What a door hanger campaign really costs a gutter company, and when it pays back
Printing, labor and route time add up fast. Here is the full cost of a 2,000-door hanger campaign for gutter work and the number of jobs it takes to break even.
Fall is when gutters fill with leaves and homeowners finally notice the overflow. A lot of gutter contractors respond by printing a stack of door hangers and sending someone out to walk neighborhoods. Some swear by it. Others say it never paid back.
Both can be right. The difference is usually whether anyone ran the numbers before the first hanger went on a door. Here is the full cost, line by line, and what it takes to make it worth doing.
The cost of a 2,000-door campaign
These are typical ranges. Your local prices will vary.
Printing. Full-color door hangers on heavy stock usually run $0.10 to $0.25 each in quantities of a few thousand. For 2,000 hangers, call it $200 to $500.
Design. If you do it yourself with a template, $0. If you hire a designer, $50 to $300 one time.
Labor. This is the cost most owners forget. A walker can usually hang 80 to 150 doors an hour in a dense suburban neighborhood, fewer in spread-out areas. At about 100 doors an hour, 2,000 doors is 20 hours. At $18 to $25 an hour, that is $360 to $500. If you do it yourself, it is 20 hours you are not selling or working.
Fuel and drive time. Getting the walker to the neighborhoods and back. Figure $30 to $80.
Total: roughly $600 to $1,400 for 2,000 doors.
What comes back
Response rates for door hangers vary widely. A common rough range for home services is somewhere around 0.5% to 2% of doors producing a call or text, depending on the neighborhood, the offer, and the timing.
Run a middle-of-the-road hypothetical:
- 2,000 doors at 1% = 20 calls
- You book 50% of the calls = 10 jobs
- Average gutter cleaning ticket of $175 = $1,750 in revenue
Against a cost of about $1,000, that is a modest return on the first round. Not exciting by itself.
Where the real payback comes from
The math changes when you count what happens after the first job:
- Repeat cleanings. A homeowner with big trees needs cleaning every fall, sometimes twice a year. If half of those 10 customers book again next year, that is another $875 with no marketing cost.
- Upsells. Gutter guards, downspout repairs, and seamless replacement carry much bigger tickets. One $2,500 guard job out of the 10 changes the whole picture.
- Reviews and referrals. Each happy customer is a chance for a Google review and a neighbor referral.
That is why a door hanger campaign usually pays back over a year, not in the first week.
How to make the campaign work harder
Pick the right streets. Mature neighborhoods with tall trees over the roofline. Skip new builds with saplings.
Make one clear offer. "Gutter cleaning for most single-story homes from $149. Text a photo of your house for a quote." A price and an easy next step beat a list of every service you sell.
Hang near your current jobs. After you finish a house, hang the 30 doors on either side and across the street. Neighbors just saw your ladder on the roof. Those doors respond better than cold routes.
Track every response. Put a dedicated phone number or a short code on the hanger ("mention code OAK") so you know which calls came from it.
Answer fast. A homeowner who texts at 7 p.m. and hears nothing until the next afternoon often books someone else. The speed to lead guide shows how to set up an instant text-back, and the calculator shows what slow replies cost.
Compare it with other channels
A door hanger is not the only way to spend $1,000. The Google Ads guide covers what that budget might buy in paid search, where people are already looking for gutter help. Many contractors use both: Google Ads for people actively searching, door hangers to reach the streets around active jobs.
Your Google profile matters either way. Most people who find a door hanger will look you up before they call. The median gutter company in our data has 6 reviews, and 20% have none. If someone searches your name and finds a thin profile with no reviews, your hanger just sent them to a competitor. The benchmark report shows where you stand.
When to skip door hangers
- If your Google profile has fewer than ten reviews, fix that first. The hangers will work better after.
- If you cannot answer calls and texts within the hour, the leads will leak.
- If you have no way to track responses, you will not know whether it worked.
A simple test
Start small. Print 500, hang them around five recent jobs, and track every call for three weeks. If it pays back, scale to 2,000. If it does not, you spent a couple hundred dollars to learn something.
If you want help tracking and answering every lead from your fall campaign, try a free 14-day trial of any service, no card, text or call (801) 509-9725.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, gutter companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor