Introducing Outreach: Send Personalized Letters to Business Owners in a Few Clicks
TL;DR: Outreach is live in Accredited Pro. It sends first class personalized letters to business owners on your target list. Build the list with our off-market sourcing tool, which finds businesses matching your buy box and pulls the owner name and mailing address, or upload your own list. Then write one letter and send it to hundreds of owners at once. We built this because after years of trying phone, email, and showing up in person, mail is the channel that has worked best for us, and because we owned a direct mail company and got tired of not having this tool.
What is Outreach?
Outreach is a direct mail tool built into Accredited Pro. You pick a list of business owners, write one letter, and we print it, stuff it, stamp it, and drop it in first class mail.
That is the entire feature. The reason it took us this long is that the hard part was never the printing. It was getting a clean list of the right owners with a real mailing address attached. That is what the off-market sourcing tool has been doing for the last several months, and Outreach is the other half of it.
Here is the whole thing in under a minute 👇
You can also see everything Outreach does on the Outreach page.
Why did we build mail first?
We have tried to reach business owners every way there is to reach them.
We have cold called. We have emailed. We have driven to a shop and walked in the front door. We have sent letters. Across all of it, one channel has consistently produced more real conversations than the rest.
| Channel | What actually happened for us |
|---|---|
| Cold email | Cheapest to send, easiest to ignore. Owners of profitable businesses get a version of that email every week. |
| Cold call | Works when it lands, but the connect rate is brutal and gatekeepers are good at their jobs. |
| Showing up in person | High signal, does not scale past your own zip code. |
| Personalized letter | Highest response rate by a wide margin. Rare, tangible, and obviously took effort. |
Nobody sends mail anymore, which is exactly why mail works. An owner's inbox is a landfill. Their mailbox has a utility bill and a letter from a person who wants to buy their company. That letter gets read.
So when we sat down to figure out what to build for outreach, mail was not a close call. We wrote up the longer case for it in our off-market outreach playbook if you want the response rate data behind that.
What do we know about direct mail?
More than we expected to.
A few years ago, as business buyers, we acquired a direct mail company called Jumbo Mail Marketing. We bought it as an acquisition, not as a strategy. But running it meant learning the mechanics of the industry from the inside: print, postage classes, list hygiene, address verification, deliverability, what makes a piece get opened versus tossed.
Listen to Shaan and Sam from My First Million as they share their thoughts on Jumbo Mail 👇
My First Million - Shaan Puri and Sam Parr on Jumbo Mail Marketing
That knowledge is what shaped Outreach. We know why first class matters for this use case and not for most others, what a letter has to look like to avoid being read as junk, and how much of a campaign's outcome is decided by list quality before a single piece is printed. Those decisions are the product. The printing and postage are handled by a mail partner, which is the part we were never going to do better ourselves.
What did this used to look like for us?
Here is the honest version of our old process.
We would buy envelopes. Then drive to the post office and buy stamps, usually more than once because we underestimated. We would print letters on the office printer, which would jam somewhere around letter sixty. Then we would sit at the kitchen table at night, folding letters and stuffing envelopes with a glass of wine and something on Netflix we were not really watching.
A campaign of two hundred letters cost us an entire weekend. That is a weekend not spent on diligence, not spent talking to owners, not spent on anything that actually moves a deal forward.
We wish we had this tool years ago. That is the whole product thesis.
How does Outreach work?
Three steps.
1. Build your list. Use the off-market sourcing tool to find businesses that fit your buy box: industry, geography, size, whatever your criteria are. Run a deep dive on the ones you like and it pulls the owner name, the business details, and the mailing address. If you already have a list from your own research, upload it instead.
2. Write your letter. One letter, written once. Personalization fields drop in the owner's name and business details so each piece reads like it was written for that owner, because the parts that matter were. If you want help with the draft, the deep dive gives you a personalized opener that references something specific about their business.
3. Send. Review your list, confirm, and send. Letters go out first class. You can watch delivery status from your dashboard.
Hundreds of letters, a few clicks, no envelopes.
Why we only send first class
Every letter Outreach sends goes first class. There is no bulk option and no postcard option, and that is deliberate.
A first class letter arrives looking like correspondence rather than a promotion. It is a plain #10 envelope with a real stamp on it, no window, no indicia, nothing that tells an owner at a glance that this is a mailer they can bin unopened. Owners of profitable businesses have well-trained instincts for junk. The envelope is the first thing that has to survive them.
First class also behaves properly when it cannot be delivered. If the owner has moved, the post office forwards it. If the address is wrong, it comes back to us. Bulk mail does neither: it is simply discarded, and you never learn that a name on your list is dead. So beyond getting opened more often, first class quietly cleans your list every time you send.
It costs more per piece. We think that is the right trade when the whole point is one letter reaching one owner who might sell you their business.
Who can use it, and what does it cost?
Outreach is part of Accredited Pro, available to every subscriber.
Letters are $1.88 each, billed as you send, on top of your Pro subscription. That covers the printing, the envelope, a real stamp, and first class postage. If your letter runs longer than a page, each additional page is $0.24, up to four pages.
Your first five letters are free. Build a small list, write something honest, and send it to five owners before you spend anything. Go try it.
FAQ
What kind of mail does Outreach send? First class personalized letters. Not postcards, not bulk mail. First class costs more and it is worth it: it looks like real correspondence rather than a promotion, and it gets forwarded and returned properly, which keeps your list clean.
Where do the addresses come from? Either from our off-market sourcing tool, which identifies businesses matching your criteria and pulls owner and address details during a deep dive, or from a list you upload yourself.
Can I upload my own list? Yes. If you have built a target list from your own research, county records, or an industry association directory, you can bring it and send to it.
Can I personalize each letter? Yes. You write one letter with personalization fields, and each owner receives a letter with their name and their business details in it. You are not sending the same generic page to everybody.
Can I see whether letters were delivered? Yes. Delivery status is tracked and visible from your Outreach dashboard.
Do I need to be an Accredited Pro subscriber? Yes. Outreach sits alongside on-market search, off-market sourcing, deep dives, and the pipeline tracker inside Pro.
Start sending
If you have been meaning to start off-market outreach and kept not doing it because the logistics were miserable, that excuse is gone.
Build a list of fifty owners who fit what you want to buy. Write one honest letter about who you are and why you are reaching out to them specifically. Send it. Then do it again next month. That is how off-market deals get found, and it now takes an afternoon instead of a weekend.
Outreach is live in Accredited Pro today. If you send a campaign, tell us how it goes. We are going to be watching this one closely.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or investment advice. Direct mail outreach and acquisition activity may be subject to privacy, advertising, and securities regulations depending on your jurisdiction and approach. Consult a qualified attorney before launching outreach campaigns or pursuing an acquisition.