so customers can provide your CSR upon booking. This can help you gauge response rates.

• Assign tracking phone numbers. When choosing a tracking number, go with a local area code. Consumers generally trust local businesses more than national chains, so having a local area code reinforces that trust from your customers. 

• Create a landing page. Include a link to a unique landing page on your website in your direct mailings. This works well for campaigns that offer discount emails or ask customers to sign up for newsletters. 

You should keep track of the following key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you measure direct mail campaign performance. 

• Response Rate = Responses ÷ Sent mailings

• Conversion Rate = Bookings/signups ÷ Responses

• Cost per Acquisition = Campaign cost ÷ Bookings/signups

• Return on Investment = (Revenue - Campaign cost) ÷ Campaign cost

Pro tip: Instead of manually tracking KPIs, use software with an integrated analytics dashboard (like ServiceTitan) to view all of your metrics in one place and track how direct mail campaigns are performing.

Drawbacks of Direct Mail Marketing Without Automation

If you’ve ever built a direct mail campaign from scratch, you know it is time-consuming and expensive. Building an audience is a laborious process that typically takes weeks to do. 

Third-party vendors can also drive up direct mail marketing costs, particularly for printing. Usually there is a minimum print run, which may be more than you need.

As we mentioned earlier, there are other challenges of not using automated software:

• Mailing lists tend to be “batch-and-blast” to a wide audience, most of which will not respond.

• Tracking your ROI is time-consuming so it’s difficult to know what’s working and what’s not.

• A lack of templates for your specific trade and use-case results in additional time and money spent on designing exactly what you need.

The Benefits of Automation

Automation takes the hassle out of direct mail marketing by streamlining the whole process while keeping you in control. Here are a few reasons contractors should adopt an automated direct mail marketing strategy:

• It’s customizable. Many direct mail service providers have easy-to-use dashboards where you can edit and personalize your mailings. 

• It’s highly targeted. No more culling spreadsheets to build your audience. Software integration lets you quickly create targeted mailing lists using your customer management software.

• It’s scalable. Direct mail campaigns can grow with your business, so you pay for and send only what you need to send.

• It’s trackable. With automation, tools such as tracking numbers and coupon codes let you measure success easily. 

How ServiceTitan Maximizes Your ROI with Automated, Hyper-Targeted Direct Mail

With ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro, you can automate postcard campaigns to hyper-targeted audiences and track results that drive revenue growth, save time, and don’t involve any outside vendors.

Here’s how it works.

Customize Postcards from Trade-Specific Templates

Creating a direct mail postcard campaign with ServiceTitan takes minutes. Simply choose from a variety of pre-built campaigns including Unsold Estimates, Membership Reminders, and Equipment Service Check-in. Many contractors also like our Inactive Customers and Recurring Service templates, which help generate new business from your existing customer base.

Each campaign is highly customizable. You can design your own from scratch, but we find most contractors choose from our suite of trade-specific templates. These have been created specifically for the trades (e.g. HVAC, plumbers, electricians, and general contractors) by our team of professional designers and copywriters. It’s easy to add your branding elements and content to make it your own. 

Examples of ServiceTitan Postcard Templates

Seasonal Check-Ins

Campaigns Aimed at Idle Accounts, Unsold Estimates, or Brand Awareness 

Recurring Service Reminders

Membership Messaging

Special Occasions

Select Hyper-Targeted Audiences

With ServiceTitan’s MarketingPro, you can hyper-target specific audiences in two areas:

1. Existing Customers

2. New Customers

1. Attract New Business from Existing Customers

While generic direct mail services allow you to segment audiences, the customization is limited. For example, you may be able to sort by ZIP code. However, these services don’t have the breadth of customer data held within an operational software like ServiceTitan. This data allows you to see customers with open estimates, those due for a service, and whether they came in via a specific email or Google Ads campaign. 

Segmenting customers in these categories is powerful. 

For example, if the software of an HVAC company knows which customers came in via an ad for furnace maintenance in the fall versus A/C maintenance in the spring, you can send personalized postcard campaigns advertising each service specifically to the interested customers. Or, if you know which customers have open estimates or are due for a service, you can include them in your target audience for a reminder campaign. These highly relevant, personalized mailings are far more likely to receive a response than a general “batch-and-blast” mailer. 

With ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro you can “set and forget” audience lists and narrow down your customers lists into segments, such as:

• ZIP code

• Age of homeowner

• Has an open estimate

• Age of equipment

• Membership status

• Date of last service

• New homeowner

• And more

In addition, with ServiceTitan you can choose from two audience filter options:

• Static filters: Select a certain date or date range (for example, customers who called before 5th March).

• Dynamic filters: These can be set to continuously adapt to events (for example, adding people to your target audience every time a customer has an estimate that’s over two weeks old).

Marketing Pro will score your target email marketing efforts as “strong,” “medium” or “broad.” This data allows you to further fine tune your audience to achieve a better response rate.

Segmenting and customizing audiences is seamless when all the necessary data is stored within the same software; there’s no need to waste time jumping in and out of different tools or spreadsheets.

2. Maximize Leads from New Prospects

In addition to hyper-targeting existing customers, ServiceTitan’s Acquisition Audience Tool means you can also attract new customers using a much more powerful strategy than the traditional “batch-and-blast” method of generic mailing houses. 

ServiceTitan drills down further into available real estate and prospects data than other providers. Contractors can select their audience from the service area they want to target, choosing up to five ZIP codes in a certain area. Using HVAC as an example, our tool allows you to filter by specific property features such as:

• Total assessed value

• Property use

• Age of structure

• HVAC cooling system

• HVAC heating system

• Total interior area

• Water source

• Property last sold

This depth of information improves your chances of finding the correct property profile for your direct mail campaigns, reduces wasted budget, increases your ROI, and saves you time.

Ara Sarkisyan, ServiceTitan’s Senior Project Manager on the Marketing Pro team, explains, “These filters, when used in combination with one another, should be able to take direct mail away from a wide-net approach to a more targeted and focused one. There's no reason to send out 5,000 postcards to get 50 jobs, if you can just send 500 to the right people for that same return.”

As with other direct mail campaigns, you can automate and track your mailings to new prospects and view all your analytics data in one place (more on this later).

Track, Print & Send

Once you’ve selected your target audience, ServiceTitan lets you assign a unique campaign code to every direct mail campaign you send so you can track and attribute revenue to the campaign after the completion. ServiceTitan allows users to choose a number at random from an existing pool or select one themselves (although manual numbers don’t track campaign revenue). Then, when a call comes into the office through that number, contractors know that the caller is responding to the associated campaign. 

When you’re happy with your postcard design, you’ve assigned a campaign code, and your target audience is selected, all that’s left to do is review, save, and submit the mailing for distribution. You can schedule the date for your mailing and the shipping method (e.g. 1st class mail via USPS). 

ServiceTitan also lets you select delivery filters such as, “Send mail until” so you can set a condition to stop sending mail to a specific customer once that customer has met the selected criteria. For example, if you want delivery to stop once a customer has called.

ServiceTitan postcards have no minimum print runs so you can send as many or as few postcards as you need. This means you never waste money on excess print costs since all direct mail campaigns have a per-postcard fee. 

Integrate Direct Mail with Digital Campaigns

Direct mail has many merits on its own, but, as we’ve mentioned, you should make it part of an integrated overall marketing strategy to unlock the full potential. 

Here are a few ideas of how to combine marketing channels: 

• Send postcards to customers who have not responded to maintenance reminder emails as a way to re-engage them. 

• Follow up on a direct mail campaign with an email if customers haven’t taken action. 

• Send customers whose email addresses you don’t yet have a postcard offering a small service discount for signing up for your emails. 

When you use an integrated approach, direct mail becomes an even more powerful tool to help you reach your customers and meet your marketing goals. 

ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro can help manage advertising and marketing campaigns with:

• Email Marketing: As with direct mail, you can build hyper-targeted audiences, automate email campaigns, and track true ROI. 

• Reputation management: Generate more quality reviews via automated review requests.

• Integration with Google Local Services Ads: Connect your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts to ServiceTitan and match campaign performance to actual jobs and revenue.

Monitor ROI in Real-Time

The key way of measuring whether your direct mail campaign was successful in getting homeowners to take action is whether it actually drives calls, booked jobs, and sales. 

With ServiceTitan’s reporting tool you can create a marketing scorecard of all current campaigns, then tie all new business from existing customers (or new leads from new customers) to the specific direct mail campaign that they responded to. 

And, if your company uses call-tracking software, such as our add-on product, ServiceTitan Phones Pro, you can easily track the number of calls, booked appointments, sales, revenue, cost per lead, and ROI for each marketing source, including your direct mail campaigns.

Knowing exactly what’s working and what’s not is critical for working out the ROI on your direct mail marketing campaigns. 

ServiceTitan Automates Your Direct Mail Marketing Campaigns

Direct mail is a powerful marketing tool that, when executed well, can reap rewards for contractor businesses by increasing business from existing customers and also attracting new customers. However, using online printers and marketing services that blanket mail customers and prospects, don’t offer templates built specifically for the trades, and don’t allow you to easily track results can be costly and time-consuming. 

Using marketing software like ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro means you can automate direct mail marketing campaigns to hyper-targeted audiences for both existing and new customers, track results accurately, and maximize ROI.