Plan on about 1%. A thousand window cleaning leaflets, ten customers. One cleaner put out nine hundred leaflets in a day and got three customers: 3 divided by 900 is 0.33%. Another got three calls off 150 leaflets: 3 divided by 150 is 2%. That gap is most of what people get wrong about window cleaning canvassing.
Getting window cleaning customers is the easy half. You can sign eight people up on a Saturday and be down to five by June.
What window cleaning canvassing returns for a day of your time
Leaflets on their own sit in the 0.3% to 2% band. That is not a channel. It is a warm-up.
What changes the numbers is doing both. Drop window cleaning leaflets down a street, then knock the same street three days later, while the paper is still on the side and your name is vaguely familiar. One cleaner reported 100 leaflets and a next-day knock producing nine customers, so treat the gap as a day or two, not an exact number. That is one person's good day rather than a rate to budget on, but most who have tried both report the same direction.
Door knocking window cleaning work on its own swings wildly: a hundred doors might give you one or two, sometimes twenty. The discriminator is not your patter, it is whether the street already has a cleaner. So walk it before you knock it, and knock where the glass is visibly dirty.
A day of knocking
Doing it yourself, realistic output is about 1.5 to 2 customers an hour. People canvass weekdays 10am to 8pm and Saturdays 10am to 2pm, because that is when somebody is in, not because of any rule about when you may knock. Set the day aside and clean nothing.
Pick streets that fill gaps in days you already work. What a round costs you is minutes, so a customer three streets from an existing one is worth about double one that adds fifteen minutes to the drive. See how the round is planned.
Log the no-answers and go back in an evening or a Saturday, because a no-answer is not a no. That list is names and addresses of people who are not customers yet, which is a question about GDPR for window cleaners.
Never price from the front
Walk round the back first. The rear elevation, the conservatory and the extension are where a £14 house becomes a £22 house, and you cannot take a number back once you have said it out loud. More on that in pricing window cleaning jobs.
Ask one thing before you quote anything. Are you after a one-off, or something regular? It sorts them out before you have said a number.
Say out loud that the first clean is the worst
It genuinely is. A first clean typically takes twice as long as a maintenance clean, and on glass left a year it may not come up perfect on the first pass. Frames, sills, webs, the runs down the render.
The customer does not know that. Say nothing, and when the windows come out better rather than perfect they quietly decide you are not much good, and are gone by clean three.
Thirty seconds at the door fixes it:
The first one takes me about twice as long, and on glass that's been left a while it might not come up perfect straight away. It'll be right by the second or third. That's normal, and it's part of why the first one costs more.
Cheapest retention move you have.
Ring them before the first clean
One canvassing firm rings every new customer within three days of the knock. Do the same: confirm the day and what the first clean will cost, before doubt sets in.
Charging more for clean one is a filter, not a fee
The mainstream first-clean premium is 25% to 50%, and plenty charge double.
It filters. The customer who wanted one cheap clean before the in-laws came does not sign up at double. One cleaner found that for roughly every customer who stayed regular, another signed up as "regular" purely to get the regular price, then cancelled after one or two cleans. That is a fake rate of one in two. Half his yeses were never going to be on the round in September.
Two other structures do the same:
- A stated minimum of four visits, agreed at the door. Three is the commoner number, including at some canvassing firms; four clears the danger window below.
- A taper across the first three, £20 then £10 then £10, so the customer can see the premium end.
A minority skip the premium and swallow the extra time, fair enough in a competitive area. Where the trade is close to unanimous: a free or half-price first clean invites the next cleaner to undercut you, and attracts the people who cancel.
Cleans two and three are where you lose them
This is where the customer decides, and rarely on price. One UK trade blog puts loss on a well-run round at under 10% of customers a year, and says the cause is reliability and communication, neither of which you can prove at the door.
Clean two: be there on the day
Turn up when you said, on the day you said. That, more than anything said on the doorstep, is what turns a canvassed name into a customer who is still there at Christmas.
Clean two is also the first time they hold the glass against what you promised. The frames and sills that did not come up on clean one should be visibly better, because that is what you told them at the door.
If the day has to move, tell them before it moves, not after. Being moved is a scheduling problem; not being told is the communication problem, and that is the one they cancel over.
Clean three: still deciding
By clean three the glass should be where you said it would be. If it is not, say so before they have to ask.
Clean three is the last clean anybody guarantees. Get a customer past clean four and the trade treats them as retained.
Why the firms guarantee three cleans
The canvassing firms price for these losses. One supplies an extra 20% of confirmed customers free, and quotes a 5% to 10% cancellation rate over the first four months. Another guarantees a three-clean minimum and will replace a cancelled customer within 28 days. Nobody builds a 20% buffer in for fun, and every guarantee window stops at three or four cleans, which is an inference from published terms rather than a figure anyone states.
That 5% to 10% covers four months, so three of those in a year is 15% to 30%, against the blog's under 10% a year on a settled round. The gap is cleans one, two and three.
What it costs to buy customers instead
This bit is for someone paying for customers rather than knocking. Paid canvassing is priced as a multiple of the work won. One UK provider publishes 2.5 times the value of the work plus VAT, per clean: £12 times 2.5 is £30, so a £12 clean costs £30 plus VAT. The other benchmark that circulates is about twice monthly value, which is per month rather than per clean, so on a four-weekly round the two are nearly the same money.
Facebook, leaflets and referrals
Facebook local groups cost nothing and are worth posting in, but they are not a channel on their own.
One documented head-to-head ran paid ads against leaflets. The ads: £21 of spend produced 5,579 reach and 129 clicks, and those 129 clicks produced three orders, so £21 divided by 3 is £7 an order. The leaflets: £20 bought a thousand A6 leaflets, 700 of them got delivered, and those 700 produced ten orders, so £20 divided by 10 is £2 an order. Seven pounds a customer against two, on that one test.
Referrals are consistently described as the cheapest and highest-converting source there is, at £10 to £20 each. Per head that is dearer than both, but a leaflet or a click buys a lead you still have to convert, where a referral arrives already trusting you, and costs you no day off the round.
The bit of the law almost nobody at the door has heard of
Knocking to sell a service is lawful in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. There is no licence to get. The cancellation rules below apply wherever you work; the zones are your council's, and the licence at the end is Scotland only.
Does the 14-day cancellation right catch your sign-ups?
A doorstep sign-up is an off-premises contract under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013. Contracts under £42 are exempt, which is why most single cleans fall outside all of this. Sign someone up at £14 a clean on a rolling basis and that arrangement may not be exempt, and "may not" is as far as anyone will put it. The plain-English version is on Business Companion.
So do not try to settle it. Give every new customer the slip below, whatever they are paying, and it stops mattering whether the exemption covers you: you have done what the regulations ask either way.
What goes on the slip
- Fourteen days to cancel, counted from the day after the contract is made.
- The prescribed pre-contract information, on paper or in another durable form, meaning something they keep, not something you said at the door.
- In that information, the cancellation right and a model cancellation form.
Not telling them is a criminal offence, and it stretches their cancellation window from 14 days to 12 months. If they want the first clean done inside the 14 days, they have to expressly request it and acknowledge what that means.
No Cold Calling zones and stickers
Suffolk Trading Standards states that ignoring a zone, or a property displaying a sticker, is a criminal offence under consumer protection law, and other authorities take the same line. Suffolk alone has more than 300 zones covering over 14,000 homes, plus about 28,000 properties with a sticker. Stickers you can see. Zones you cannot, so ask: your council's trading standards will tell you which streets are covered.
Working in Scotland
You need a window cleaner's licence, and working without one can cost you up to £2,500. Councils set their own conditions: expect public liability cover, commonly £1m, passport photos and a criminal record check. Ask the council before you knock a door.
None of that is legal advice. I write software for a living. Check your own position.
Keeping the ones you just signed up
Nine new customers in a weekend is only nine customers if you can find them again in three weeks, know which of them are due, and know that number three still has not paid for the first clean. RoundWiz holds the round, the schedule and who owes what in one place on your phone, for £7.99 a month including VAT, no contract. You can import a spreadsheet to start, and the 30-day trial needs no card. Built and supported by one person in Essex, who answers the email himself.