Roofing companies often use direct mailers to market their services to specific neighborhoods. That usually means designing a postcard or flyer, printing it in bulk, and mailing it to homeowners in the areas you want to target, either through a purchased mailing list or a service like USPS Every Door Direct Mail.

But while direct mailers can bring in new customers, they come with tradeoffs:

• They're expensive, and you're locked in to your ongoing campaign. You pay for design, printing, and postage up front, before you know whether the campaign will work. Once the mailers go out, you can't change the message or the neighborhoods you're targeting. If the campaign doesn't bring in leads, you can’t modify it.
  
  

• They're slow. Between design, printing, and delivery, a mailer can take a week or more to reach a homeowner. After a storm, that's often too late, because other roofing companies may already be in the neighborhood.
  
  

• They can get lost with junk mail. Homeowners tend to sort through their mail quickly, and a roofing postcard can end up in the recycling bin along with everything else.
  
  

• They require extra setup to track. Without tracking phone numbers, unique URLs, or QR codes, you’re relying on homeowners to tell you they saw your mailer. Even with those tools, homeowners who contact you another way can be difficult to attribute.

These tradeoffs make direct mailers costly and hard to scale.

In this post, we cover three alternatives to direct mailers:

1. Outbound SMS and MMS marketing with GlassHouse

2. Door-to-door canvassing

3. Google Local Services Ads and Google Business Profile

Plus, we look at the problems with pay-per-lead services like Angi and HomeAdvisor, and how to build a lead generation system that uses more than one channel.

1. Outbound SMS and MMS marketing with GlassHouse

Outbound SMS and MMS marketing means texting homeowners who haven't contacted your business yet. MMS messages can include an image, such as a photo of a roof you recently finished nearby. At GlassHouse, we call this approach digital door knocking: instead of mailing postcards to a neighborhood, you text the homeowners.

Compared to direct mailers, outbound texting lets you:

• Reach homeowners the same day on a device they use throughout the day. A text arrives within minutes of being sent. After a storm, you can reach homeowners in the affected neighborhoods before they've started looking for a roofing company. Plus, for most of us, our phone is something we use throughout the day. This means a homeowner can interact with your message when it’s convenient for them. 
  
  

• Track which campaigns work. When a homeowner replies to your text, you know which campaign and neighborhood the lead came from. Of course, some homeowners won't reply and will search for your business and call you instead. To see these leads as well, GlassHouse can connect to your CRM and run a matchback, which compares the homeowners you texted against your closed jobs, so those leads get attributed to the right campaign too.
  
  

• Adjust your campaigns as you go. You aren't paying for a print run, so you can test different messages and neighborhoods. If a campaign you send on Monday doesn't get the replies you want, you can easily try a different message to a different set of homes. You can also do A/B testing, where you test multiple messages in one campaign. 
  
  

• Target specific homeowners. Route-based services like USPS Every Door Direct Mail reach every address on the selected routes. With GlassHouse, you can filter homeowners by home age, home value, home size, lot size, and last sale date, so your campaigns focus on the homes that fit your jobs. You can also draw a shape on a map to pick a specific area within a neighborhood or ZIP code.

Outbound texting does need to be set up and managed correctly, or your messages can get blocked or put your business at legal risk. GlassHouse handles carrier registration and checks contacts against national and state Do Not Call lists. We also consult with a national law firm that specializes in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) to keep our service compliant. This helps improve message delivery and reduce the risk of your texts being blocked or flagged as spam. (Read more about how we follow federal law and carrier policy here.)

Roofing companies we work with have seen strong results with GlassHouse. For example:

• Mighty Dog Roofing in Pittsburgh closed $135,000 in revenue after spending $6,500 on cold texting over six weeks, with another $126,000 in proposals still open when we pulled the numbers. That comes out to $197 per booked appointment.
  
  

• Complete Roofing in Woodstock, Georgia, hit a 75x ROI in 2.5 months. After four months, they had 26 qualified appointments, $150,000 in won revenue, and one to two booked appointments per day during their busy season.

To learn how GlassHouse works in detail, you can schedule a free demo or keep reading below.

How to set up a campaign with GlassHouse

First, choose where to prospect. You can draw a shape on the map around the neighborhoods or streets you want to target, such as an area hit by a recent storm or a neighborhood you want to get more customers in.

Next, choose who to send your campaign to. You can filter by home age, home value, home size, lot size, and last sale date before you pull contact information, so you only reach homeowners who are a good fit.

Then write and launch your campaign. You can start from our message templates for roofing companies, and our customer success team helps write your first campaigns. You can also write your own messages.

Two campaigns roofing companies commonly run with GlassHouse:

• Storm response: After a hailstorm, many homeowners haven't contacted their insurance company yet, let alone a roofer. You can draw shapes around the affected neighborhoods the night before and schedule your texts to go out the next morning.
  
  

• Jobs near a completed roof: A message like "We just finished a roof on Elm Street and noticed several homes nearby with similar shingle wear. We'd be happy to stop by for a free inspection while we're in the area" gives homeowners a local reason to trust you.
  
  

Positive replies show up in your sales dashboard, where you can manage each conversation and track its status. Your team can respond directly, or JackieAI, our AI autoresponder, can carry the conversation to a booked appointment.

To see how GlassHouse would work for your roofing business, schedule a free demo.

2. Door-to-door canvassing

Door-to-door canvassing means sending sales reps to knock on doors in the neighborhoods you want to target. Many roofing companies already canvass, especially after storms, and it remains an effective way to find new customers.

Canvassing has a few advantages over direct mailers:

• Face-to-face conversations build trust. A homeowner can meet your rep, ask questions, and get a sense of your company before agreeing to an inspection.
  
  

• Reps can point to visible damage. After a storm, a rep can spot missing shingles or hail damage from the street and offer a free inspection on the spot.
  
  

• You get answers right away. Instead of waiting to see whether a homeowner responds to a mailer, your rep knows by the end of the conversation whether there's interest.

But canvassing is expensive and labor-intensive. You have to hire, train, and pay reps — and each rep can only knock on so many doors in a day. Many homeowners won't be home when a rep comes by, and some cities require solicitation permits or restrict door-to-door sales. Reaching more homes usually means hiring more reps.

Canvassing can also be a cold approach. The homeowner answering the door often hasn't heard of your business, and after a storm, many homeowners are wary of out-of-town contractors knocking on doors. (For tips on getting more out of your canvassing team, see our post on door knocking techniques.)

How GlassHouse supports your canvassing team

Most of the roofing companies we work with don't replace canvassing with outbound texting. Instead, they use GlassHouse alongside their canvassing team in two ways:

• Text homeowners before your reps knock. After a storm, you can schedule texts to go out in the morning before your reps arrive. When a rep knocks, the homeowner has already heard from your business, so the rep is following up on a message instead of making a cold introduction.
  
  

• Find interested homeowners first. You can text a neighborhood, see who replies, and send your reps to those homes. That means less time knocking on doors that won't turn into leads and more time with homeowners who have already shown interest.

Texting also reaches homeowners your reps can't, including those who weren't home when a rep came by and those in neighborhoods where door-to-door sales are restricted.

3. Google Local Services Ads and Google Business Profile

Direct mailers and canvassing reach homeowners before they start looking for a roofer. Google Local Services Ads (LSAs) and Google Business Profile reach homeowners who are already searching.

Google Business Profile is a free listing that shows your business in Google Maps and local search results. To set one up, you claim or create your profile, choose "Roofing contractor" as your primary category, and add your service areas, hours, contact information, and photos of completed jobs. Reviews have a large effect on how your profile ranks and on whether homeowners call, so it helps to ask satisfied customers for a review after each job.

Google Local Services Ads appear at the top of search results when homeowners search for terms like "roofer near me." Unlike standard Google Ads, you pay when a homeowner contacts you through the ad, not when they click. To run LSAs, your business has to pass Google's screening, which generally includes background, license, and insurance checks. Once you're approved, you set a budget, and Google ranks your ad based on factors like your reviews, your distance from the homeowner, and how quickly you respond to leads.

Compared to direct mailers, both options provide built-in performance reporting: LSAs track incoming leads, while Google Business Profile reports interactions such as call-button clicks and website clicks. But they come with tradeoffs:

• You only reach homeowners who are already searching. Homeowners who haven't noticed their roof needs work won't find you this way.
  
  

• You're competing with other roofers on the same page. Homeowners can compare several companies at once, and costs tend to rise during busy seasons and after storms, when more roofers are bidding for the same searches.
  
  

• You can't choose which homeowners see your ad. Google decides who sees your listing based on their searches, not on the neighborhoods or home types you want to target.

A strong Google presence also supports outbound marketing. When homeowners get a text from GlassHouse, some will search for your business and call you instead of replying. A complete Business Profile with recent reviews helps turn those searches into leads. If you connect GlassHouse to your CRM, we can run a matchback that compares the homeowners you texted against your closed jobs. That way, a job that came in through Google but started with a text gets credited to the right campaign, and you can see which channels are working together.

The problem with pay-per-lead services like Angi and HomeAdvisor

Some roofing companies buy leads from services like Angi and HomeAdvisor instead of running their own campaigns. A homeowner submits a request for roofing work, and the service sells that request to contractors in the area.

Pay-per-lead services can fill gaps in your schedule, but we didn’t include them in our list of alternatives because they come with significant drawbacks:

• Leads are often shared. The same homeowner may be sold to several roofing companies at once, so you're racing competitors to call first. It's common to arrive for an estimate and find that another contractor has already been there.
  
  

• Close rates tend to be lower. A homeowner who submits a request on a lead platform is usually comparing quotes, which can push your close rate and your prices down.
  
  

• You pay for leads that don't pan out. Some leads will have wrong contact information or homeowners who aren't ready to buy, and you typically pay for them either way.
  
  

• You don't own the relationship. The homeowner found the platform, not your business. If you stop paying, the leads stop.
  
  

• You can't choose who you reach. You get the requests that come in for your service area, not the neighborhoods or home types you want to target.

With outbound texting, the homeowner hears from your business first, under your company's name. You choose which neighborhoods and homeowners to reach, and the leads that come in aren't shared with other contractors.

Next steps: creating a lead generation system that works for you

Relying on one channel for most of your leads can leave your pipeline exposed if that channel gets more expensive or stops performing. Roofing companies with predictable pipelines typically combine several sources: referrals from past customers, inbound channels like SEO and Google LSAs that capture homeowners who are already searching, and at least one outbound channel that reaches homeowners before they start looking.

When you're building your mix, keep a few things in mind:

• Plan separately for storm work and retail replacements. Storm work depends on timing. After a hailstorm, the roofing companies that reach affected neighborhoods first often win the work, so same-day channels like canvassing and outbound texting fit well. Retail replacements usually come from homeowners with aging roofs, and that demand exists year-round, so channels you can run steadily, like SEO or text campaigns targeting older homes, tend to fit better.
  
  

• Make sure you can track attribution. You can't compare channels if you don't know where your jobs came from. That's harder with direct mail, where it's often unclear which mailer brought a homeowner in, and easier with channels that log calls, replies, and matchbacks.
  
  

• Run outbound and inbound together. Outbound doesn't replace inbound. When homeowners have already heard from your business through a text or a knock on the door, they're more likely to recognize your name when they search, which can make your inbound channels more effective.

Which metrics to track for each channel

Once you can attribute leads to their source, three metrics show which channels deserve more of your budget:

1. Cost per lead (CPL): What you pay, on average, for each lead a channel produces. CPL is the quickest way to compare how efficiently channels spend your budget and to notice when a channel gets more expensive, such as when ad costs rise after a storm.
   
   

2. Close rate: The percentage of leads from a channel that turn into signed jobs. Close rate shows lead quality. Leads from referrals or from homeowners who replied to your own outreach often close at higher rates than shared leads from aggregators, because those homeowners started the conversation with your business.
   
   

3. Customer acquisition cost (CAC): Your total spend on a channel divided by the number of new customers it produced. CAC combines the first two metrics into what a signed job actually costs. A channel with a low CPL can still have a high CAC if few of its leads close.

Reviewing all three together, rather than any one of them alone, gives you a clearer picture of which channels to scale up and which to pull back on.

In our experience, GlassHouse works best alongside your existing ads, canvassing, and referral programs. Roofing clients typically put 10 to 15% of their marketing spend toward outbound text with GlassHouse, and the warm touches it creates raise conversion rates across their other channels.

If you want to see how outbound texting would fit into your lead generation system, schedule a free demo with GlassHouse.

You can also use our ROI calculator below to estimate the kind of ROI you could see with GlassHouse.

You can also read our posts on:

• A guide on getting roofing leads

• Is cold texting legal for home service businesses?

• The three-part system for growing a home service franchise