Direct mail that finds the gates.
Statewide Automatic Gates installs and services automatic gates across rural and estate Oklahoma. Licensed, established, genuinely good at the work — and entirely dependent on referral. There was no brand system, no way to track where a lead came from, and no repeatable way to create demand in a quiet month.
- Client
- Statewide Automatic Gates
- Sector
- Access control & field services
- Market
- Rural & estate Oklahoma
- Scope
- Brand, demand generation, lead infrastructure
Good work, invisible pipeline.
The trade was never the problem. The company holds the license, runs the trucks and does the work. The problem was everything around it: no consistent identity to put on a shirt, a sign or a truck; no reviews anywhere, on any platform, despite a book of completed jobs; and no mechanism at all for telling where an inbound call had come from.
That last gap is the expensive one. Without attribution you cannot tell a good marketing decision from a lucky month, which means you cannot repeat either. Every quiet week was answered with the same instinct — wait for the phone to ring.
And the two audiences are not one audience. A rancher with a failing solar opener at the end of a half-mile drive and an estate owner who wants a gate that talks to a phone are buying different things, in different words, at different price points. One message to both was going to underperform for both.
What we did.
Brand first, because everything else has to be printed on something. Then demand. Then the plumbing that makes demand measurable.
Built the brand system.
A full identity — primary lockup and a badge mark for tight applications, a navy and gold palette, and outlined vector files ready to hand to a shirt printer, a sign shop or a decal installer without a font ever going missing. All of it lives in one master brand reference, so every vendor works from the same file instead of the last email attachment they were sent.
Split the market and mailed it.
Two postcard editions, written for two buyers. Rugged. Solar. Automatic. for ranch and acreage owners. Secure. Smart. Connected. for estate properties. 430 oversized 6×9 first-class pieces on a property list we built and filtered ourselves, mailed on schedule.
Made every card trackable.
A dedicated text line with a different keyword on each edition, wired into the company’s field-service software so an inbound text arrives already tagged. Every response is attributable to the exact card that produced it — which turns a mail drop from an expense into an experiment with a readable result.
Built the review engine.
A playbook and a tracker: who gets asked, when, in what words, and what the reply says. SMS and email templates, response templates for both good and bad reviews, and a strict no-gating, no-incentive policy so the program stays inside Google’s rules and the reviews stay defensible. The company’s two years of free quarterly maintenance became the natural moment to ask again.
Put the launch in front of local press.
A press release and media kit to eight Oklahoma outlets covering the towns the trucks actually drive to, timed to land with the mail.
Then we stopped guessing.
The second campaign flipped the target: the first drop went to properties without a gate, selling an installation. The second goes to properties that already have one, selling the repair. That changes who deserves the card — and made the list itself the highest-leverage thing on the project.
Pulled the whole universe, not a sample.
Every qualifying property across four rural and semi-rural ZIP codes — 1,486 records. Then we suppressed every household from the first drop, every do-not-mail flag and one unaddressed parcel. What remained was 1,035 genuinely fresh households, 2.4 times the volume of the first campaign, with no one receiving the same offer twice.
Replaced random sampling with a scoring model.
A 100-point gate-likelihood and engagement score on every record. Acreage. Age of improvements — properties built between 2005 and 2016 score highest, because a gate goes in with the house and an opener runs ten to twenty years, which puts that cohort in the failure window right now. Owner-occupancy. Whether the record is addressed to a human being rather than an LLC or a trust. House size. Then penalties: properties currently listed for sale, and properties in financial distress, score down.
Proved the model against the alternative.
Scored top 250 versus a random 250 from the same pool: owner-occupied, 245 against 190. Addressed to a named person, 228 against 127. Median lot, 10.0 acres against roughly 5. In the opener-failure window, 155. Currently listed for sale, zero. Same budget, same postage, a materially different mailbox.
Left the reserve intact.
505 qualified households sit ranked and unmailed behind the send list — a third campaign already built, and a list that can be cut from the bottom if the budget moves without losing the best names.
Where it stands.
Every card carries a keyword, every keyword lands in the field-service software tagged, and every drop gets a 30-day scorecard. The company can now tell a good decision from a lucky month.
What we’re doing now.
The repair campaign
The scored lists mail the first full week of September, with the tracking keywords live before the cards land so nothing arrives unattributed.
Gate verification
Working the ranked list down against satellite and street-level imagery to confirm which drives actually carry a gate — tightening the model with every pass.
Review program
Running the request cadence against the completed-job book and turning a zero-review presence into a defensible one.
Local search
Building the search and directory foundation so the demand the mail creates has somewhere to land.
Entrepreneurs, not consultants. The difference matters.
We take a limited number of engagements at a time. If you’re an established business owner ready to sharpen your competitive edge, let’s talk.