Getting Started with PostPilot
Direct Mail? For direct-to-consumer advertising? In 2023?
Yes — enter PostPilot.
Andrew Foxwell joined Michael Epstein with PostPilot for a webinar to discuss how PostPilot can streamline your DTC direct mail advertising channel and scale it profitably. PostPilot does this through
So, why is Direct Mail hot right now? First, the iOS update (iOS14 originally) has made it much harder for advertisers and brands to track and target their customers through attribution, which has forced advertisers to diversify their channels and find other ways to reach and engage with their customers and prospects. Second, existing or warm email list subscribed customers have email overload in their inboxes and are becoming increasingly more likely to not open a brand’s email blast. (Did you know that the average e-commerce email open rate is only about 20-25%?). Third, there's something different about receiving a physical piece of mail from a brand that you know or recognize versus an email that's fleeting and forgotten about an instant. Direct mail keeps your brand top of mind and people just perceive it differently. Studies show that they perceive direct mail actually more like a gift from a brand versus an interruption like an ad.
With direct mail, you can actually reach nearly 100% of your audience, even if they're actually unsubscribed, you can still send them a direct mail piece because it's not subject to the same sort of restrictions as email. So it's a great way to reach all your customers and prospects.
Watch or read the webinar below to learn more about how direct mail may be the next best way to diversify your marketing efforts in 2023.
Read the full transcript:
Andrew Foxwell (00:03):
Welcome everyone. Thank you so much for being here. I'm here talking with Michael from PostPilot. We have had a good partnership with PostPilot in the third and fourth quarter of 2022, and members of our Foxwell Founders Membership, many of them gave it a shot. We gave it a shot. l loved the process, loved how it worked. Also appreciated the forward thinking nature, always of the PostPilot team of like, Hey, have you tried this? Have you tried that? So Michael, who I've come to know and respect, is gonna be talking today about the kinds of things that they're doing and the ideas that they could provide to your brand, that are really innovative in terms of direct mail coming into 2023. So, Michael, thanks for being here.
Michael from PostPilot (00:50):
Thanks, Andrew. I appreciate everything, privilege to be working with you -- OG ad Guru and the Foxwell Group, which has been awesome for us and love, you know, making those connections. So appreciate it. And yeah, we're gonna talk a little bit today about direct mail free e-commerce, and specifically why is it hot right now, and why is it coming back? And then how to add it to your Q1 arsenal. We'll make it pretty quick. Keep it to probably under 30 minutes, and happy to answer any questions afterwards, or stop me any time. So, why is Direct Mail hot right now? There's kind of three main reasons. First, the iOS update. I mean, a lot of ad agencies and ad buyers in this group understand this acutely. Kind of the bane of everyone's existence for the last year plus. So obviously it's made it harder to track and target and people have seen challenges with their Facebook ROAS. So actively looking to diversify their channels and find other ways to reach and engage with their customers and prospects.
(02:08):
Second, email engagement, email overload. So, the average e-commerce email open rate is only about 20-25%. So what that means is this large swath of your best audience, your existing customers and subscribers, are actually not getting your message, right? Like you, you can't really reach them. And again, iOS14 has only made that even harder from a retargeting perspective. But, you've got this, this rich audience that is engaged with your brand and is not really hearing from you. With direct mail, you can actually reach nearly 100% of your audience, even if they're actually unsubscribed, you can still send them a direct mail piece because it's not subject to the same sort of restrictions as email. So it's a great way to reach all your customers and prospects. And then number three, it just works as evidenced by all these smiling stock photos. People like receiving direct mail. There's something different about receiving a physical piece of mail from a brand that you know or recognize versus an email that's fleeting, it's forgotten about an instant. You're not really engaging with it. This direct mail sits on the table, on your desk, on the kitchen counter, and is keeping your brand top of mind. And again, people just perceive it differently. Studies show that they perceive direct mail actually more like a gift from a brand versus an interruption like an ad.
Andrew Foxwell (03:56):
I received some direct mail in the third and fourth quarter of 2022 that I kept the pieces because they were so fun to browse and to look at, you know, and there was something about that sitting and it was sitting on the kitchen counter and I loved looking at it like when I was waiting for the oven to warm up or whatever. Because it was so beautifully designed and it told the brand story well. Obviously I'm inclined because I'm a marketer, but I think that is important to point out that it is different in that way. And you know, they're gonna get it, because the USPS will get it there. Hell or high water.
Michael from PostPilot (04:38):
Yes, for sure. I remember talking to Albert from Promix, the supplement brand and just talking about how he loves having a physical representation of his brand inside someone's home. And that just feels different. It elevates the brand in a lot of ways. So really kind of similar to what you're saying, Andrew. And to be clear, not suggesting anyone stop email or stop Facebook ads or do any of that stuff, this is really just a supplement, another tool in your arsenal to allow you to reach more folks and engage people how they want to be engaged. And so as kind of continue with the points I was, I was mentioning before, again, direct mail people read it, they look at it again, think about how you look at even junk mail that you take out from your mailbox.
(05:33):
You're not discarding it without even looking at it. You're flipping through it at least. And when you see a brand in that stack of mail that you receive and you recognize a brand, you stop and you actually pay attention to what that says. That's why the lifespan on a postcards over two weeks versus again, seconds for an email that gets discarded or if, if you even see it and it hasn't gone to your promo tab, you're typically deleting it and forgetting about it almost instantaneously. And that's why it also gets such higher response rates -- 3.4% versus, you know, less than 1% for email. Then you have to balance that with the fact that obviously there's a higher cost for for direct mail versus sending out an email. But typically the response rates are gonna justify that, and still produce a really high ROI.
(06:23):
So how should we think about direct mail as a marketer? And so a lot of marketers picture direct mail is sort of this spray and pre I'm just gonna blast a bunch of people in a ZIP code of a total cold audience with the direct mail piece. And that's not the way that we recommend starting. We recommend thinking sort of back of the customer funnel and working your way back up. So think retention first. The low-hanging fruit is win-back campaigns or second purchase campaigns -- reminders. So folks that have gone 90, 180 even a year or more without purchasing from your brand, obviously not responded to digital ads during that time because if they had, they, they would've purchased by now. And you can see a lot of incremental revenue and reactivation from targeting and nudging those existing customers with a direct mail piece. And then you start working your way up the funnel into kind of middle and and colder audiences. So we'll talk about a couple of those strategies as well, but start with the remarketing retention audiences and then work your way up towards cold as you sort of prove out the efficacy of the channel and start to get your campaigns dialed in.
(07:50):
And so lots of brands say, where do I start? I've never done direct mail. I'm a digital marketer, I don't know what to do. So where do you start? Run through some, some strategies. So right now, a lot of our, our brands call this Q5 because especially in the health and wellness space, because it's kind of their second Christmas. It's when, obviously New Year's resolutions are big and so you're thinking like these new year new you type campaigns again, particularly in sort of the health and wellness space, supplements and other products, cosmetics, apparel, people looking to refresh their wardrobe, self-improvement type products. So that is an easy win right now. That is, again, kind of like a second Black Friday, second Christmas period for a lot of brands. We talked about those second purchase and win-back campaigns.
(08:48):
So think, Obvi is an example here sells they, if they sell a 60 supply of supplements and a customer goes 65, 70, 90 days without repurchasing that product and they've been getting nudged via email and still haven't purchased, you gotta get them back before they permanently defect. The longer they go without repurchasing from you, the more likely you are to lose them forever. So it's important to trigger these campaigns that help get them back on track and buying again. Similar with Overtone, a hair color brand, again, they kind of know how long that product is supposed to last. If they keep going beyond that time, trigger a card that reminds them it's time to restock. You can do cross sells for a second purchase -- customer buys product A and trigger card to, with an offer for product B, reactivation is similar to this win-back. We worked with brands like Four Sigmatic and they actually went back over two years and profitably reactivated customers that had not purchased in over two years and had been on their email list the entire time. It's where you make your profit, because as we all know, it's coming from living with Facebook hacks continuing to kind of rise over time. The dirty little secret for a lot of brands is they're just not profitable or marginally profitable on that first purchase and the profits are coming from getting that second and subsequent purchases from customers. And, and so that's critical for improving your margins.
Andrew Foxwell (10:30):
Yeah, I mean I think even doing email win-back campaigns are tough, like they can do well, but they are harder depending on how well it's designed and things. And so, in the times that we've mirrored our email win-back, if that's designed well with the mailer itself is really powerful. It's just another lever to pull and it's much less expensive than you think actually. Which was very surprising to me. How it actually paid for itself, right? Multiple times over. And the times we've done that. So that is really, really helpful and I think a good thing to bring up. So it's where you make your dough, as you said.
Michael from PostPilot (11:15):
Totally. Those were some of the results from those particular campaigns. So as we talked about moving up the funnel a little bit, and so one way to do that is targeting your email prospects who have not yet converted. So let's say they've gone through your welcome sequence already. You've tried to get them to convert and they just haven't converted yet. You can actually target that prospect, that lead, with a physical postcard. We have a feature called Mail Match, which allows you to take, say your Klayvio list and we can find a postal address even if they've never purchased from you. And we can find a match for about 60 to 70% of those email addresses and retarget that that prospect with a postcard. And again, this is like a warmer audience than going totally cold.
(12:16):
So you get some really good returns on these types of campaigns because they've obviously demonstrated engagement and intent with your brand, but they just haven't -- they're these fence sitters and they haven't pulled the trigger yet. And so how do you get them to convert if email hasn't done the trick? And that's where you layer in direct mail campaign. New feature, first exclusive announcement on Foxwell's webinar. It is a new format that we are, we've just released called Cardalogs. It's the cross between a postcard and a catalog. So lots of brands are interested or thought about creating a catalog. The problem is one, most brands who have catalogs have full-time employees, multiple employees that are just focused on creating a catalog, because, think, it's like creating a magazine like photography, copy for all 16 pages plus of products, the layouts, all that stuff -- that takes a lot of time and resources.
(13:21):
Then if you want to find a catalog printer, the lead time to lock down your creative and even reserve paper, because there's supply chain challenges around paper, is typically three to four months. So if you want to launch a Black Friday campaign, we saw traditional printers cutting off the deadline for a Black Friday campaign was August. And then you're also subject to really large minimums, because again, with your traditional printers, you're having to print in really large bulk runs. And so this combines kind of the flexibility and speed of a postcard with more of the real estate that you might get more similar to a catalog. So it's hard to get a perspective on how big these are, but they're like the size of my arm. And they give you a lot of space to be able to tell your brand story, present an assortment of product, which is great, particularly as you think about colder audiences that need to be introduced and educated on your brand and be able to give them more opportunities to convert. And so this is something that we are launching this week. And it can go from concept to in the mail in under a week. It's super easy. You can even split test these, like there's no minimums. You could create different variations, run it like an ad and test different variations of the content. And it's a really cool feature for brands that have thought about trying to get into catalogs and it's way easier, and way more efficient to do it this way.
Andrew Foxwell (15:07):
Yeah, I'm excited to see and hear more results about them. I think that, yeah, the catalogs that I got, I looked at like the first third of them basically. So this is sort of taking that and bringing it into something more legitimate. I also think that the type of paper and the thickness of it kind of is as I know is ingrained into these is really important. Like it feels more serious and it's like a thicker type of paper that is big in itself and it feels like a real statement piece almost, which is cool. So I think that also has implications of feeling more upmarket, which allows you to get a real piece of mail from from a brand that's worth looking at. It's beautifully designed. It's certainly going to get consumed in a very different way than an email would design the exact same.
Michael from PostPilot (16:00):
Yeah, that's a great point. I, I actually have one here, and you can see it's hard to tell on camera, but these are not like flimsy brochures that are, like one the size of it, you can get a sense of the size and two, it's thick. It's supposed to have a more luxurious feel to it than like a flimsy flyer that you might get or a traditional sort of brochure. It's a lot different, but yeah, totally good points and definitely makes a statement. One other type of format you could do is handwritten notes. So if you want to do handwritten notes at scale, particularly for your VIP audiences, maybe they've made their third purchase from you or maybe they've spent a total of $500 or a $1,000 with you, you could trigger a handwritten note.
(16:55):
These are robotic and so it's a robot that literally holds a pen to paper and writes with all the nuance of a human hand. So you can see the letters vary the spacing and indentation and it just has all the sort of nuance of human handwriting. It's a really memorable thing for, again, your VIP customers and then, clone your email campaigns. Andrew was talking about it before, in some cases you can send the direct mail piece if someone hasn't responded to your email. In other cases, brands wanna send simultaneously to have kind of multiple touchpoints that help get that message across. But the standard core flows that you would have in an email program win-back campaigns, we talked about abandoned cart, so they've gotten your abandoned cart email, they still haven't converted, trigger an abandoned cart, direct mail piece, cross sell.
(17:57):
So this bottom right corner is for a shapewear brand one, if they buy certain shapewear, then they trigger this cream to promote customers of their shapewear, refill reminders, and subscriptions. So if the brand has a subscribe and save option, but the customer only purchased the one time, a one-off purchase trigger, it's something to get them to move into a subscribe and save. Conversely, you could actually trigger a card if someone cancels a subscription and nudge them to resubscribe. And then again, we talked about some of these. So you can see on the bottom left is an abandoned cart campaign from Snow, a teeth whitening brand.
(18:56):
So what does a good postcard look like? People ask like, I've never designed one of these, how do I design it? So a couple of the elements that you'll see here -- QR code kind of best practice now reduces the friction. You can send somebody directly to the site, you can also send them to a landing page. You can even auto apply a discount code using UTM parameters for Shopify brands. So you could say, scan this and we'll automatically take 10% off your cart. The incentive. So you want to drive urgency with some sort of incentive. It doesn't need to be necessarily something that's much different from what you might find on the site, but you should have something that helps create urgency, clear branding, something that's recognizable, the URL to send back so the customers know to go back to the site, dynamic personalization. So you can see it says, Hey Judy, that's a dynamic field. So that sort of personalization really helps with engagement and response. And then, expiration. Again, create some urgency and the code that people would use to apply that discount. And again, some results over here. Campaign got about a 9X ROAS.
Andrew Foxwell (20:29):
You're talking about the re return on ad spend metrics that you're showing, and I know that's within PostPilot. How is that calculated? Could you describe that?
Michael from PostPilot (20:41):
Sure. So couple ways that we can calculate ROAS: because we're natively integrated with Shopify, we know when the customer receives the card and we know if they go on to make a subsequent purchase and we can track that in real time in your dashboard and show you that that customer went on to make a purchase. And we can also do it based on the coupon code. We show you both metrics -- whether they used the coupon code that was on the card.
Andrew Foxwell (21:07):
Cool. Perfect. I wanted to have you describe it. I knew that was the answer, but I just wanted to make sure that I was saying it correctly. Anyway, you were going to talk about these examples of some other best practices.
Michael from PostPilot (21:20):
Yeah, on the dynamic personalization like these, these are individually triggered. So you can send a campaign to an audience segment the same way you'd send an email campaign, like a newsletter or product announcement or a sale announcement, but you can also trigger them like flows the same way you'd trigger an email flow in Klaviyo. So as soon as somebody enters the segment that you've defined, trigger an individually personalized card to go out to somebody at that time. And that's why you can do the sort of personalization of these cards.
(22:05):
Quick recap for everybody. It's cheaper than you think. It's more effective and easier than you think. Cards start at $0.49 a piece. Again, no minimum, no big commitments or contracts or anything like that. It's easy. We can literally do the whole thing for you. And if you're an agency, we can do all the work behind the scenes and you guys take all the credit. We like doing that with our agencies. I think retention first. So start in those retention and remarketing type campaigns and then work your way back up the funnel from there into colder acquisition. And as I mentioned, we do have a done for you service. So we have a full team of creative designers, account managers and strategists, analysts.
(22:54):
And so we can do everything from strategy, set up, implementation, design, and get this launched for you. We take it all off your plate or if you're an agency, do it on behalf of your agency and let you run point with your client, whatever you prefer. And it's just an easy add-on for a lot of agencies, whether they're doing paid or email and SMS retention type campaigns. It's easy to add on. Direct mail is just another touchpoint and channel. We can replicate a lot of what you're doing in your email program and again, just makes it really easy and could be lucrative for an agency as well. So lastly, PostPilot -- think Klaviyo for postcards. It's the easiest way to think about what we do. DTC is really in our DNA. Myself and my partner Drew have been in DR e-commerce for over 20 years. We built the product that we know digital marketers and e-comm brands would want to use. We can do it all for you. And like the shortcut here is if you go to postpilot.com/gfo, which is Godfather offer, because it's an offer you can't refuse, we'll do the, again, we'll do the whole thing for you. We can offer you or your clients a free batch of cards to help get them started and make it kind of no risk for everybody. So that's my spiel.
Andrew Foxwell (24:22):
That's awesome. I appreciate you going through it. I think it's the offer itself is great. There's no commitment, very low risk. The worst thing that can happen is you try it and it, and it gets mediocre results, which it probably won't, but let's say that it gets mediocre results. You can have learnings of, okay, well this is what happened with it, let's try another one. So I think that's super important. I appreciate you running through what people can do and I don't think there's any questions that I see on here. If you need any help, email Michael or you can email myself, andrew@foxwelldigital.com and we'll go from there.