A 3.7x+ Conservative Return That Led Air Control HVAC to Triple Their Campaign

Campaign Overview

Air Control HVAC's leadership started our first meeting sharing their perspective on direct mail marketing - that it just gets thrown away. But they were curious and open-minded to try it. City Publications takes a more data-oriented approach than most partners, in the space, so Air Control was comfortable running a pilot in summer 2026 that operated on clear success criteria and measurable outcomes for the business.

Location: North Metro Atlanta and Cherokee County

The card pack reached 50,000 affluent, owner-occupied homes across North Metro Atlanta. Precision Postcards targeted the recent wealth moving into Cherokee County household by household, focusing on owner-occupied single-family homes that were at least ten years old and above a defined property-value threshold.

Digital display reinforced those same targeted addresses, while Visitor ID addressed a different part of the funnel: website visitors who left without filling out a form.

Why Better Measurement Was Needed

The challenge was not simply skepticism about direct mail. It was skepticism about attribution. The company had been burned before by marketing reports that looked impressive but did not connect cleanly to completed work.

• Use the client’s own job file as the basis for the analysis.
• Compare every mailed address against the jobs completed during the pilot.
• Count households once, never twice.
• Exclude jobs occurring within three days of a mail date.
• Separate existing customers from households that were not already on the books.
• Distinguish a household match from proof that the advertising caused the job.
• Give the client the analysis file so the work could be checked independently.

The Analysis: A 3.7x+ Conservative Return

At the end of the four month pilot, City Publications Atlanta placed the campaign mailing file beside the company’s job file and reviewed all 891 jobs completed during the period. The pilot delivered 60 leads.

That figure was not presented as proof that direct mail caused 60 jobs. It established that the campaign reached an address and that the same household later appeared in the company’s job records. The analysis then narrowed the result by removing existing customers and applying timing exclusions.

The distance between the company’s tracked figure and the broader address match was not treated as a result by itself. It was treated as a range that needed to be narrowed. The conservative read produced the 3.7x+ return.

What the Data Showed

The card pack outperformed expectations. It produced the most matched jobs of any channel in the program despite being the specific mail piece the team was most skeptical of going in.

Precision targeting worked in a new market. The targeted postcards performed well enough in Cherokee County that the fourth-quarter targeted mail program is concentrating there.

Visitor ID became the efficiency story. In one billed month, Visitor ID identified 68 website visitors who left without submitting a form. Three became jobs, a 4.4% visitor-to-job conversion rate including a full system replacement. The company’s CRM had attributed that job to a search ad. On the stated campaign economics for that month, Visitor ID returned approximately 50x.

Match quality was high. In the match-quality subset cited in the analysis, 53 of 58 households matched on exact street address plus ZIP code.

What They Did Next

They tripled the campaign.

The decision to expand is the most concrete business outcome of the pilot. Two executives who had spent years dismissing the medium reviewed an analysis that explicitly stated what it could prove, what it could not prove, and where uncertainty remained, then bought more of it.

How the In-Home Advertising Program Worked

The pilot combined broad reach with household-level precision. The card pack placed Air Control Heating & Air’s brand inside 50,000 affluent North Atlanta homes at a low cost per household. Precision Postcards concentrated additional spend on properties aligned with the company’s target profile.

Digital display reinforced the campaign against those same addresses. Visitor ID handled another gap entirely by identifying website visitors who left without completing a form and activating postcard follow-up. Each component had a distinct job instead of expecting one channel to do everything.

Program Components

• Card Pack reaching 50,000 affluent, owner-occupied North Metro Atlanta households.
• Precision Postcards targeted using home type, owner occupancy, age, value and geography.
• Digital display reinforcement against the same targeted addresses.
• Visitor ID to identify site visitors who left without submitting a form and trigger postcard follow-up.
• Job-file review comparing campaign records against 891 completed jobs.
• Address-level matchback with household deduplication.
• Conservative attribution rules removing existing customers and jobs too close to the mail date.
• Client-checkable reporting with the underlying analysis file provided for review.

Why Atlanta Home Service Businesses Trust Us

City Publications Atlanta does not ask a home service company to judge advertising only by pieces mailed, impressions served or a vendor-built dashboard. Campaign performance is compared against the business itself.

• Campaign records are compared with real customers and completed jobs.
• Household-level matchback can reveal business missed by traditional source attribution.
• Conservative exclusions reduce the risk of claiming revenue the campaign could not reasonably have influenced.
• Tracking and matchback are reported as different forms of evidence rather than blended into one inflated figure.
• Clients can review the underlying data and methodology themselves.

Key Benefits

Summary

Air Control Heating & Air, whose leadership came in suspecting direct mail might just be junk mail, ran a defined four month pilot combining a card pack, Precision Postcards, digital reinforcement, Visitor ID and address-level performance analysis.

City Publications Atlanta reviewed 891 jobs, delivered 60 leads from the pilot, and then deliberately narrowed the analysis instead of claiming every match as campaign-generated business. After removing existing customers and applying conservative timing rules, the program returned 3.7x+ the investment, roughly six times what the company’s own attribution system had been able to see.

Visitor ID separately identified 68 anonymous website visitors in one billed month, with three becoming jobs, including a full system replacement. The company then expanded from 50,000 to 150,000 mailed homes for Q4, concentrated targeted mail in the market that performed, and continued Visitor ID.

They did not triple the campaign because they were shown the largest number possible. They tripled it after being shown what the data could establish, what it could not establish, and enough information to check the work themselves.