Postcard Marketing ROI for Home Services: The Data

Direct mail is supposed to be dead. Digital marketers have been saying it for 15 years. Meanwhile, home service contractors keep mailing postcards because the math works.

The average direct mail response rate is 4.4%. Email sits at 0.12%. That’s not a typo. Direct mail outperforms email by 37x on response rate.

But response rate doesn’t pay the bills. Jobs do. Here’s what the data actually says about postcard marketing ROI for home service businesses.

The baseline numbers

The Data & Marketing Association tracks direct mail performance across industries. For home services specifically, the numbers look like this:

Response rates range from 2.9% for prospect lists (people who’ve never heard of you) to 5.3% for house lists (past customers and known contacts). That gap matters more than most contractors realize.

Cost per piece runs $0.50-1.50 depending on volume, design complexity, and whether you’re printing in-house or using a service. A standard 6x9 postcard at 5,000 quantity costs roughly $0.65-0.85 each including postage.

At a 3% response rate and $0.75 per piece, you’re paying $25 per response. If half those responses become estimates and you close 30%, that’s $166 cost per job from cold mail.

Compare that to Google Ads where HVAC clicks run $32.77 each. At a 4% website conversion rate and 30% close rate, you’re looking at $273 cost per job. Direct mail wins on unit economics.

When postcard ROI actually works

Postcards perform differently depending on who receives them. Mailing to cold lists is a volume game. Mailing to warm audiences is a conversion game.

Neighbor marketing

A roofing contractor finishes a job on Oak Street. The 50 houses within walking distance are now warm leads. They saw the truck, maybe talked to the homeowner, definitely noticed the work happening.

Mailing those 50 neighbors costs about $40 total. If one becomes a customer, you’ve acquired a roofing job for $40. The industry average cost per roofing lead is $150-300.

The conversion math gets even better when you include a photo of the actual job you just completed. “We just finished your neighbor’s roof at 412 Oak Street” hits different than a generic “Spring roofing special.”

Read more about neighbor marketing strategies.

Past customer reactivation

Your house list converts at nearly double the rate of cold prospects. These are people who’ve already let you in their home, paid you money, and (hopefully) had a good experience.

A “We miss you” postcard to customers who haven’t used you in 18+ months costs the same to mail as a cold prospect piece. But the response rate jumps from 3% to 5-6%, and the close rate is higher because they already trust you.

One HVAC contractor mailed 2,000 past customers with a maintenance agreement offer. At $0.80 per piece and 4.8% response, they generated 96 leads for $1,600. Closed 31 maintenance agreements at $189 each. That’s $5,859 in immediate revenue plus recurring service visits.

Website visitor retargeting

73% of your website visitors will never come back. They browsed, compared, and moved on. Digital retargeting ads try to bring them back, but banner blindness is real and ad blockers are everywhere.

A postcard arrives in their physical mailbox. No ad blocker stops it. The average person touches their mail for 5+ seconds vs 1 second for a digital ad impression.

When you can identify which homeowners visited your website, you can mail them within 48 hours while intent is fresh. These campaigns consistently convert 3-5x higher than cold prospect mail because the recipient was already shopping for your service.

The 96% of visitors who leave your website without converting represent demand that’s walking out the door. Postcards give you a second chance to capture it.

Learn more about capturing lost leads from your website.

The numbers that kill postcard ROI

Bad targeting is the fastest way to burn money on direct mail.

Mailing 10,000 postcards to a purchased list of homeowners sounds efficient. But that list includes renters who slipped through, people who moved last month, and addresses that don’t match your service area boundaries.

List quality varies wildly. A 15% bad address rate means you’re throwing away $1,125 on a 10,000-piece campaign before anyone reads a word.

Saturation mail (every door in a ZIP code) costs less per piece but converts worse. You’re mailing to apartments, vacation homes, and houses that just got a new roof last year.

Smart contractors get specific. They target homeowners only, filter by home age and value, exclude recent customers, and focus on streets where they’ve already completed work.

Timing mistakes

Spring is when every contractor mails postcards. Homeowner mailboxes fill up with competing offers.

The contractors who win time their campaigns differently. They mail in January before the rush starts. They hit shoulder seasons when competition drops. They trigger mail based on events (new job completed nearby) rather than calendar dates.

A postcard that arrives alone in a mailbox gets read. A postcard buried in a stack of 8 competitor offers gets thrown away.

Weak offers

“10% off your next service” doesn’t move anyone. It’s the same thing every competitor offers.

Specific, urgent offers work. “$89 AC tune-up before summer” gives a reason to act now. “Free water heater inspection - your neighbor’s just failed” creates urgency.

The offer needs to make the phone ring, not just communicate that you exist.

What a realistic postcard campaign looks like

A plumbing contractor wants to grow maintenance agreement revenue. Here’s an actual campaign breakdown:

Target audience: Past customers (1,500 addresses) who haven’t booked in 12+ months

Piece cost: 6x11 postcard, $0.92 each including postage

Total spend: $1,380

Response rate: 4.2% (63 responses)

Conversion rate: 41% signed up for annual maintenance plan

New maintenance agreements: 26 at $169/year = $4,394 first-year revenue

Cost per acquisition: $53.08

ROI: 218% in year one, plus recurring revenue in subsequent years

That same contractor also runs Google Ads at $65 cost per lead and 15% close rate. The math: $433 cost per new maintenance agreement customer. Postcards win by a factor of 8.

Combining postcards with digital

The best-performing home service marketers don’t choose between digital and direct mail. They sequence them.

Someone visits your water heater page. You can’t reach them digitally because they didn’t fill out a form. But you can identify the household and mail a postcard within 48 hours.

That postcard includes a URL or QR code to a specific landing page. Now you’ve got tracking. If they visit that page, they’re actively shopping and you can prioritize follow-up.

This sequencing works because direct mail has 6x better attribution than digital display ads. People remember receiving a postcard. They don’t remember which banner ad they ignored.

The production side

Printing and mailing postcards used to require relationships with printers, mailing houses, and list brokers. Now you can run a campaign from your laptop.

Services like PostcardMania, ProspectsPLUS, and Vistaprint handle design templates, list purchasing, printing, and mailing in one workflow. Upload your customer list, pick a template, approve the proof, and they mail it.

For triggered campaigns (like mailing neighbors after completing a job), automation platforms connect to your CRM. Job closes, postcard goes out within 48 hours without anyone touching it.

The contractors getting best results treat postcards like email sequences. Drip campaigns instead of single blasts. Follow-up pieces to non-responders. Different messaging based on what service the prospect looked at.

When to skip postcards

Postcard marketing makes sense for established contractors with decent margins and a service area worth mailing.

A solo operator with 20 customers isn’t ready. The minimum order quantities don’t work economically until you’re mailing 500+ pieces.

Ultra-competitive markets where every contractor mails aggressively require more sophisticated targeting to stand out. Generic campaigns get lost in the noise.

And if you don’t have systems to handle the leads quickly, you’re wasting money. A postcard generates a call. If that call goes to voicemail and gets returned 6 hours later, you’ve lost to the contractor who answered the phone.

Speed to lead matters as much for mail-generated leads as it does for digital. Read about the 5-minute rule for lead response.

The math works if you work it

Postcards aren’t magic. They’re a direct marketing channel with measurable inputs and outputs.

The contractors who get 300%+ ROI from direct mail have dialed in their targeting, their offer, their timing, and their follow-up process. They treat it like a system, not a one-off blast.

The ones who mail 5,000 pieces to a purchased list, send a generic “we’re here for you” message, and wait for the phone to ring are the ones who call direct mail “dead.”

The data says otherwise. You just have to use it right.