The first application was thirty dollars. The programme is six hundred.

Lawn care is one of the few trades where postal mail remains a serious acquisition channel, targeted by neighbourhood and timed to the spring.

It produces no clicks and no form fills, so it is absent from digital reporting entirely, and its cost per customer is usually estimated rather than measured.

A distinct tracked number or a code on the mail piece turns it into a lead file like any other, ranked on the same season value against its printing and postage cost.

Companies that run this often find mail outperforms a channel they had been favouring, and occasionally the reverse — the point is that it becomes a comparison rather than an argument.

It also identifies which neighbourhoods produced customers who renewed, which changes next year's mailing list rather than next year's budget.

A lawn customer who renews for four years is worth several times one who cancels in autumn, and the renewal decision is made on whether the lawn improved.

That makes retention partly an agronomy problem rather than a marketing one — but the rate still differs by channel, because channels differ in what they promised.

A source that sold on price brings customers who leave on price. A referral brings somebody who already saw the results next door.

Measuring two seasons rather than one shows that difference as a number, and it is usually large enough to change where the acquisition budget goes.

The report keeps first season and renewal apart so neither is silently credited to the other.

Aeration, grub control, seeding and mosquito are sold to existing customers, carry better margin than the core programme, and are very unevenly taken up.

Which customers buy them tracks with how engaged they are, and engagement tracks with how they arrived.

A file containing only core programme revenue therefore understates the channels that bring interested customers and flatters the ones that bring price-led sign-ups.

Including add-ons is one column and it reorders the ranking often enough to be worth doing every time.

It also puts a number on the value of a renewing customer, which is what justifies paying more at the front end.

Most of a year's sign-ups happen in a short spring window, and a channel's performance in that window decides the year.

Comparing a channel that runs year-round with one that runs for six weeks on total revenue is a comparison of calendars rather than of marketing.

The report groups revenue by when the customer arrived, which makes the spring cohort readable as a cohort and comparable with last year's.

It also produces the lag from lead to first application, which tells you how early the mail has to land to catch the season. A piece arriving two weeks after the neighbours signed up is not a weak channel; it is a late one, and those are different problems with different fixes.