Learn How to Develop a List of Repeat Customerseat Customers

Painting and Decorating Concourse

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Every painting business needs to develop a marketing strategy - who are your desired customers, where are they located and how do you reach them.

It is true that the best advertising is word of mouth. In fact, word of mouth referrals and repeat customers are probably about 80% of my business. The longer you have been in business the more repeat customers you will get (providing you have been doing

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a good job and are responsive to your customer's needs), but you will still need to get new customers who don't know you from Adam (or Eve), in this article I want to discuss how to obtain repeat business from commercial clients.

Repeat commercial clients: builders, remodelers, interior designers, real estate sellers, apartments etc.. all need to use painters on a regular basis. In fact, they will need your service more often than the average home owner will. Reaching commercial clients is for the most part remarkably cheap. Once you have landed an account with one of these clients, you should have a repeat customer for years to come.

Direct mailers to residential home owners will cost you maybe $350 per 10,000 mailers, and you may get .0005 response from the mailer and maybe 1.5 jobs from that mailing. If you send out a first class mailing to a list of builders, it may cost you

$350 for postage and printing, if you pick up one builder - you may get a number of jobs per year for several years to come. So the potential "return on investment" is quite good with marketing to reach repeat customers, so don't neglect this form of marketing.

Where to start

Create your own lists for free

You can buy lists from data suppliers, but I have always opted to create my own lists for free from the local yellow pages.

Make a list of each type of client you are interested in pursuing , think of the main and alternate listings that they might fall under in the phone book. Transfer the information from the phone book onto a spreadsheet.

Looking up the zip codes. The phone book does not list zip codes, if you don't know the zip code for a listing you will have to look it up. One way to find a zip code is to enter the phone number into one of the Internet look up services, these will then give you the address of the phone number along with the zip code. Another way is to purchase the zip code directory from the post office. The last zip directory I purchased was a few years ago (maybe 6 or 7 years?), they are fairly cheap, and you can look up any address, anywhere and get the zip code.

What should you mail?

There are post card mailers, coupon mailers, and newspaper type mailers. The only type of mailer I send out to commercial clients is a old fashioned letter on my stationary. My mailings include a letter stating who I am , what I do, and asking the recipient to please keep me in mind for future painting needs. I include a business card with each mailing so that the recipient may keep it on file. While the letter is typed on the word processor, and printed by my computer on an as needed basis. I go through the process of signing each one before inserting into the envelope, which makes it more personal and less generic looking.

How often should you mail?

I mail all letters out 1st class mail, and it is best if you do so on a scheduled basis. Rather than waiting until you desperately need to pick up some work, you could for example mail to the builders and remoderlers twice a year, and maybe once per quarter to apartment managers. Don't mail out too often, but don't let them forget you either. Each time you send out a mailer it should have a different letter copy. You should rotate the letter copy by creating six or eight different letters and using a different one each time you mail out, by the time you recycle back to the first letter it might be three years since you used the letter last, so you should be OK to reuse the letter again.

Responses will sometimes be immediate, and often will be delayed until the recipient has a project they want to try you out on. Often a client will hold on to your letter or business card until the next project comes up.

I strive for a good market mix that works for me: some repeat commercial clients, some residential repaint clients (both new and repeat), and I rely on different methods to reach these clients: word of mouth, direct mailers, coupon mailers and networking etc.... The goal should be a good mix of clients using a mix of methods to reach them, this should give you a good balanced work stream that doesn't rely too heavily on any type of client or advertising method.

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