How Jake Needham builds a direct mail list for roofers

Jake I like to really focus in on the data. I think it is a little bit more important of an aspect than the mail piece itself, because I've seen some terrible mail pieces that have still closed deals just because we're getting in front of the right people at the right time.

Jake I appreciate you having me on here. A little bit about my background is, I joined Boom Print Mail about two and a half, three years ago here now. Previous to that, I graduated college with a communications degree and a business minor, worked in professional sports for about three years. It was more of sales jobs that I worked there, ticket sales to be specific, season ticket account management. But I always wanted to learn more about marketing. I always knew that was kind of the field where I wanted to be, setting up campaigns and testing out different aspects to how can we make our clients more money. I got approached. Actually, I had a family member that worked here, and he was like, yeah, you should check it out. And I've been here ever since. So it's been a fun journey. We do handle a lot of roofing mailers. So we already have some templates on file to make recommendations to our clients. So whenever they reach out to us, we have a meeting with them. We find out more about their company. And from there, we go look at past campaigns we've ran around their markets and give them realistic expectations, saying, here's some good pieces that have worked around your area in the past. Let's use these and make them unique to your company. The mailers play a large portion in the success. It's going to be the call to action. It's what's going to make them pick up the phone and give you a call, or direct them to your website. But the mailers are only really as strong as the data that's backing them. So that is the key to setting up a successful mailing campaign, is pairing very good data with a proven mail piece that has been shown to work. And with marketing, there's obviously no guarantees in it, but we like to go off of past results. That's something that we monitor close with our clients. We like to set up monthly check-ins with them and determine if we should make any adjustments, because that's usually where the magic happens, about 30 to 45 days into a campaign. We get some feedback from our clients, different trends that they've been noticing, and we make those small tweaks midway through to try to keep getting better results over time.

Jake That is accurate, and it's a lot easier said than done. A lot of times we'll do split tests up front, because if we put all of our eggs in one basket and it doesn't end up doing good, we're back to square one. Was it the data that wasn't good? Was it the mail piece that wasn't resonating with the recipients? We don't know. So with a lot of my clients up front, we'll do some kind of split test, whether that's using two different data sets, using two different mailers, and then running them head to head to find out what is getting the best results, and then reallocating the budget to what is working best, to try to continue getting better and better results over time.

Jake Yeah, so that is a great question there. And I go down this rabbit hole all the time. Actually, I call it getting lost in the data. I do that about on a weekly basis. So what that looks like with direct mail is, we have our own data platform. There's all these different data platforms where you can pull from county records and different things of that nature. But it's really how you can filter and manipulate that data to find your top prospects, the top people that you want to be getting in front of. Our clients will want to get a sense of their ideal avatar, I guess you could call it, who's going to be the most likely person to buy from them, and that's in any industry. And then from there, once we have an idea of who's their ideal avatar, we go out in their target markets where they operate at and find the top candidates from there. Getting in front of the right people is essentially the name of the game. And the question is, how do you do it?

Jake Well, one, if you've already had some deals in the past, we can always do a deal analyzation, and saying, okay, you're a beginner, but you've done three roofs, five roofs. We can take those three to five people that you have sold and see if there's any similarities between them all. And then from there, we can do, okay, all of your properties, they've been valued over $500,000. You're more on the high-end side there. These are all owner-occupied homes. All their properties have been at least 20 years old. So we can take those three things and then basically go do a search in our data platform. And let's say we come back with an abundance of data. Say they only want to mail out 500 people, but we have 5,000 people that fit that search. Okay, so now where do we go from here? How do we narrow down this search even further? There's two ways of going about it. One, we can manually start filtering it down by properties valued between $500,000 and $700,000, because anything over a million, maybe you haven't done a property of that size yet. We can also add in square footage of homes. There's a lot of times if you're in a certain area like Los Angeles, it could be a very small home, but it's valued at close to a million dollars. So that's not going to be an ideal job for you. Larger roof usually means more money. So we want to be targeting properties with certain square footages. That's a few different ways you can manually filter that data down more. The other way is using AI scoring. So a lot of people are getting into AI now. And one way that we use that is, we can run these lists through AI scoring, and we basically lean into the AI to target the most likely to buy from you. And what that looks like, actually, I did an example list for a guy. Basically, it said in his market, he's in the hail corridor. His property is between 20 and 25 years old, so he's likely needing a new roof very soon. So it's adding in all these patterns. It's stacking these different distressors, I guess you could call it. That's some insight there on how we go about pulling these lists for our clients. I like to really focus in on the data. I think it is a little bit more important of an aspect than the mail piece itself, because I've seen some terrible mail pieces that have still closed deals just because we're getting in front of the right people at the right time.

Jake That's what we try to do for our clients. Doing this by yourself, it can be very difficult, and you can end up spending thousands of dollars and not seeing returns from it. Or you can come to someone like us, get our advice, and kind of help you put the pieces of the puzzle together, take out some of that guesswork, even give you ideas on what to send. Everyone has access to ChatGPT and Claude nowadays, where you can take that piece, throw it in there and say, make it unique to my business, check out my website, and you can come up with a whole new piece that is unique to your business.

Jake Those are very common questions that we get. As far as the timeline goes, with direct mail, it's snail mail. That's what people call it. So there is a little bit of a ramp up period. Usually by the time we place your order, it's still a week and a half to two weeks before mailers are actually hitting the ground and you're starting receiving phone calls. So it's always a lagging indicator. I have a lot of people that we start off a campaign, three weeks in, they're like, what's going on? I'm not seeing any results yet. Well, we just haven't had enough time to see if this has been successful or not. It's usually, the first 30 days, we just want to ensure trends are heading in the right direction, but you start seeing results with direct mail usually about 45 days into a campaign. Those are some realistic expectations there. And as far as what you should receive out of it, it's different from one market to the next. As far as average response rates go, what we typically see is around a half percent. So it doesn't sound like a lot, but that's five phone calls for every thousand mailers. And what I like to do with my clients is reverse engineer that thought process. And 90 plus percent of people are going to either throw these mailers away, or maybe they'll put up on the fridge, and then they'll call you when the time is right. So going back to the reverse engineering of it, okay, let's say we get five phone calls. Out of those five, one ends up being a good deal opportunity. They're ready to move forward now. One deal opportunity for you out of a thousand mailers, around $1,000 spend, how much profit do you usually make on your deal? And that's going to be different from every industry that you're in. There's small ticket items, there's larger ticket items. With roofing, let's just say on average you make $10,000 per roof that you do. So if we're able to find you a deal opportunity with somewhere around a $1,000 to $3,000 spend, that looks like a 3 to 5X return on your investment. That's a great marketing channel. So that's how you had to think about it whenever you're going into, I think, any marketing channel, is, okay, what are some realistic expectations? And does it make sense? How much spend do I need to put up to find that deal opportunity? The great thing is with using mail, I don't know if this is similar with digital marketing, but over time it becomes more and more predictable. So if you want to scale up, you can easily say, okay, if I send out X amount of mailers, I know I get X amount of calls, which leads to X amount of deals. So if I want to get two deals a month, three, five deals a month, I know I need to spend X amount to produce X amount of phone calls to get X amount of deals. Is that a similar thought process with how digital marketing is too?

Jake That's where you see the differences between successful business owners and people that are kind of just running and gunning. Whenever you can get these KPIs, these numbers for your KPIs dialed in, it becomes very predictable, and you know exactly what you need to do in order to reach your goals for the month, for the quarter, for the year.

Jake Exactly. And not even just for marketing in general, I think to scale up any business, if you look at any successful business owner, I feel like they have their numbers down, or at least they have someone else on their team that is doing it for them. A lot of times people will give us a list and they just want to mail it out. Here's the neighborhood I want to be in, send out these mailers. And we're fine with it. We'll do what you want. A month later, they say, I haven't gotten any phone calls. Well, you're spraying and praying. There's no targeted approach to it. You're basically living on prayer at that point. And that's how people spend a lot of money on marketing and don't see results with it.

Jake Yeah. So yeah, I don't know if you can see it on the hat here, but I am wearing my REI Print Mail stuff, but there's two sides of our company. Real Estate Investing Print Mail, and then Boom Print Mail. We do home services and we focus in on roofing. So I do have some roofers that are getting into real estate as well. So whatever industry you're in, feel free to reach out if you're wanting to get some direct mail going. We're happy to share any of our insight.

Jake Yeah, we're based out of St. Louis, Missouri. So we're centrally located to send mailers out all over the country.

Jake Hey, thank you for having me. And I look forward to doing another one with you here soon again.