Most HVAC and home service owners who tried direct mail in the past ended up quitting after one blast. Most who stick with it quietly build their best lead source.Â
The gap between a 14x return and a negative one, mailing the same people in the same market, comes down to a handful of decisions almost nobody talks about.Â
You're going to want to watch every minute of this video, because it will show you exactly what you need to do to start getting more leads every single week...
If you've been wondering if direct mail is worth testing this year, this episode answers it with a specific data point that is hard to ignore: one contractor found a letter driving consistent 9 to 11x ROI, then scaled that single working piece into 20 simultaneous campaigns. The method he used to get there is laid out step by step.
Direct Mail for HVAC and Home Service Companies - A Full Strategy Breakdown
Why Direct Mail Is Both Dinosaur and Secret Weapon
Direct mail is like this old dinosaur marketing activity that no one does anymore - or, for the business owners who have figured it out, it is the secret thing that nobody knows about but it still works.
The way to succeed is constant experimentation. You find something that works really well and then you just keep testing and trying. Think of it like the scientific method: find your baseline and test against that baseline. We are science-based, baby.
Introduction and Who Is on the Show
Welcome back to Owned and Operated. I am your host, John Wilson. During the day I run a plumbing, HVAC, and electric company in Northeast Ohio and Indiana. For fun, I run a podcast where I talk about scaling our business with our friends.
Today I am joined by my good friend Sam Preston, CEO of Service Scalers. This is our continuation of the series "Clicks to Calls," which is kind of funny because direct mail has nothing to do with clicks. But it is direct response, and some people absolutely kill it with it.
Workshop Announcement - Booked Solid
Before we get too deep into the topic, Sam is hosting a workshop called Booked Solid. It is happening in Stow at my facility. We just built out the itinerary this morning.
The workshop takes a high-level approach to understanding marketing, then drills down. We will cover all the different channels, the campaigns and strategies that actually work in those channels, how to understand what is and is not working in your marketing, and then help you build a 90-day plan to get more leads and fill your call board.
We are bringing in experts in each channel, including a different marketing agency to cover traditional marketing. If you have not grabbed a seat yet, go get one. It is going to be legit.
John's Business Acquisition Update
We bought a business on January 1st and took control of another in early January. We are about to officially own it this week - it is February 3rd or 4th today. We also have three or four other active conversations going.
The original plan was to buy two to four businesses this year. Two are done, and it is only 32 days into the year. We also have a new state under our belt. A lot of this has come through the podcast - people who reached out and said they were interested in partnering.
If you want to partner, let me know. We are actively acquiring. If you are in the Midwest, we are open to a conversation.
What Direct Mail Actually Is
Direct mail is physical marketing delivered to someone's home. That includes postcards, flyers, letters, or bundled packages like Valpak. Any of those are fair game.
And if we think about what direct mail is at its core, it is direct response marketing. The same thing as Meta or TikTok - you are doing something to elicit an immediate response. All the energy you would put into designing a great Facebook ad, you put that into a mailer to try to get a response from this person.
What format works best changes every couple of years. The way to succeed is constant experimentation, just like with digital ads. You find something that works and you keep iterating on it.
Standing Out in the Mailbox
With a Facebook ad, the goal is to capture attention through sound, color, or movement. With mail, it is the same challenge: how do you stand out inside the mailbox? How do you get someone's attention?
You get to make a lot of creative decisions. Should I do a gigantic postcard or a small postcard? Should I make it look like the utility company sent it? Should I send a huge letter? One friend of mine sent certified mail once. The customer reception was horrible, people hated it - but I bet the open rate was 100 percent.
You can go from leaving a flyer on a door to sending a box. Creativity has no end with direct mail. The more creative, probably the better. If you approach it the same way you would approach Facebook - how do I get someone's attention - you are probably going to do pretty well.
The Biggest Mistake - Doing It Only Once
One of the common mistakes people make is they do it one time. They just do a blast, see it does not work, and move on.
Direct mail requires repetition. Someone who has never heard of you might need six months of receiving your mail before they pick up the phone and call. You almost want to show up in the mailbox more and more and more.
The Four Audiences You Can Mail
There are four different audiences you could mail, and the expected results are dramatically different depending on which group you are targeting. Be really thoughtful about this - it is the most important first question to ask.
Audience One - Members
Members are people who actively pay you a monthly fee. They are the most likely to spend money with you because they already do. There is a lot of trust already built up. They have already made a buying decision to work with you.
If you send a thousand letters to members, you might get something like 60 calls. That is because they pay you money every month and they actively use your service.
Audience Two - Active Customers
Active customers are people who have used you in the last two to three years. They have seen you within the past 24 months and are in your system. They are more likely to spend money with you than a total stranger.
Audience Three - Inactive Customers
Inactive customers are people you did work for five or ten years ago. They touched you once. You can remind them of that relationship and pitch a relevant service. They are a warmer audience than people who have never heard of you at all.
Audience Four - People Who Have Never Been Customers
This is what most people think of when they picture direct mail: mass mailing campaigns where you send letters to people who have never heard of you. This is the hardest category to convert.
At roughly a 1 to 2 percent conversion rate, if you send a thousand letters you should expect about ten calls. If you are mailing members, you might get 60 calls from that same thousand letters. The difference is enormous.
Expected Conversion Rates and How to Think About Audience Size
If you want a hundred leads a week from net-new contacts at a 1 to 2 percent conversion rate, you need to be mailing around 40,000 people each week. That is not actually that much. And you can mail the same people on repeat - which is what you want, because more contacts over time builds familiarity and trust.
A hundred people who are active members is a lot of people, because you might get 20 to 30 leads from that. A hundred people who have never heard of you? You will probably only get one.
Building and Managing a Direct Mail Campaign
Direct mail is high design and high touch. You have to be iterating pretty frequently. We have done it in-house, we have sent it to agencies, and we have used Valpak's internal design tools.
The folks who do this best fully in-source it, because it is very similar to running Meta ads - you have to be able to iterate fast. With a letter, the hook is what happens the moment they open it. Did they read all the way through to where you wanted them? Did they call? It is a very high-touch marketing source, but it can be super productive.
Why Direct Mail Matters in 2026 - Less Competition Creates Opportunity
Direct mail is not sexy right now. LSA and Google Business Profile - those are where everyone is going. But mail has a lot more friction involved: you have to pick a vendor, choose the homes, design it, print it, mail it, and then wait for delivery. That process takes a week or two.
That friction is the opportunity. It is the same as canvasing or events - this is hard, this is high-touch, and the only way to do well is to execute well. Which means if you execute, you can win. I went to my mailbox recently to see if there were any mailers from home service companies. Nothing. That is an opening.
Specifically for businesses looking at underserved geographic markets: pick a city 45 minutes away with 50,000 to 100,000 people and only two or three competitors and just mail it hard for six months. You could probably own that whole city. They might make you the mayor.
The Legitimacy That Comes With a Physical Mailer
There is a spark of legitimacy with direct mail in 2026. If someone mails me, I immediately know a few things about that business: they definitely serve my area, they have some marketing budget, and the design looks professional. This seems like a real business.
I actually chose my landscaping vendor from a direct mailer because I could not find anyone else who would come to my area. He mailed me, so I knew I was on his route. Four years later he is still doing our landscaping. Direct mail caught me at exactly the right time.
This also builds brand familiarity over time. When someone does eventually go to Google and search for your service, they recognize your name or your logo. It supports your entire marketing mix - especially if you are trying to own a geographic area.
Isaac's System - Finding One Letter That Works and Scaling It
A friend of mine, Isaac, runs a plumbing business in Chicago and is driving serious results through direct mail right now. He opened up his whole operation and showed me how he does it. He is using a tech stack that includes HubSpot and a mailing service, operating in a huge market with millions of people to reach.
What he did was find one letter that works - a letter that consistently drives a 9 to 11 times return on investment. If digital at 6x feels solid, 11x means you can scale that thing to the moon. You have just found your path to whatever revenue number you want.
Once he found that working letter, he started iterating and testing around it. Does it work better in black and white? Fully colored in blue? How about red? He now runs around 20 different campaigns a month and sends roughly 40,000 letters a week. He took one offer that drove the response he wanted and came up with 19 other ways to word it or present the graphics.
Campaigns That Actually Drive Response
What we have found a lot of success with feels a lot like canvasing. HVAC tuneup campaigns work really well. Water heater promos work well. The "we're in your neighborhood" campaigns work really well.
For HVAC tuneups, a lot of people use a bright yellow postcard that looks like the gas company or the power company sent it. It says something like: it is time for your tuneup, it was due on this date, the last one you had was on this date. That design and that framing elicits a pretty big response.
The iteration is probably the difference between a 6x return and a 14x return. If you want the greatest response in the industry, it is going to take the greatest amount of effort. You cannot just delegate it.
The Hidden Secret Sauce - Your Offer's Ticket Size
Here is something that should be kind of obvious but that people mess up a lot: what is the offer? If you are spending money on direct mail to drive a return on investment, what are you actually marketing?
I have seen people do direct mail for sump pumps where the average ticket is around $700. It is going to be really hard to drive ROI on that. The hidden secret sauce of direct mail is what you are selling.
Isaac sells sewer replacements at around $15,000. If his campaign costs $45,000 and he is mailing 100,000 people a month, he only needs three sales to break even. If you are mailing less, you might only need one sale to break even. That is a very different math problem than mailing for a $700 ticket.
The contractor driving a 14x ROI in Charleston was selling HVAC systems. One single system probably paid for the entire campaign every month, and then he was in the positive. Ask yourself: how many of these things do I need to sell to pay for this campaign? If the answer is one, great. If the answer is 50, you are probably selling the wrong thing.
Writing Copy That Speaks to the Job the Customer Is Trying to Do
When thinking about ad copy, focus on the job someone is trying to do - and then help them do it. You want to take the pain away.
The example I always give: imagine a dad who just worked a 12-hour shift and is driving home. He remembers it is his turn to feed the family tonight. He sees a pizza place on the left. That pizza joint could advertise how hot the pizza is, how cheesy it is, how it is the best in the kingdom. But the best possible copy in that moment is: "Make it easy to feed your family tonight." He is pulling over.
For HVAC, focus on what the customer is actually trying to do: keep their house cool, lower the energy bill, not get a surprise breakdown in July. Make it easy for them to solve that problem, and make sure the offer behind the copy is on a ticket size that can actually drive ROI.
What to Experiment With in Your Direct Mail Program
You have a lot of levers to pull. Who you mail - members, active customers, inactive customers, or net-new prospects. What you send - postcards, letters, flyers, door hangers, or even physical goods. The zip codes you target. The income levels, credit scores, and demographics you filter for. Direct mail actually lets you filter more specifically than Facebook ads.
You can run campaigns from as small as 500 people to as large as a quarter million. Everything in between is fair game.
One thing people overlook: always use both sides of a mailer. The address side is just as important as the offer side. It is another one-second window to hook them into making a decision. Do not waste it.
When someone says mail does not work for them, there is a lot going on in what we just covered. If you are not approaching it as a high-touch marketing activity - if you are just blasting a postcard to a thousand people and moving on - of course it is not going to work. But if you take a methodical approach, iterate, and test, someone in your market is killing it with direct mail right now. You should figure out how to compete with them.
When to Add Direct Mail to Your Marketing Mix
I would say when you have testable marketing budget, which probably happens around $10 million in revenue. At that level, you can block off 5 to 10 grand a month for experimentation without it threatening the business if it does not work right away.
Early on, $10,000 a month on mail that does not produce could be a serious problem. Whereas at scale, you can afford to iterate and find the channel. We are on year three or four of constant iteration - whether it is mail, radio, Meta, or whatever. We always have something being tested.
The caveat: if you buy a business that already has working direct mail campaigns, keep pushing them from day one. Do not let them stall. That existing momentum is an asset worth protecting.
That is a process any home service company can run, and it almost always works best when the ticket size is large enough that a handful of conversions pays for the whole campaign.
Harvard Business Review reported on research done by Freferick Reichheld of Bain ^ Company (the people who created the NET Promoter Score) and said that if you could retain just 5% of your existing customers, you could increase your profits by 24% to 95%. Direct mail is an excellent way to actually retain customers, because people remember direct mail longer than they remember digital ads, just because of how the brain reacts to physical mail vs digital pixels.
If you are ready to put what you learned here into action, the best first step is to define which of the four audiences you will mail first. Start with members or recent customers if you have them. Set a real offer, one that is anchored to a high-value job, not a low-ticket repair. Design your first piece with the mailbox in mind: how do you stand out, and what does the hook look like the moment someone opens it? That is your experiment. Run it for at least two months before drawing conclusions.
Many of you may remember Ryan from back in the days of the minisite, when he was known as Design Guru Ryan. He was the designer behind some of the biggest launches online, and he understands conversion rate optimization and direct marketing. He's a fantastic designer, and you can see some of his work here and here. Send him in email if you need help with any design, and I know he will do an amazing job on your HVAC lead generation campaign materials.
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