An internal Invenix pilot built to validate a new lead activation channel for trade businesses across landscaping, roofing, fencing, pools, paving, pest control and construction. Built around the reality that small NZ tradies can't justify enterprise data subscriptions, full-time marketing staff, or weeks of door-knocking, and that generic letterbox drops typically convert below 1%.
Door-Knocking Doesn't Scale
A two-person sales team can knock 40-60 doors a day. Labour costs run $15-25 per contact and conversion sits at 1-3%.
Tradies either burn evenings knocking themselves or hire reps who churn within months.
Generic Letterbox Drops Convert Below 1%
Untargeted "we do roofs" flyers go straight in the bin. The industry benchmark for generic letterbox drops is 0.5-1%, and most NZ tradies report worse.
A 5,000-piece drop returns 25-50 inquiries, most unqualified, with cost per booked job in the hundreds.
No Visibility Into Which Houses Actually Need the Work
Aerial and public property data already shows which roofs are rusted, which lawns are bare, and which backyards have space and value for a pool. No small operator has the tools to surface those signals at suburb scale.
Sales effort gets sprayed across neighbourhoods instead of landing on properties that genuinely need the service.
Renters and Investors Eat the Budget
Even targeted lists mix in renters, absentee landlords and short-term flippers. Tradies pay to reach them anyway and rarely hear back.
Up to a third of mailing spend lands with people who can't or won't commission the work.
A system that turns public property data into a pipeline of warm, hyper-personalised leads. Each lead arrives as a ready-to-mail postcard showing the homeowner's actual property, a realistic upgrade preview, and an ROI narrative specific to their suburb.
Lead Discovery Engine
- Built a suburb scan that identifies properties matching the trade partner's target service (bare yards for landscaping, ageing roofs for roofing, fenceless boundaries for fencing, etc.)
- Layered freshness checks so properties that have already been upgraded drop out of the pipeline
- Hand-validated detection accuracy against current street-level evidence before any mail consideration
Owner Qualification
- Built an ownership confidence model that scores each property HIGH, MEDIUM or LOW for owner-occupier likelihood
- Cross-referenced rental signals, tenure length and sale history to filter renters, landlords and recent flippers
- Set a HIGH-confidence threshold as the gate for any personalised mail piece so trade spend lands with real decision-makers
Personalised Lead Asset
- Generated photoreal "after" previews tailored to each qualified property and the chosen service
- Wrote per-property postcard copy naming the suburb, the likely value uplift and a soft "free quote" CTA
- Ran four full Auckland pilot properties end-to-end to validate render quality, tone and ROI accuracy
Print & Delivery Pipeline
- Integrated print-ready output with NZ Post AdCard bulk mail for hands-off delivery
- Added a QR code per postcard linking to a property-specific landing page with before/after slider and booking widget
- Built suppression-list handling so opt-outs are honoured immediately across every future send
- Pipeline now ready for first trade partner campaigns
Pilot Validation
Industry benchmark for hyper-personalised direct mail. Generic letterbox drops sit at 0.5-1%, putting this roughly 6-13x higher.
Renters and investors filtered out before any postcard is printed. Flagship pilot property scored 98/100 on the ownership confidence model.
Landscaping, roofing, fencing, pools, paving, pest control and construction all live in the pilot pipeline.
Four full pilot runs from suburb scan to ready-to-mail postcard, with render quality and copy tone signed off internally.
Once a service and suburb are set, the system produces qualified leads and personalised mail without ongoing input from the trade partner.
Additional outcomes
- Replaces door-knocking with a desk-job: trade partners stop chasing streets and start receiving qualified inquiries.
- Every campaign produces a property-specific landing page, so digital follow-up (SMS, retargeting, email) reuses the same personalised assets at no extra cost.
- Pilot architecture lets a single trade partner test one suburb at low risk before scaling regionally.