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Almost all residential cleaning work comes from two places: people who already know you, and your Google listing. Paid leads run roughly $53–$104 a lead and $233–$472 a paying customer, which is only sane once you know what a customer is worth to you over the visits they stay. Everything else is a supplement.
The honest version of this article is short, because most of what gets written about marketing a cleaning business is written by people selling marketing. Cleaning is a local, repeat, trust business. That narrows what works to a handful of things, and two of them are free.
If you do one thing from this article, do this. 98% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses, and review signals drive roughly 15–17% of local pack rankings — the three results that appear above everything else.
Which means your rating is not a vanity number, it is a cost. If you are on 3.2 stars and the cleaner across town is on 4.6, your cost per customer is being set by your reviews rather than by anything you can outspend. Moving from 3.8 to 4.5 stars is worth roughly $24,500 a year to a $500,000 business.
Every number in the paid column above is meaningless on its own. $300 to win a customer is disastrous if they leave after two visits and cheap if they stay three years.
So do this sum once. Take what you charge a visit, take your margin, and multiply by the visits an average customer actually stays for. That is what one is worth. Now you know what you can afford to pay for one — and you will usually find it is far more than you thought, which is why the businesses that grow are the ones that measured it.
The cleaning price calculator does exactly this: it spreads acquisition cost across the visits a customer stays for, so you can see the difference between a customer who lasts eighteen visits and one who lasts three. A customer costing $80 to win and staying 18 visits costs you $4.44 a visit. One who leaves after three costs you $26.67 — on a job you may have priced at $50.
Every other trade guide here says the same thing and cleaning is no exception: where your customers are matters more than how many. Twelve customers across forty miles is a worse business than eight in two neighbourhoods, because the difference is unpaid driving, every week, forever.
So the highest‑value marketing you can do is also the narrowest: the week you win a house, leaflet the twenty nearest doors. It is the only channel that makes your existing round more profitable rather than just longer.
If you want offices, small retail or property management work, none of the above applies. That work is won by turning up:
Winning the customer is half of it. The half that decides whether they stay is what happens in the first fortnight: did they get a confirmation, did you turn up in the window, did the invoice arrive when you said.
BizBaby handles that part — a recurring booking that repeats itself, a reminder the customer actually gets, an invoice that goes out when the visit is marked done, and card payment on the link. Leads from your website land in the same place as everything else, so nobody gets lost between a form and a notebook. And the reporting shows you the number this article is really about: how many customers you kept.
Free for the first three months.
Every figure above comes from one of these, checked in August 2026.
Marketing figures move faster than prices do. Treat the paid numbers as an order of magnitude rather than a quote, and measure your own — what a lead costs you locally is the only number that matters.
