Plumbing Postcard Templates: Easily Design, Send, and Track Results from Direct Mail Campaigns

Direct mail is one of the many channels that plumbing businesses can leverage as part of a multi-channel marketing strategy. When used effectively, it can help create brand awareness, drive new customer acquisition, and increase retention with existing customers.

However, the execution of direct mail has traditionally been challenging. Before online printing and template services existed, it required businesses to work with separate services for designing, printing, and sending their postcards. It was time consuming and difficult to manage.

Then services like VistaPrint came along and made things a little easier, but there are still a number of downsides to using a generic printing service for plumbing postcards:

1. Limited Trade-Specific Templates: Online printing services typically have limited template options that are specific to the trade business. And your ability to access templates for business-specific use cases, such as following up on unsold estimates or sending reminders for recurring services, are limited.

2. Difficult to Coordinate Targeted Campaigns: Online printing services make it easy to produce postcards to a single audience list, but it’s difficult to create more targeted multi-segmented campaigns—which are an invaluable asset in an effective plumber marketing strategy.

3. No Ability to Track ROI: When you send postcard campaigns through standard printing services, you have limited to no visibility into which campaigns performed well and which didn’t. Therefore, you can’t make data driven marketing decisions or track and improve your ROI.

ServiceTitan is changing this by providing a direct mail marketing service specifically for the trades. Users of ServiceTitan Marketing Pro can now easily coordinate postcard marketing from within the same platform where they’re running the rest of their business. Our teams of professional designers have designed—and continue to build—a suite of easy to use templates for our customers to leverage in their businesses. 

In addition, we offer audience targeting and campaign tracking capabilities that are critical for improving ROI from direct mail.

» Want to grow your plumbing business? Click here to get a demo.

In this post, we’ll walk you through:

• How plumbing postcards work in ServiceTitan.

• Examples of plumbing postcard categories and templates.

• How postcards tie into ServiceTitan Marketing Pro to create campaigns that drive revenue.

Want to see how ServiceTitan’s Plumbing Software can help grow your business? Get a free, personalized demo. Already a customer and interested in upgrading to Marketing Pro? Click here to schedule a call. 

How Plumbing Postcards Work in ServiceTitan Marketing Pro

Postcards allow you to leverage all the customer data you already have in ServiceTitan to provide timely communications and keep your business top-of-mind. This, in turn, builds customer loyalty and a strong potential for a customer referral network.

ServiceTitan has what you need to launch a campaign with ease, including:

• Postcard templates.

• The ability to segment your audiences.

• The ability to track your campaigns.

• Always-on automation.

• API integration direct to the printer.

So how does it work? If you haven’t already signed up for ServiceTitan Marketing Pro, you’ll need to do that first. Then, you simply create your campaign, personalize your design, order delivery of your mailer, and track your success.   

Step 1: Create Your Campaign

You’ll start by creating your campaign. Currently, you can choose to create an email campaign or a direct mail campaign; we’ll soon be offering an SMS text messaging option, too.

The campaign categories users can choose from are designed specifically for the trades based on the use cases and audience segments that the most successful plumbing businesses leverage, such as “unsold estimates” or “equipment service check-in.” 

If you wanted to coordinate these types of strategic campaigns without ServiceTitan, it would require a more manual, time-consuming approach. In contrast, with ServiceTitan, you can launch sophisticated campaigns in just a few clicks.

Note: Our current direct mail features are solely focused on communicating with current customers. However, soon we’ll also provide options for running prospecting campaigns to acquire new customers.

Step 2: Select Your Audience

After you’ve decided on a direct mail campaign, it’s time to select your audience.

This is where all the customer data you’ve stored in ServiceTitan comes into play. Marketing Pro gives you the ability to segment your customer lists in a myriad of ways, and target specific customers with precise messaging to increase response rates. 

For instance, when creating an Unsold Estimates campaign, you can create an audience of people with unsold estimates of $500 or more (focusing efforts only on high revenue opportunities). Or, as another example, you could create an audience and corresponding campaign to target all customers who have a water heater that’s more than ten years old. And the best thing yet? After you build your audience segments, you can use them again and again without additional work, saving you time and effort on future campaigns.

Step 3: Design Your Full-Color Plumbing Postcard 

All of ServiceTitan’s templates are created by our in-house team of professional designers, copywriters, and long-time marketers in the trades. To build your campaign, you can select from hundreds of different design templates that are purpose-made for plumbing companies, electricians, HVAC businesses, and other trades. 

After you’ve chosen your plumbing postcard design, you can easily customize your template inside Canva, a simple-to-use web-based design service. 

Within Canva, you can add your business name and logo mark to your template, as well as any messaging or pricing details you’d like to include (discount offers, service reminders, testimonials, etc.).  

Then, you simply download your template and upload it into ServiceTitan as the front of your postcard design.

Next, you can customize the back of your postcard from within ServiceTitan, and your postcard design is complete.

Step 4: Choose Your Campaign Tracking

Before scheduling your campaign’s printing and mailing, you have the option to choose how you want to track responses. This will give you the insight you need to track the effectiveness of your campaign. 

The quickest and easiest option is to let ServiceTitan generate a new phone number for each campaign and route it to your customer service team. This phone number will be printed on postcards in the campaign, and ServiceTitan’s software will record the response when a postcard recipient calls that number. Then, you can check your reporting metrics to see which postcard campaigns are resulting in calls and sales.

Alternatively, you can choose to manually enter your existing phone number, but keep in mind that automated tracking within ServiceTitan will not be available for reporting. You won’t be able to tell which calls are coming into your business from people who have received postcards in the mail versus people who have seen your other advertisements (e.g. business cards, door hangers, signage, etc.).

Some plumbers choose to add a QR code when they upload their logo design and other graphics to their postcard template. The QR code sends postcard recipients to a trackable website address, providing a customer with another way to interact with your campaign. These QR codes are also trackable providing you with additional metrics on site visits.

Step 5: Choose When to Send Your Plumbing Postcards

When it comes time to schedule your campaigns for mailing, ServiceTitan gives more flexibility than most mail services. 

If you want to send holiday greeting cards in early December to all customers who’ve used your plumbing services in the past three years, you can easily do that.

But you can also set up a campaign to automatically send a certain postcard only to customers who meet certain criteria that you specify. For example, you might want to send a referral offer to every client who gets a repair. You can set the system to send the postcard one week after the repair is completed, when your business is still top-of-mind. 

By creating rules and automation for an “always-on” campaign, you can be sure to stay top-of-mind with customers you just serviced, without having to think about it.

Unlike EDDM postcards and other “batch and blast” mail services, you don't need a minimum print run to send a campaign with ServiceTitan. You can even send out one postcard at a time. 

ServiceTitan’s audience builder allows you to get hyper-targeted so you aren’t wasting money by sending mail to people who aren’t likely to be interested in your message. 

Step 6: Track the Effectiveness of Your Campaigns

Once campaigns are dropped, you can track them via your direct mail analytics dashboard. This allows you to see how different campaigns are performing. 

Your dashboard will tell you how many postcards have been ordered, printed, and mailed, and you’ll also be able to see how much revenue can be directly attributed to each campaign. 

You can continually track, assess, and evaluate to see which campaigns you should devote more resources to, and which campaigns you should tweak or discontinue.

Examples of ServiceTitan Plumbing Postcard Templates and Categories 

Membership Messaging

Recurring Service Reminders

Seasonal Check-Ins

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

Holidays and Special Occasions

Membership Drip Campaigns

Keep members engaged with marketing materials sent quarterly, annually, or at any interval you specify.

Conclusion: How Postcards Tie into ServiceTitan Marketing Pro

ServiceTitan Marketing Pro offers plumbing businesses tools that make managing a multi-channel marketing strategy easy.

In addition to direct mail marketing with professionally designed postcards, customized audience segmentation, and ROI tracking, ServiceTitan also offers email marketing and reputation management with equally powerful tools. Together, we enable you to deploy, measure, and increase ROI from marketing in your business.

Direct mail produces an ROI of around 29% for ServiceTitan customers. Want to see how ServiceTitan’s Plumbing Software can help grow your business? Get a free, personalized demo. Already a customer and interested in upgrading to Marketing Pro? Click here to schedule a call.