RedShifted

In effort to keep this as concise as possible my boss has just registered his local energy audit business in NJ.

He called me today and told me he plans on spending $2700 for 120,000 valpak mailers. And then asked for my feedback. Considering he sent out 50,000 last month and only got 12 leads (none closed they were all horrible quality) I told him I think its a waste of money and time (those mailers were for his waterproofing company however not energy audits like he wants to do now).

Still I told him he does not target his ads at all. He does not track them. And he has not rotated ads or changed the ad he has now for the last x however many years he's been using it.

Although that ad was for a different company a waterproofing business. His sales proposition (if you'd even call it that) was a $500 off coupon and since he never referenced the average price of a waterproofing job, I assumed it meant little to nothing to people and thats why he was getting horrible conversions.

But now he thinks people will be more interested in energy audits, and if he targets enough people that apparently he'll get more and better leads for this new business (btw I should note his waterproofing business has been fairly successful just that his ROIs have always sucked - luckily with a company like this though it only takes a few leads to make more than your money back) .

I asked him what he wants his offer to be and he said he was thinking something similar to his waterproofing business. But he wants to use percents instead and do a 50% of coupon. I said once again "what does that mean to all the people who have no idea how much a typical energy system costs?" (system as in insulation/ventilation/radiant barrier). It will mean nothing to a high majority of the 120,000 people he sends it to.

So he asked me what I recommend. I recommended 2 things. First I told him service magic is horrible and he needs to find a better lead broker. Cause he also buys leads from them. I told him cleanenergyexperts would be a much better place to buy leads from. And for $2700 he can get 90 quality leads. Versus $2700 for 120,000 valpaks and I honestly don't even see him getting 30 leads from that. Considering he only got about 10 from his last 50,000 and not even one sold.

I don't know how to explain this to him in a way that will make him understand he's not doing things right. Which is why I'm here.

Does this make sense to you people what I'm saying? I told him theres just so many other things he can do with that money that I think would be better than valpak.

So my question is what else can we do? Besides the lead broker I mean how hard would it be for me to get him some PPC leads for energy audits? It looks like all I have to do is find energy audit companies with high converting ads, copy their ads and then just throw them up myself? I mean obviously I wouldn't copy them word for word just understand the concept of why their ad is working (most seem to appeal heavily to emotions) and implement it in mine.

How hard is this to actually do for local energy audit business? I've done mostly everything up to this point except PPC and it just seems this is something I need to nail down.

I've already made this too long though any input I can get on this I'd really appreciate. I'm just looking for a way to get a better ROI with $2700 than using valpak. It seems with that much money I can be completely braindead, throw up a few PPC ads and get a better ROI than valpak would get us. I mean clicks are cheap aren't they? How hard would this really be to do considering I'm new to PPC? Thanks a lot guys.