Yard signs and postcards still bring in work for some roofers, and the complaints are about a paid mailer service and about flyers piling up on doors after a storm. Someone buying a 20-year-old residential roofing company in Austin wrote on r/RoofingSales in 2025 that 90% of its sales come from referrals, past clients, postcards and yard signs, without saying how the 90% splits. A New Jersey roofing and chimney business wrote on r/PPC in 2023 that Money Mailer, its only advertising, was “very expensive and has provided next to nothing in leads” in recent months.
We haven’t measured an offline channel for any client, and I found no response rate for roofing mail from a source that shows its data, so the solid numbers are mostly costs and penalties. Postage runs 26 cents a door when you mail a whole route, and 65 cents a card when you mail only the houses around a job, so 25 neighbors come to $16.25. A yard sign came to under $4 on one vendor’s holiday deal, and in Texas the same sign planted on a public road’s right-of-way can draw a civil penalty of $500 to $1,000 for every day it stays up. One sales rep saw door hangers draw from 2 responses in 10,000 to about 1.3%, depending on the design and which doors got them.
A yard sign can cost under $4, and it tells competitors which house you sold
A 2025 post on r/RoofingSales passed along a sign vendor’s Black Friday deal that ran from $195 for 50 signs to $925 for 250, stakes and design included, or roughly $3.70 to $3.90 a sign. It was a short promotion, so get your own quote.
“My company stopped putting out yard signs until day of install,” an owner on r/Roofing wrote in 2025, because competitors were knocking those doors and badmouthing his company.
Another owner, three years in, went the other way. Cheap yard signs everywhere and fully wrapped vehicles made his company familiar, he says, and marketing costs fell once people started finding it on their own, though the same comment recommends an SEO agency by name and may be promotion. Holding the sign back costs you the days it would have stood in the yard before install, so the choice comes down to how hard competitors work the streets around your jobs.
Texas fines a sign on a public road’s right-of-way by the day
An owner commenting on a YouTube roofing-marketing video in 2026 says police warned him after he put yard signs at intersections, and that fines start at $1,000 a sign after that, though he didn’t say where.
In Texas, the one state whose sign law I’ve read, the Transportation Code bars any sign on the right-of-way of a public road unless state law allows it. The civil penalty runs $500 to $1,000 per violation, with a separate penalty for each day the sign stays up, and it falls on whoever places the sign or pays to have it placed, so a crew you hire doesn’t take the risk off you. Placing one is also a Class C misdemeanor, and a sheriff or constable can confiscate the signs.
A sign in your customer’s own yard falls outside that law. City sign codes and HOA rules may be stricter, and I haven’t read them, so check both before you stake anything.
One sales rep saw door hangers draw 2 in 10,000 to 1.3%
A sales rep on r/RoofingSales posted his numbers in 2024, counting only hangers left without a conversation at the door. The worst design, at a company he works with, drew 2 per 10,000 (0.02%), and the best he’d seen drew about 1.3%, so 1,000 hangers could bring anywhere from almost nothing to about 13 responses. He puts the gap down to design (contrasting colors, a bold headline with a call to action) and to targeting, and he showed no data. Handing a hanger over at the door is canvassing, covered in Is Door Knocking Still Worth It for Roofing Companies?.
In storm markets a hanger left on the door joins a pile. “Every person has had fifty people knock the door, flyers every other day, mail every week,” a Florida contractor with about 13 years in roofing wrote on r/Roofing in 2025. A DFW storm roofer we work with describes houses collecting hundreds of roofing cards on the door after a storm.
Hang them on the door and keep them out of the mailbox. Federal law (18 U.S.C. 1725) makes it an offense, punishable by a fine, to knowingly put unstamped mailable matter such as a circular in a mailbox to avoid postage. Your city can tell you whether you need a handbill or solicitor permit before a crew hangs a few thousand.
Leave the deductible off them too. After a 2024 hailstorm in Virginia, a sales rep found competitors’ door hangers offering to pay the homeowner’s deductible. In Texas, Business and Commerce Code 27.02 makes it a Class B misdemeanor to advertise or promise to pay, waive, absorb or rebate an insured’s deductible without the insurer’s consent, and that covers a hanger or a postcard.
Postage to every door on a route is 26 cents a piece, and you can’t pick the doors
USPS Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) delivers a mailer to every address on the carrier routes you choose. At retail, postage is $0.26 a piece for flats up to 3.3 ounces (on the USPS price list as of October 2026), and printing and design come on top. Retail needs no permit and takes 200 to 5,000 pieces a day per ZIP Code, and you pick the routes yourself in the USPS online tool, so you don’t need a marketing company for it, us included.
The tool filters routes by residential count, age, household size and income from Census data, with no way to pick single addresses. In fiscal 2025 USPS delivered to 170.4 million delivery points on 236,347 routes, about 721 per route by my math, so an average route comes to roughly $187 in postage. Routes vary widely, and the tool shows each one’s real count.
EDDM prices are for flats, the big mailer size. Under the general USPS rules a thin one has to be longer than 11-1/2 inches or taller than 6-1/8 inches, so a retail-size postcard won’t qualify, and your printer should check EDDM’s own size rules. The bulk version saves at most a tenth of a cent a piece and needs a bulk mailing permit.
Postcards to the 25 houses around a job cost $16.25 to mail
A New York roofing contractor asked r/marketing in 2024 for a company to mail postcards to 25 to 500 neighbors, timed around a job in their neighborhood. EDDM mails only whole routes, so a mailing that tight takes addressed First-Class postcards or a mail house that works from an address list.
A First-Class postcard costs 65 cents to mail, so cards to 25 neighbors come to $16.25 in postage before printing. At that retail price the card can be no bigger than 6 by 4-1/4 inches, while USPS allows commercial postcards up to 9 by 6.
A mailer with a reason behind it did well for someone in Nebraska. On r/RoofingSales in 2025 he wrote that mailing and canvassing wood-shake roof owners about insurer changes, with a year to replace the roof before being dropped, had brought strong success and conversations homeowners welcomed, though he gave no numbers and I haven’t checked the insurer change.
The people who praise sponsorships posted no call counts
Replying to a Houston roofer on r/Roofing in 2024, someone who had worked in a family business wrote that it quickly dropped ad spend for cheap community marketing, like a billboard at a local school’s ball field and sponsoring the trash cleanup on a major road. An Ontario roofing owner wrote in 2023 that marketing after a big storm brought in a few repairs and never turned into real jobs, and he recommends sponsoring a sports team and putting the company name on clothes and trucks.
Two posts on r/smallbusiness from roofing owners in 2026 describe paying the same vendor $1,997 for a year on a local golf course scorecard, and the later one praises the quality of the calls. Two near-identical stories praising one vendor read like promotion to me, so treat that price as reported.
A tagged QR code counts scans, and a tracking number counts calls
An owner on r/Roofing who spends over $15,000 a month, direct mail and truck wraps included, gives every marketing source its own phone number to count leads and cost per lead, though he didn’t post results by channel. That’s what lets you compare a yard sign with a postcard. I’d tag the link behind a mailer’s QR code with the three campaign tags Google Analytics says to always use together on web links, so you can see which mailer sent each visit. A tagged code still misses everyone who calls, so keep the phone number on the piece and judge each one by the signed jobs it brings in. How to Track Which Marketing Brings In Your Roofing Jobs covers the setup.
A leave-behind at the end of a job can carry a review QR code, which your Google Business Profile makes under Read Reviews, then Get more reviews, from a computer browser only. Tie any discount on a hanger or postcard to booking a job, because Google treats a discount or freebie offered for a review as fake engagement and prohibits it. How Roofers Get More Google Reviews (and Deal With Fake Ones) has more on asking.
Florida and California want your license number on signs and mailers
Florida requires a contractor’s registration or certification number on every advertisement in any medium, so a Florida roofer’s yard signs, door hangers, postcards and truck wraps need it, while branded shirts and other giveaways are exempt. California requires the license number in all forms of advertising, and its separate truck-lettering rule covers three other license classes and leaves roofers out. I haven’t read other states’ advertising rules, so if you work elsewhere, look yours up.
Start with the houses around your next job
To find out what offline marketing does for you, test it at a job you already have: a sign in the customer’s yard, held until install day if competitors work your streets, and First-Class postcards to the 25 houses around it for $16.25 in postage. Give each piece a phone number used for nothing else and a tagged QR code, and count the signed jobs each one brings in before you pay 26 cents a door for whole routes. Keep signs out of the public right-of-way, and check your state’s advertising rules before you print.
The owner who put signs everywhere says people started finding his company on their own once the name was familiar. To see where they’d find yours on Google Maps, run the free Google Maps heatmap: pick your Google profile and a search, and in a few minutes you’ll see your rank at 49 points around your office.