Door hangers after a job: the cheapest targeting there is

Aug 27
3 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Introduction

Door hangers have a poor reputation because most of them are leaflets. Printed by the thousand, delivered by someone paid per hundred, and read by nobody.

Used differently they are one of the highest-return actions available to a trade business — not as a leaflet campaign, but as five hangers left on the five nearest houses immediately after finishing a job.

1. Door hangers after a job work because of proximity, not print

The neighbours have just watched a marked van sit outside for two hours.

That is the entire mechanism. Your hanger is not introducing you cold — it is putting a name and number to something they already noticed. The same piece of card posted to a random street a mile away performs a fraction as well.

2. Say that you were just next door

This is the line that makes it work, and most hangers omit it.

"We were working at number 14 today" turns an advert into a local fact. It carries implicit social proof — someone on this street chose you — and it explains why the card is there at all. Without it you are just another leaflet.

3. Keep it to one offer and one number

You have about three seconds between the front door and the recycling.

The trade, the fact you were nearby, a phone number, and one reason to call. That is the whole card. Every additional service listed reduces the chance any of it is read, and there is no version of this where a dense list outperforms a single clear line.

4. Deliver the same day, while the van is still remembered

The value decays fast. A hanger delivered a week later is a leaflet again.

Which means the technician does it, not a distributor. Five doors on the way back to the van takes about three minutes, and that timing is the difference between this working and not working.

5. Five houses, not fifty

The instinct is to cover the street. Resist it.

Immediate neighbours either side, and the few directly opposite. Those are the people who saw the van, who share the same housing stock and therefore the same likely problems, and who can see the work if it was external. Beyond that radius the effect drops away sharply.

6. Make the card look like the van

Same colours, same logo, same trade wording.

The recognition is the point: the card should visually connect to the vehicle they saw this morning. A beautifully designed hanger that looks nothing like the van breaks the only link you have.

7. Respect the obvious rules

No junk-mail stickers, nothing pushed through a letterbox where a hanger is asked not to be used, nothing left at a property where someone has asked you not to.

This costs you almost no reach and it protects the reputation the whole exercise depends on. A trade business known locally for pestering people has spent more than the hangers were worth.

8. Give it a reason to be kept

A hanger with a fridge-magnet quality lasts longer than one with an offer that expires.

For trades, the useful version is practical: where the stopcock usually is in these houses, what the annual service interval is, what to check before calling anyone out. Something genuinely useful gets kept on a noticeboard, and the number goes with it.

9. Track it with the one question that works

Ask every caller how they heard of you, and log the answer.

"You put a card through the door" is countable, and in a tight geographic area it usually punches above what the cost suggests. If nobody ever says it after a few hundred cards, the card is failing the three-second test and the copy needs cutting, not the volume increasing.

Conclusion

Treat door hangers as a five-minute action at the end of a job rather than a print campaign — the value comes from the neighbours having just seen your van, not from the card.

Say explicitly that you were working nearby, keep it to one offer and one number, deliver the same day by the technician, cover five houses rather than fifty, match the card to the van visually, respect no-junk-mail requests, give it something practical worth keeping, and log "card through the door" when you ask callers how they found you.