Biggest Marketing Fail

Thumbtack has a lot of good qaultiys , that the other lead generation site do not posses. No contract, no monthly fees, you simply , go to the contractor area, follow the instructions. Fill out the info boxes… They will send you leds, you have to decide if you want to bid on the job or not, if you do not bid, there is no charge. The only way they will refund any money, as if the customer doesn’t look at the bid within 48 hrs. they will automatically credit your account…

Home advisor and yodle fail big time. Angies list has been OK but not impressed. Oddly enough I get a lot of my work from local newspapers

Thumbtack has been a flop for me. I’ll try to leave a quote the instant I get a lead and out of maybe 20 times I’ve never been able to because they’ve already received the max amount of quotes. I guess it’s just to saturated.

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You won’t see the full benefit of EDDM unless you are committed to a long term strategy with multiple mailings.

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Agreed do you stop during winter or still mail but scale back to the best areas only?

Has anyone tried Amazon Services? I think it’s a 10% flat fee.

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N2 publishing by far. Big sales pitch and promises but I have gotten absolutely NOTHING from this. They do local high end neighborhood magazines and will not let you out of the contract for anything. I should have known better than to sign a contract, but it was an expensive business lesson.

I ALMOST made the same mistake a couple of years ago…got a bad feeling about it, told them I needed some time to think about it, searched the forums here and in PTState, and knew within about 15 minutes that it would be a waste. Any time I have a big decision to make, I search first!

I ordered 500 business cards in 1998. I still have about 490. I just hate to give away something i paid for. That $50 was probably my biggest waste.

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  1. Yellow pages
  2. High end, elite type magazine ad
  3. Mailed bundle pack coupons

Theses are my top 3 worst. I wish I could get back all that money paid out to the phone book.

Y. E. L. P.
worst market experience I have ever had and I will never recommend them to anyone and we had to get a lawyer to get out of the contract and they put us in collection and took money that was not authorized to them after we cancelled.
We had to change Banks and and they told me that they were distressed vendors and Visa gave them our new card numbers so when we went to another bank they found our card number on our account they went into our new account and took the money again buzzards

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Thumbtack is better than HA, you at least get to pick which leads you bid on. The bid price is lower too. Neither is really amazing imo because you still get duds who don’t respond. Supposedly thumbtack is coming out with a new feature where you don’t get charged credits unless the customer responds. Sports schedule posters 0 calls. What has really worked this year after hitting the same area with the exact same flyers for the past 3 years. Got about 5% pick up rate this year alone.

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What is EDDM?

I’ve been on it for over a year and I’ve only gotten one job offer

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What is EDDM?

Every door direct mail
A quick search on google will give you the answer you seek.

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Thank you

I am about to pull the pin on EDDM. If you get a minute, can you expound on your comments about long term & multiple mailings?

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This is good to know because I had the Chiefs program advertising people call wanting to charge $2500+ to get in the programs. Something felt a little off about the whole deal.

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A-freakin’-men! Yelp is AWFUL! Yelp and Thumbtack don’t work for me…

HomeAdvisor works like gangbusters for me though. I’m about as big of a fan of HomeAdvisor as you’ll find.

The people who complain about HA I’ve found fall in one of these categories:

  1. They don’t know how to use it.
  2. They prefer “cheaper” marketing methods (I.e. Thumbtack) and get what they pay for.
  3. Are just following the lead of other naysayers without experience of actually using it. (“Have you used it?” “Well no… but… the internet…”)
  4. Already have all the business they can handle from growing a legitimate business via tried and true marketing methods.
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