If you’ve ever been handed a menu at a restaurant or received a business card from a real estate agent, you know the importance of printed materials in the business world. For home services businesses, print marketing (e.g., direct mailers) can help both attract new customers and enhance the experience of current ones. 

Physical materials allow you to convey to customers exactly what you want, something that isn't always easily done through a verbal conversion. These materials are also convenient for customers, who can consume the printed information quickly and at any time. 

In this article, we’ll cover three of the most impactful types of printed materials for your business, and how to get them right:

• Business cards
• Customer handouts
• Direct mail

Business cards

The humble business card has been around forever — its earliest iteration dates back to 15th-century China, where aristocrats carried them around to prove just how aristocratic they were in case a hater questioned them.

Flash forward to today, and every business has got a stack or two laying around. And for good reason: The business card is the perfect medium to give someone all your contact information at once. It’s also a way to get your business name and logo in front of a customer’s eye and subsequently in their house — never a bad thing. 

The business card is a simple document and it's hard to mess up. The only mistake you can make is to make it too visually busy and/or include too much information. Here’s what to include:

Side 1: Business name and logo. That’s it.

Side 2: First, your name (somewhat prominently) and title. Then, your contact information: phone number, email address, website, and physical business address if you’ve got one.

As far as creating the card, many printing companies such as Staples and VistaPrint also give you templates to use directly. Or you can use a DIY design tool like Adobe Express and then get it printed.

If you want something extra personalized and sleek though, shell out the couple hundred bucks and work with a professional graphic designer — it’ll be worth it in the long run.

Need some inspo? Our friends at Jobber have eight great examples. (These happen to be HVAC-specific but work for other industries too.)

Customer handouts

One-page flyers can be a great way to advertise your business’s capabilities. Most companies use these to provide a list of the services they offer, but they can be used in other ways too.

Let’s take a look at three over themes for your flyer.

The services flyer

Goal: To tell customers what your business can do for them

Must include: A list of your services and a reason customers should choose you over your competition

This type of flyer is pretty self-explanatory: you want to go over the services you offer and provide a description for each. Mentioning pricing is helpful for customers too, even if it’s just a range or "starting at" price.

Also, make sure to mention what differentiates your business from your competitors — you don’t want your flyer to look the same as theirs. 

The education flyer

Goal: To educate a customer on a problem they might be having that you can help solve

Must include: Your expert advice on an issue the customer might be facing, and a call to action to contact you to help them

Ultimately, this type of flyer serves the same purpose as the services one: you want customers to contact you after reading it. But the approach is a bit different. Here you want to use your expertise to teach them about something that is helpful to them but also might trigger them to contact you in the near future.

For instance, if you’re an HVAC business, you could create a flyer for winter about different furnace noises, what they mean, and if the customer needs to seek professional help.

Creating marketing collateral that educates customers on something is a form of content marketing — a topic we cover extensively here.

The referral flyer

Goal: To ask current customers to refer your business to family and friends. 

Must include: How the referral program works, what the reward is

In this blog post, we discuss the importance of a referral program, which is an effective way to get new customers that’s also highly cost-effective. To promote this referral program, after each job, you (or your techs) should always encourage the customer to refer your business to their family and friends.

But if you want to take too much time talking about the referral program, you can create and share a flyer (or card) containing the rules and incentives of the referral program.

Direct mail

Whoever said that physical mail was a thing of the past didn’t look at the whole picture: 41% of Americans look forward to checking their mail every day. As a result, direct mail marketing is still a viable marketing strategy, particularly when targeting older customers. 

As the name suggests, direct mail marketing consists of mailing physical materials to prospective or current customers. “Physical materials” can technically be anything the post office will take — you could send plungers as a Christmas gift to all your current customers — but the tried and true approach is to send a small printed ad, like a postcard or a letter.

As far as the content of the mailer, you should follow two principles: make it relevant and make it enticing.

Make it relevant by mentioning problems the customer might be having and/or by promoting services that they’re likely to need (same idea as the “services” and “education” flyers we mentioned earlier). And for the “enticing” part, this can be an offer or discount you’re willing to give to sweeten the pot.

Want more information on building and executing a direct mail strategy? Check out our comprehensive guide.

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