Yard Signs, Truck Wraps, Door Hangers: What Actually Pays

A full truck wrap runs $2,500 to $4,500. A hundred yard signs with stakes runs about $600. Five thousand door hangers, printed and in your hand, runs around $350 — and that’s before you’ve paid anyone to walk them.

All three get sold to contractors as “exposure.” Exposure doesn’t pay your workers’ comp premium. Leads do. Here’s the cost-per-lead math on four offline channels, and the routine that beats all four for about $12 a job.

The only metric that matters

For every channel, you need two numbers:

• Cost per lead — total spend divided by the number of people who called because of it.
• Cost per job — cost per lead divided by your close rate.

Say you close 40% of the leads you quote, and your average job nets $900 in gross profit. A channel that costs you $150 per lead costs $375 per job, and you keep $525. That works. A channel at $400 per lead costs $1,000 per job, and you’re paying to work.

The problem with offline marketing is that nobody tracks it. The sign goes in the yard, a call comes in three weeks later, and you have no idea which one did it. Fix that first: ask every single caller “how did you hear about us?” and write the answer down. One column in a spreadsheet. If you can’t do that, don’t spend money on any of this.

Channel 1: Yard signs

Real pricing, roughly, for corrugated plastic 18x24 double-sided with H-stakes:

Quantity	Signs + stakes	Per sign
25	$180	$7.20
100	$600	$6.00
250	$1,150	$4.60

Signs only work in two places: in front of a job you’re actively doing, and in high-traffic spots you have permission to be. The second one is where contractors waste money — a sign zip-tied to a telephone pole gets thrown out by code enforcement, and in a lot of towns it gets you a fine.

A sign in front of an active job is different. It’s proof. Somebody is paying you to be there right now.

Realistic performance from a solo shop running signs on every job: a sign sits out for maybe four days per job, you do 60–80 jobs a year, and signs generate somewhere in the range of 5 to 15 calls a year. Say 10 calls off a $600 sign order that lasts two seasons.

Cost per lead: roughly $30. That’s cheap. But notice the ceiling — you can’t buy more of it. Signs scale with your job count, not with your budget. They’re a tax you pay on being visible, not a lead channel you can turn up.

One rule: take the sign down when the job ends. A sign in a yard where no truck has parked for three weeks reads as abandoned work.

Channel 2: Truck wraps

Here’s where the big money goes, and where the math gets honest.

Option	Cost	Life
Door magnets	$80–$150	1–2 years
Cut vinyl lettering, name + phone + trade	$300–$700	5–7 years
Partial wrap (rear, doors, quarter panels)	$1,200–$2,000	5–7 years
Full wrap	$2,500–$4,500	5–7 years

Over five years, a $3,500 full wrap is $700/year. Vinyl lettering at $500 is $100/year. The question is whether the extra $600/year buys more than six times the calls.

In my experience watching contractors track this: it doesn’t. Wrap calls are rare and they’re mostly from people already looking for your trade, in which case a legible phone number did the job. A $3,500 full wrap that produces 8 calls a year over five years is $87 per lead — fine. One that produces 3 calls a year is $233 per lead — not fine, and you’ve tied up $3,500 you could have put into a Google Business Profile push.

Three things actually matter on a vehicle, in order:

1. Phone number, huge. Readable at 40 mph from the next lane. If it’s smaller than your logo, it’s wrong.
2. The trade, in plain words. “ELECTRICAL” beats “Precision Solutions Group.”
3. A license number if your state requires it on vehicles. Several do. Check your state board before you print anything.

Everything else — the lightning bolts, the gradient, the swoosh — is decoration you’re renting at $600 a year.

Start with lettering. Upgrade to a wrap when your truck is parked in good neighborhoods five days a week and you can point to tracked wrap calls.

Channel 3: Door hangers

Print cost is low. Distribution cost is what kills you.

Line item	Cost
5,000 door hangers, 4x9, full color, die-cut	~$350
Distribution at $0.12/door (hired walker)	$600
Total	$950
Cost per door	$0.19

Blind-neighborhood door hangers in the trades typically pull somewhere between 0.1% and 0.5% response, and the low end is a lot more common than the high end. At 0.2%, 5,000 hangers produce 10 calls.

Cost per lead: $95. At a 40% close rate that’s $238 per job. Survivable, not great — and that’s assuming you hire someone to walk them. If you walk 5,000 doors yourself, you spent about 40 hours. At $65/hour of your own time, you just spent $2,600 in labor to save $600.

Door hangers get dramatically better in one situation: hung on the 40 houses immediately around a job you’re doing. Same piece of paper, radically different response, because the message changes from “hire a stranger” to “we’re on your street.” Which brings us to the thing that actually works.

Channel 4: The five-house neighbor letter

This is the routine. It costs almost nothing and outperforms everything above.

Every time you start a job, you hand-deliver a short letter to the five nearest houses — two on each side, one across the street. On a corner lot, make it seven. Then you do it again when the job finishes.

Cost per job:

Item	Cost
10 letters (5 before, 5 after), printed	$0.60
10 envelopes	$0.40
Your time, 12 minutes at $65/hr	$13.00
Total per job	~$14

Do 70 jobs a year: $980 a year, 700 doors. Same annual spend as the door hanger campaign, one-seventh the doors. But these doors are warm. They’ve seen your truck. They heard the saw. They’re already wondering what’s going on next door.

Response on tight-radius neighbor contact runs far higher than cold distribution — call it 2% to 5% as a working assumption, and track your own. At 3%, 700 doors is 21 calls.

Cost per lead: about $47 — and these leads close better, because you’re the contractor the neighbor already hired, not a name on a flyer.

What the two letters say

Letter 1 (before you start), 60 words:

Hi — I’m Dave with Dave’s Electric. Starting Tuesday I’ll be rewiring the panel at 418 Oak for the Harrisons. There’ll be a van in the driveway and some noise between 8 and 4. If I’m ever in your way, knock on the window or call me at 555-0199. Thanks for putting up with us.

That’s it. No offer, no pitch. It’s a courtesy note, and it does three jobs: it tells them you’re licensed and real, it gives them your number, and it makes you the guy who warned them instead of the guy with the loud saw.

Letter 2 (the day you finish), 70 words:

We wrapped up at 418 Oak today — new 200-amp panel, permit closed. Thanks for the patience. If you ever want someone to look at your panel or an outlet that’s been bugging you, I’m already in the neighborhood most weeks and I don’t charge for a look. Dave, 555-0199. Licensed, #EC-44821.

Hand-written address on the envelope. No window envelopes, no glossy postcard stock — it gets read because it doesn’t look like mail.

Why it beats the others

Three reasons:

1. Proximity proof. They can walk over and look at your work. No other channel does that.
2. Timing. Houses on a street are usually the same age with the same systems. If one panel is maxed out in 1978 construction, four more are too.
3. Low resistance. You’re not asking for anything in the first letter. That’s why the second one lands.

Log the source like everything else. When someone says “you did the Harrisons’ panel,” that’s a neighbor-letter lead whether they mention the letter or not.

The whole picture

Illustrative numbers for a solo shop, one full year:

Channel	Annual cost	Est. leads	Cost per lead	Scalable?
Yard signs	$300 (amortized)	10	$30	No — caps at your job count
Vinyl lettering	$100 (amortized)	5	$20	No
Full wrap	$700 (amortized)	5	$140	No
Blind door hangers	$950	10	$95	Yes
Neighbor letters	$980	21	$47	Partly — scales with jobs

Signs and lettering are cheap per lead but have a hard ceiling. Full wraps are mostly vanity until your truck is parked in the right driveways every day. Blind door hangers are the worst dollar in the group. Neighbor letters cost the same as door hangers and produce twice the leads at a better close rate.

And none of these should be your first marketing dollar. If your Google Business Profile isn’t filled out and collecting reviews, fix that before you print anything — it’s free and it outpulls all four of these combined in most markets. Same for answering the phone; offline marketing generates calls, and a missed call is a lead you paid for and threw away.

Do this on your next job

Print 10 copies of the two letters above with your name and number swapped in. Put them in the truck with a box of envelopes. On Monday morning, before you unload tools, walk five houses and drop the first five.

Then add one column to your job spreadsheet: Source. Ask every caller. In 90 days you’ll know which of these channels is worth a second order, and you’ll be making that call with your own numbers instead of a wrap shop’s sales pitch.