Winback for Painters & Decorators
The list you need is in your invoices, not your phone
A repeat cycle nobody in the trade uses
A full interior decoration on a three-bed is £3,260. Exterior painting, £2,380. A kitchen refresh, £915. Wallpaper hanging, £445. A single room, £410.
Decorating comes round again. Most homes want redoing every five to seven years, and exteriors more often than that depending on exposure. It is one of the most reliably cyclical trades on this site.
Which means that everybody you decorated for in 2019 and 2020 is due now. Not “might be interested” — due. The hallway you painted six years ago is scuffed, the woodwork has gone, and somebody in that house has been thinking about it for a while.
There will be several hundred such households behind an established decorator, and almost none of them will hear from you, for a reason that is entirely practical rather than a failure of intent.
You do not have their details. You have a name and a road in a paid invoice from 2019, a phone number in a handset you have replaced twice since, and a memory of the colour. The customer list exists but it is scattered across bank statements, invoice books, old messages and accounting software, and nobody has ever pulled it together.
That is what this service actually is for a decorator. Not persuasion — excavation.
Where the list is hiding, in order of yield
Your accounting software. Every invoice you have raised, with a name, an address and a date. This is usually the single richest source and the one nobody thinks of as a customer list.
Bank transaction records. Payments received, with names and references. Cruder, and it fills gaps.
Old message threads. Quote conversations, photographs of rooms, addresses sent for the first visit. Frequently the only place a mobile number survives.
Your own photographs. Most decorators have thousands, dated, and often geotagged, which places jobs you would otherwise never identify.
Merchant and paint records. Colour mixes ordered against a job reference, which sometimes recovers both the customer and the exact specification you used.
Pulled together, an established decorator typically recovers between two hundred and six hundred contactable households, most of whom are inside or approaching the repeat window.
The ratio
A full interior is £3,260. Our Noticed package is £49 a month — £588 a year. One interior job covers five and a half years.
On the recovered list: three hundred past customers, a three per cent response, is nine jobs. At a blended £900 that is £8,100 from households who already know your work — and unlike a cold enquiry, they are not comparing three quotes, because they already know what you are like to have in the house.
What we’d actually do
The excavation. Assemble the list from every source above, de-duplicate it, and get it into one place that survives your next phone.
Segment by year and by what was done. A 2019 full interior and a 2023 single room are entirely different prospects.
A contact that names the work. “We decorated your hallway and stairs in October 2019” is a completely different message from “hello from your local decorator”, and it converts several times better.
Attach the specification where you have it. The colours and finishes you used are genuinely useful to them and almost nobody else can supply them.
Seasonal timing. Interiors contacted in September, exteriors in February. The same list, worked twice a year.
A capture habit going forward, so the next five years of customers are a list rather than another excavation.
What good looks like at twelve months
- A single consolidated customer list, several hundred names deep
- Segmented by year and job type rather than treated as one group
- Two properly timed contacts a year rather than none
- Colour specifications attached where they exist
- Bookings from households you last saw six years ago
The mistakes we see most
Assuming the list does not exist. It exists. It is in your invoices and your photographs.
Keeping it in a phone. Phones are lost, replaced and wiped. This is the single reason most decorators have no customer base.
A generic message. Naming the actual room you painted is what makes this work.
Doing the excavation and not fixing capture. In five years you would be doing exactly the same job again.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–4. The excavation — accounting records, messages, photographs, merchant orders — consolidated into one list.
Weeks 5–8. Segmentation by year and job type, and the first seasonal contact to whichever group is next.
Weeks 9–12. The capture habit set up at quote stage, so this never has to be done from scratch again.
At ninety days the measure is the size of the list. For most decorators it goes from effectively nothing to several hundred contactable households, and everything else follows from that.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Once the list exists, customer records hold the rooms, colours, finishes and dates, so a contact six years later can name the work rather than address a stranger.
Completion dates drive the repeat prompts, which means the five-year mark arrives as an alert rather than as a realisation.
And because quotes and invoices issue from the same records, every future customer joins the list automatically — which is the part that stops this being a job you repeat in 2031.
For this list, the letter beats the email
The excavation produces something slightly unusual: a list that is strong on addresses and weak on everything else.
Invoices carry a house and a street. Bank records carry a name. Photographs carry a location. What almost none of it carries is a current email address or a mobile number that still works, because those were held in a phone that has since been replaced.
Which makes a physical letter the only channel that reaches most of the list, and that turns out to be an advantage rather than a compromise.
A letter to a household you decorated for six years ago is opened. It is not competing with forty other messages, it does not need a subject line to survive, and it arrives at the address where the work actually was, which means it reaches whoever lives there now — including a new owner, who is a genuine prospect in their own right.
Five hundred letters printed and posted is somewhere around £400 to £600 all in. Against a full interior at £3,260, the response rate needed to justify it is very low indeed.
Write it as a letter rather than a leaflet. Name the room and the year. Include the colours if you have them, because that detail is the thing that gets it kept rather than binned — it is genuinely useful information about their own house that nobody else on earth holds.
Questions decorators ask
Is my old data usable? Almost always more than expected. Accounting records alone usually recover most of it.
What about people who have moved? Some have, and the new owner of a house you decorated is a genuine prospect anyway.
How long does the excavation take? A few days of work, most of it mechanical, and it is done once.
Will they remember me? They remember the fortnight far better than you would think, particularly if it went well.
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