13 Realistic Ways to Increase ROI (and Grow Your Bottom Line)

In case you missed it, running a business costs money. You pay for tools and platforms, supplies, employee salaries, and more. While you can't always reduce those costs, there are things you can do to get more out of what you are spending.

Lots of things.

So in this post, I'm going to share 12 ways to increase your ROI so you can get more mileage from your existing budget and grow your revenue.

Table of contents

• How to increase marketing ROI
• How to increase sales ROI
• More ways to increase ROI

How to increase ROI in marketing

Here are some ways to get more out of what you're spending on marketing efforts like ads, lead aggregators, your website, email platforms, and more. 

1. Use low-cost high-return marketing strategies

There are zillions of marketing strategies out there, but the core marketing strategies are core for a reason: they will give you the most bang for your buck. If you're looking to increase your marketing ROI, make sure you're employing all of these low-cost, high-return strategies:

• Listings: Totally free to create. Check our roundup of the best business listings to create for contractors.

Google Business Profile = free marketing on the world's most popular search engine. Aka an ROI machine.

• Website: A good quality website is not free, but if it's designed for lead generation and conversion, the returns pay out the costs in no time.
• SEO: A conversion-driven website will do you no good if no one's visiting it! SEO will get more of the right people visiting your site and converting. SEO is virtually free. It just takes time to create content, but that's what repurposing is for!
• Social: Social media is totally free. Facebook, especially, is a great place to make announcements, promote services, reach local customers and get word of mouth referrals.
• Email: An email platform is not free, but did you know that email averages $43 for every $1 spent? Get a newsletter going already, will ya!
• Reputation building: Your reputation starts with great customer service, gets fueled by asking for reviews, and gives way to retention and referrals which equates to higher returns on what it cost to acquire those customers.

2. Vet your lead aggregators

Lead aggregators are a popular strategy among contractors, but they don't come cheap. And they all offer something a little different. It's important to do your research to find the right service and pricing model for your business needs.

Here are some questions to ask:

• What is your lead collection, vetting, and verification process?
• How long have you been in the industry?
• Is there filtering available?
• Do you offer a dashboard, lead management system, etc?
• When and how will I receive the leads?
• What kind of support do you offer?
• What is your credit policy? 
• Is there a buying minimum?
  
  

Getting fully informed will ensure that you're only paying for what you need and won't fall victim to unexpected charges. For more help choosing a lead aggregator, check out our list of the best lead generation websites.

For more ways to improve your ROI on your lead aggregator, download our free guide: 8 Mistakes You're Making with Your Lead Aggregator.

3. Improve your Google ad quality

Google Ads is the most popular paid advertising strategy out there, and for good reason. It has an average 200% ROI. But you don't want to be average, do you? If you create above-average ads, you'll get an above-average ROI.

So how do you create better quality ads?

• Use landing pages specific to your offers. When the landing page is super relevant to the ad, your Quality Score will increase, your costs will decrease, and you'll get more conversions at the same or lower costs.

Take this search ad that came up when I searched "bathroom remodeling near me." 

When I click on it, instead of going to this company's homepage, they send me to a landing page specific to their bathroom remodeling services:

This makes the landing page super relevant to the ad, which helps its Quality Score and ranking, and also makes it more conversion friendly—both of which improve the success (and ROI) of the ad.

• Do in-depth keyword research. Unless they are converting, clicks on your ads will only cost you money. Use keyword research tools to identify the words and phrases that will attract the most conversion-likely clicks on your ads. 
• Add trust signals to your landing pages like testimonials, reviews, ratings, real photos, and logos of well-known customers if applicable. Not only will this increase conversion rates but it will improve your Quality Score.
• Segment and target. Structure your account so that you're promoting each of your services separately. This will ensure your keywords, ads, and landing pages are closely connected to one another. 

The way you group your keywords, ads, ad groups, and campaigns directly impacts the relevance of your ads, and therefore the cost per click. Image source

These are just a few ways to improve your ROI in Google Ads. I cover more ways to lower your cost per lead in Google Ads here.

4. Repurpose content

Content for any marketing strategy is like water for plants. It can't live without it! But content takes time and money to create. The key is to repurpose your content so you can get lots more mileage out of each piece you generate.

For example:

• Blog posts --> downloadable PDFs and webinars --> social posts
• Webinars -->PDFs and blog posts
• Website pages --> slide decks --> promotional videos
• Battle cards --> blog post
• Sales notes --> FAQ page
  
  

Even better? This creates more consistency in your content and reinforces your key messaging points, which will help the content to convert at a higher clip.

Pro tip: Keep a content library spreadsheet that can be sorted different ways so everyone on your team can have visibility into what exists. This will prevent duplication of efforts and make it easier to see what can be repurposed.

How to improve ROI in sales

With sales, you invest time and money into tools, team members, training, and more. Here are some insider tips on getting a higher ROI.

5. Reach out to your leads the right way

Home improvement businesses spend hundreds to thousands of dollars each month on ads and lead aggregators, only to connect with about 20-30% of those leads. Why? Because they’re either (a) calling only (and calling a LOT), (b) sending super long emails, or (c) Reaching out once or twice before giving up.

Data shows that effective lead outreach has four requirements:

• It's immediate: five minutes or less
• It's multi-channel: via text, email, and ringless voicemail (no calls)
• It's short: no long stories or sales pitches
• It's persistent: No, not pesky. But followed up on diligently and tastefully 

Setting these standards can take those 20-30% response rates and turn them into 70-80%. Now that’s a boatload more leads and a much higher ROI into your lead aggregators.

Setting those standards is one thing, following them is another. Download our free guide on increasing your speed to lead below:

6. Recycle old leads (rehash)

Prospects cancel or go MIA for a number of reasons—it’s not always because they found someone better. Take a look through your database and build a list of leads or prospects that you haven’t heard from in a month or so and check in.

Here's a 10-second template you can use:

Hey
[Name] from [Company] here. We were in touch a while back—are you still looking for [service you provide]?

Boom.

You'd be surprised at how much additional revenue an effective rehash program can bring in. If you don't mind me tooting our horn here:

• Matrix Basement Systems had no idea they were sitting on an additional $1.5 billion in rehash until they started using our strategy.
• Strittmatter HVAC & Plumbing's consultant recommended Hatch for rehash, and in the first year they achieved a 59:1 ROI, and brought in an additional $600,000 in revenue. 

You’ve already paid for that lead, so it’s like finding money in the couch cushions. 

7. Get a CRM

A CRM is a platform that collects all of your contacts—leads, prospects, customers, churned customers—and all of their interactions with your business, all in one place.

How does this increase ROI? In many ways.

• Customer experience. A CRM helps you keep track of and maintain the individual relationships you're creating with all of your contacts. Better relationships means more appointments, sales, and retention, which means higher ROI on your sales, marketing, and customer service campaigns.
• One source of truth. When everything is in one place and everyone has access to the same information, fewer opportunities fall through the cracks.
• Automation. CRMs enable you to streamline and automate daily tasks  that take up the time you could be using to sell—like document signing, accounting, billing, surveys, and more.
• Insights. The data and analytics available through CRMs allow you to set goals and KPIs. What gets measured gets improved, right?

Image source

Check out our list of the best CRMs for home improvement companies here.

8. Automate your outreach, humanize your follow-up

If you're thinking that automation means canned and/or complicated, hear me out: today’s sales and marketing tools are designed to be non-tech-whiz-friendly and to help aid in personalization rather than hinder it.

Well, at least Hatch is. With Hatch, you create outreach sequences for different scenarios—new leads, quoted prospects, canceled prospects, existing customers, and more.

Then you set rules so that Hatch will automatically enroll contacts into those sequences. Once the contact responds, you can jump in and engage in real time.

Now you’re saving hours that would have been spent building lists and reaching out to crickets, and all you have left to do is engage with the people who are responding.

More responses and more engagement leads to more appointments, sales, and retention, which improves your ROI on all your marketing, sales, and customer service investments.

9. Have the right team structure

One of the biggest barriers to effective follow up and rehash is that no one owns it, so it falls through the cracks. There are three main sales team structures that can help prevent this:

• Call center model: Call center reps handle all inbound leads and triage objections to the right sales rep.
• Sales manager model: Sales manager decide which rep gets which lead and objection.
• Follow-up model: A dedicated follow-up rep oversees all follow up.

There is no right or wrong answer here. The right team structure for you will depend on your business size and the skill sets of your team members. What's important is that you have a clear owner of follow-up.

Other ways to improve ROI

We've covered ways to increase your ROI on marketing and sales, specifically. Now for some bonus tips that can really be applied anywhere in your business.

10. Create rinse & repeat processes  

This is effective for any process, whether internal (like creating content or reporting on results) or external (like onboarding, booking appointments, following up on quotes, and engaging customers). 

When everyone’s following the same process, you experience:

• Efficiency: Much easier to complete, share, and transfer tasks among team members.
• Scalability: A standardized process makes for easier onboarding and training, which allows you to scale the quality of your services along with the size of your team. 
• Employee retention. Team members have the direction they need while also the autonomy they want, with clear KPIs and goals, all of which improves overall job satisfaction. 
• Customer retention: Quality services, performed by satisfied employees, and kept consistent no matter who they’re working with makes for an enjoyable customer experience. Retention = ROI.

This maximizes the returns on investments you make into hiring and training, lead generation, and customer service. It also makes it easier to identify what can be automated.

11. Automate

Creating rinse and repeat processes saves time and reduces errors. The only thing better than that is automating those repeat processes. Now you're putting in even less time and money, while getting even more output. It's ROI on a rocket ship, basically.

Here are some ways to automate daily and/or repetitive tasks, so you can free up your time to do the manual ones.

• Content creation: Use AI to create blog post outlines and get starting points for just about anything. We have some great ways to use ChatGPT for home improvement businesses here.
• Advertising: Google Ads offers a number of automations that can save you time and money, such as by pairing different headlines and descriptions to find the best combinations.
• Email: Set up drip campaigns to nurture leads through your funnel and re-send emails to recipients who didn't open them the first time.
• Social: Write your social posts for the week and schedule them to publish using a tool like Buffer.
• Communication: Create outreach sequences and automate them to fire based on specific criteria (with Hatch!).

10 outreach attempts, 3 channels, over 10 days—without you lifting a finger

• General: Connect your platforms so they can share data and generate robust reports and more customized automations. 
• Sales: Automate proposal and contract creation, invoice creation and sending, bill pay, and more.

It may take a little learning at first, but with the execution part on autopilot, you can focus your energy on optimization and growth. 

12. Schedule regular meetings with your service providers

Whether it's a software, service provider, or both, schedule monthly or quarterly check-ins with your vendors to go over questions you have and any new features and offerings they have.

This will ensure you're getting the most out of your software/service. You'd be surprised at what opportunities you can surface through these ongoing conversations. 

13. Report regularly

If you’re not reporting on the results of your sales and marketing efforts, you may as well be throwing (very expensive) spaghetti at the wall. Use the numbers to identify and harness what’s working, and to weed out what’s not. 

Rhythm Systems has a master KPI list for every aspect of running your business, but here are some sales and marketing KPIs to start with:

• Inbound calls
• Appointments
• Estimates
• Prospects 
• Total outbound attempts
• Calls, emails, texts
• Sales qualified leads (SQLs)
• Conversations
• Proposals sent
• Proposals pending
• Closed - lost
• Closed – won
• Win rate

If this feels overwhelming, here are some tips:

• Identify what you can measure easily. Go into your platforms and take a look at what reports and metrics are available that you can pull with a few clicks each week.
• Put these data points into a spreadsheet. Even if your platform offers dashboards and reporting, I’d still recommend creating your own spreadsheet so you can internalize the data better and also slice and dice it any way you want.
• Just focus on collecting the data points for at least a month. This will give you a sense of your baseline metrics. Once you have a baseline, you can then establish core KPIs and goals to increase each month.

What gets measured gets improved. Image source

Increase your ROI, grow your revenue

Nothing is cheap these days, but with the right strategies in place, you can make sure that you're getting the most out of every dollar you spend—whether on marketing, growing, or running your business. And the higher your ROI, the more you can grow revenue. Use the tips in this post and you'll be seeing higher returns on your investments into marketing, sales, operations, and more. 

Here's a recap of how to increase ROI for your business:

1. Use low-cost high-return marketing strategies
2. Vet your lead aggregators
3. Improve your Google ad quality
4. Repurpose content
5. Reach out to your leads the right way
6. Recycle old leads (rehash)
7. Get a CRM
8. Automate your outreach, humanize your follow-up
9. Have the right team structures
10. Create rinse and repeat processes  
11. Schedule regular meetings with your service providers
12. Report regularly