Your drawback recovery stops at the ports you already know.

Your firm finds money Customs already owes. The 99-year-old drawback statute, 19 U.S.C. 1313, lets exporters recover duties, taxes, and fees paid on imported merchandise that was later exported or destroyed. Most eligible companies never file. Your work is to identify the gap, document the chain, and file the claim. Your pipeline, if it runs on referrals from brokers and forwarders, has a ceiling. It always does.

The Buyers Are Importers Who Export, Not Drawback Specialists

The company that needs you does not know the term "duty drawback." They know they paid duty on raw materials, imported components, or finished goods, and they know some of those goods left the country. They do not connect the two events into a refund opportunity.

Your buyer sits in trade compliance, supply chain, or finance at a firm with significant import volume and measurable export activity. The role varies: a director of global logistics at a manufacturer with maquiladora operations; a CFO at a chemical distributor who sees the duty line on the P&L but not the recovery potential; a trade compliance manager at an electronics firm handling returns and warranty replacements across borders. They are not searching for drawback firms. They are not comparing vendors. They are not attending webinars on Customs refund strategy.

They find you through accident: a broker mentions it in passing, a competitor's general counsel raises it at an industry dinner, a Big Four team spots it during a broader engagement and brings in a specialist. These accidents produce good clients. They do not produce enough of them.

Why Referrals Cap Out in This Vertical

Broker and forwarder referrals have a structural limit. The broker who knows your work has a short list of clients with both import and export volume. After those introductions, the broker's network is tapped. The broker also has no incentive to push drawback aggressively: it does not increase their freight revenue, and a failed claim can damage the relationship they value more than yours.

The accountant who refers you once may not see another eligible client for two years. The in-house counsel who trusted you with a post-audit recovery has moved to a new company. The trade association where you spoke has a membership that turns over slowly.

Your close rate on referred leads is high. Your volume is low. The math is not mysterious.

What Email Correspondence Reaches

ROI Wire structures Email Correspondence to a named person at a named company, with a subject and opening line that reference the firm's actual trade pattern. The letter does not announce your services. It states a condition: the recipient's firm imported a certain class of goods in a volume that suggests export activity, and export activity triggers potential recovery under 19 U.S.C. 1313.

The specifics matter. A letter that opens with "We help companies recover Customs duties" reads as generic and is deleted. A letter that notes the recipient's HTS chapter, the rough import volume implied by public manifests, and the export filing pattern visible in Census data signals competence. It signals that the writer has done the work of understanding the firm's trade footprint, not bought a list and sprayed a template.

The correspondence proceeds through a short sequence. The first letter identifies the condition and asks a single question: whether the firm has an active drawback program or has reviewed its eligibility in the past thirty-six months. The second letter, sent to non-responders, names the specific drawback category that likely applies: same condition, manufacturing substitution, rejected merchandise, or destruction. The third letter, where appropriate, references a regulatory change or a recent CBP ruling that affects the firm's sector.

Each letter is signed by a principal at your firm, not by ROI Wire. The reply address routes to your domain. The phone number is yours.

Direct Mail for a Physical, Document-Heavy Decision

Drawback claims require paper. They require bills of lading, commercial invoices, manufacturing records, export declarations, and proof of destruction. The decision to engage a drawback firm is not made in an inbox. It is made in a conference room with files spread on a table and counsel on the phone.

Direct Mail respects this. A letter arrives in a standard envelope, business size, with a typed address and a live stamp. It is opened by the person whose name is on it, or by an assistant who was told to watch for it. The letter inside is one page, dense with specifics: the HTS subheading, the estimated annual duty paid, the export years visible in the data, and a single proposed next step, a thirty-minute review of the firm's import and export records.

A follow-up piece, sent two weeks later, includes a one-page summary of the firm's drawback category and a short checklist of the documents required to file. This is not a brochure. It is a working document that the recipient can hand to operations and say, "See if we have these."

The physical pieces accumulate. A trade compliance manager who has received two letters and a checklist will take the call. The call is not an interruption. It is the next step in a correspondence they already recognize.

The Phone Follows the Letters by Date

The phone call, when it comes, references the letter sent on a specific date and the HTS category named in it. The caller, from your firm, speaks as someone who has already studied the company's trade pattern and is now confirming details that the public record cannot show: whether the exported goods were in the same condition, whether manufacturing consumed the imported materials, whether destruction was documented with CBP supervision.

The recipient is not surprised. They are not sold. They are asked to verify facts they already possess, and to consider whether those facts, assembled correctly, constitute a claim they did not know they had.

This is the difference between outreach that works in this vertical and outreach that fails. The buyer does not want to be educated about drawback in general. They want to know that the caller has done enough homework to speak about their specific import and export history without wasting their time.

Revenue Share Fits Here, When the Structure Is Right

Some drawback engagements suit a revenue share model. The client firm covers the cost of the correspondence program and the infrastructure to run it. ROI Wire takes a share of the revenue from claims that originate through the correspondence. The share is negotiated case by case. It is never "risk-free" and never a blanket guarantee.

Other engagements run on a retainer, particularly where the client prefers predictable cost or where the recovery timeline is extended by CBP processing backlogs. The model is discussed after the fit is established, not before.

What matters is that the commercial structure aligns with the client's incentive to cooperate. A revenue share only works when the client commits to document production and to timely filing. A firm that wants the money without the work is not a client ROI Wire will correspond for.

What ROI Wire Does Not Touch

Drawback claims involve sensitive commercial data: supplier names, pricing, manufacturing yields, export destinations, and destruction certificates. ROI Wire runs the correspondence only. It does not handle claims, file with CBP, access ACE records, or touch the documentation that supports the drawback application. That remains entirely with your firm.

This separation is stated plainly to prospects who ask, and it should be stated plainly here. The correspondence program finds the conversation. Your firm conducts it.

The Firms This Will Not Serve

ROI Wire does not take on drawback practices that are new enough to lack filing history with CBP, that promise clients recovery figures they have not substantiated, or that treat drawback as a volume play alongside other refund chasing. The correspondence is precise because the underlying work is precise. A firm that files claims it cannot defend in a CBP audit will eventually harm its clients and itself. That firm is not a fit.

Nor does ROI Wire work with firms unwilling to pay fairly for the infrastructure and labor of a sustained correspondence program. The cost is real. The return, when the fit is right, justifies it. A principal who wants the leads without the commitment will not get them.

The Specifics That Make the Correspondence Credible

A credible drawback letter names real elements of the trade. It references the HTS, not generically but at the six-digit level where the pattern is visible. It notes the distinction between same-condition drawback and manufacturing substitution, because a firm that exports finished goods made from imported raw materials needs a different program than a firm that exports what it imported unchanged.

It acknowledges the three-year lookback and the five-year export window. It knows that TFTEA, the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015, expanded substitution drawback and that some firms eligible under the old rules are newly eligible under the new ones. It does not lecture. It states the condition and asks whether the firm has reviewed its position.

This specificity is not decoration. It is the filter that separates a recipient who will respond from one who will not. A generic logistics manager at a firm with no import volume will not recognize the terms and will discard the letter. A trade compliance director at a firm with $2 million in annual duty payments and a maquiladora operation will recognize them immediately. That is the intended effect.

The Data That Informs the List

ROI Wire builds correspondence lists from public and commercial sources that record import and export activity. The sources include bill of lading data, Census export filings, and Customs manifest records. The list is not purchased from a generic B2B database. It is constructed firm by firm, verified for trade volume and pattern, and matched to the individuals responsible for compliance or logistics decisions.

The list is narrow. A thousand firms with import volume but no export activity are excluded. A hundred firms with export activity but no duty-paid imports are excluded. The remaining firms, typically a few hundred in a given sector or region, receive correspondence calibrated to their specific trade pattern.

This narrowness is the point. Drawback is not a mass-market service. It is a precision service for a thin slice of importers. The correspondence should reflect that.

How the Engagement Begins

An engagement begins with a review of your firm's existing client base: the sectors they serve, the drawback categories they handle, the average claim size and timeline. ROI Wire then identifies lookalike firms in the same sectors with visible import and export activity. The first correspondence list is typically fifty to one hundred firms, enough to test response patterns without overextending your capacity to conduct discovery calls and document reviews.

The correspondence runs for a defined period, usually ninety days, with reporting on opens, replies, and meetings scheduled. The program is adjusted based on what the data shows: which HTS categories respond, which job titles reply, which letter sequences produce meetings. The adjustment is continuous, not quarterly.

After the initial period, the list expands or shifts to adjacent sectors where the pattern holds. A firm that successfully serves chemical importers may find similar profiles in pharmaceutical ingredients or specialty plastics. The expansion is deliberate, not automatic.

Sources

Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015, Pub. L. No. 114-125, 130 Stat. 122 (2016).

19 U.S.C. 1313.

19 C.F.R. Part 191.