O’Lyn Roofing, an Owens Corning Platinum Preferred Contractor, has been reroofing Boston homes since 1974. In the last few years, something changed: the previous customers who already trusted them started saying yes more often.
“We’ve seen that the close ratios have gone up with those previous customers from about like 40% to about 55%, which is really cool.”
— Tucker Olen, Head of Marketing at O’Lyn Roofing
That’s not a fluke, and it’s not a new sales tactic. It’s what happens when a 52-year-old family roofing company stops treating previous customers like a closed file.
As Tucker describes it, O’Lyn handles “everything from the gutter up” — roofing, gutters, and skylights — running about 600 jobs a year out of three locations: Norwood, Wellesley, and Boston.
This isn’t a company that’s just dabbling in marketing, either. O’Lyn already runs marketing campaigns with significant budgets: billboards, TV ads, and direct mail campaigns. That sophistication shows up in the numbers, too: a 4.8-star average across 544 Google reviews.
But before starting with gFour, O’Lyn relied on its reputation alone for repeat and referral business.
Reputation isn’t a system.
Fifty-plus years in business earns you some repeat calls, but “some” isn’t a system. There was no consistent process for staying in touch with customers once a job wrapped. If someone came back, it was because they remembered O’Lyn, not because there was a strategy behind it.
O’Lyn found gFour at Accelerate Live, the annual home improvement industry conference run by The Wealthy Contractor in Florida.
O’Lyn’s co-owner, Linda Olen, made the connection first. As Tucker tells it, she compared it to a new car sale: when you buy a car from a dealership, sometimes you get a little something back — a wash, air fresheners, small extras that say “we appreciate you.” Linda saw gFour’s signature jar of cookies as that same idea, translated into roofing — a way to say thank you to someone who just handed over $20,000, $30,000, or $40,000 for a new roof.
That’s what got O’Lyn’s attention in the first place and why they signed on with gFour in 2019
Even with billboards, TV, and direct mail already in place, O’Lyn treats the gFour program as a crucial element in their marketing mix rather than another expense.
It’s the piece specifically responsible for turning past customers into repeat and referral revenue, a job none of those other channels are built to do.
Years later, the automated cadence and system are what keep O’Lyn with the program: email nurture, print newsletters, a one-year follow-up card — handled by a dedicated relationship manager who works with the marketing team at O’Lyn to take the extra work off of their plate.
The referral program adds a $100 digital payout on top of that, turning word-of-mouth into something O’Lyn can actually track.
That means they have people who do this for a living running the programs and a dozen less thing piled onto an in-house to-do list.
O’Lyn’s close rate on previous-customer jobs went from ~40% to ~55%.
And the volume of previous customer leads increased an estimated 50% since O’Lyn joined.
At Year 7 with gFour, O’Lyn has seen a 15.3x return on its investment.
Reviews jumped from 55 to 544 in that same timeframe, with the average rating increasing from 4.6 to 4.8.
A $100 digital referral payout on a $20,000–$40,000 roofing job barely registers as a cost, and it beats what most roofers pay per lead through Google Ads or pay-per-lead services, where costs keep climbing, and conversion rates keep falling.
O’Lyn’s own math backs this up: Tucker estimates that the company’s referral cost of marketing is 2% or less, a number no paid-lead channel comes close to touching.
Previous customers don’t just come back for a second roof, either. O’Lyn sees people reply to nurture emails asking about gutters or skylights months or years after the original job.
Staying in touch surfaces adjacent work most contractors leave on the table.
The program is more than just review generation and email nurture, though: direct mail continues to be a major player for O’Lyn’s marketing ecosystem.
gFour offers direct mail newsletters and seasonal holiday mailers for targeted marketing blasts.
O’Lyn didn’t need a new sales team or a bigger ad budget to move its close rate. It needed a system for the customers it already had.
See how a roofer like yours could replicate this.
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