How to Dominate the 2022 Holiday Shopping Season with Direct Mail
One of my goals with our blog is to bring to the forefront good ideas for all of you. And one of those came across my desk this summer after speaking to my close friend Zach Stuck, automated direct mail with Post Pilot.
Post Pilot has integrations with Shopify and Klaviyo, allows you to precisely target audiences, send triggered campaigns and allows you to track ROI in real-time in their dashboard. It’s really effective for getting current customers to make another purchase and honestly, they have a new prospecting tool that can help you reach your perfect customers too.
With <60 days until BFCM, there’s no better time to give it a try. We all know during the competitive holiday season email inboxes are extra-crowded with promotional messages and CPCs go through the roof, making direct mail an even more effective channel to reach your customers & prospects.
And good news exclusively for our blog readers: they’ll send your first 1000 cards on their dime when on their Pro plan! And if you don't get a positive ROI on your first campaign, they'll refund your subscription making it totally risk-free.
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In order to bring some true value, I asked for some direct-mail best practices this holiday season from their team. This is what they put together.
How to Dominate the 2022 Holiday Shopping Season with Direct Mail
1. Start Early
It may seem like no-brainer advice for BFCM planning, but it’s important with direct mail campaigns—and especially crucial this year. You always need to build an additional week into a direct-mail marketing timeline, to give your campaigns time to actually get to customers’ mailboxes. But you’ll want even more of a cushion for the 2022 season, because direct mail is getting increasingly popular.
In addition, there’s a paper shortage, thanks to supply chain breakdowns, labor shortages, and increasing demand, among other causes.
The earlier you get your holiday campaigns rolling, the less likely you are to be impacted by shortages. Working with a larger, vertically-integrated printer like PostPilot is also an advantage, because suppliers prioritize big customers.
PostPilot recommends that clients submit holiday campaign design requests by October 10. The good news is, campaigns can be prepped early and scheduled to mail at a later date, so they arrive in mailboxes right on time.
2. Strategize Your Campaigns
Generally speaking, your marketing campaigns will be even more effective during the BFCM season. But a few kinds of postcard campaigns work exceptionally well in Q4—especially when used in tandem.
1. Start with a winback. This is a prime time to reach out to customers who have ordered in the past—particularly if they purchased last holiday but haven’t bought anything since.
That’s what Italian truffle brand Urbani did during the 2021 holiday season—and saw a 1,500% ROI. Leonardo Plebani, founder of the company’s agency, DTC Gang, sent postcards to customers who had been big spenders in the past but hadn’t made a purchase in a year. They not only came back, but they kept buying after the holidays were over.
Winback campaigns are easy with PostPilot. Simply carve out the segment in Klaviyo or the PostPilot app.
2. Prospect your email list. Next, hit the fence-sitters—people who are interested enough in your brand to be on your email list, but haven’t made a purchase yet. Put a killer BFCM offer in front of them to get them to finally convert.
No physical addresses? No problem. PostPilot’s proprietary MailMatch ™️ feature can match 60-70% of street addresses from email addresses. High-end baby gear brand Orbit used MailMatch to reach high-intent customers and scored a 16X ROI.
3. Automate an abandoned cart campaign. Abandoned carts are the plague of the holiday season. Sync email and direct mail for a powerful one-two punch. Send an abandoned cart email right away; if your customer doesn’t bite, follow up with a postcard. It’s easy to automate with PostPilot’s native Shopify and Klaviyo integrations.
Create a Klaviyo Segment
What someone has or has not done → Placed Order → Zero Times → In the Last → 30 days
+AND
What someone has or has not done → Checkout Started → At least once → Between → 6 & 8 days ago
4. Send a second campaign. Sometimes, the second time’s the charm. Concentrate your offers on Cyber Week. Then, depending on what you’ve got left in stock, in early December drop another postcard campaign that targets customers that didn’t bite on your BFCM offer the first time.
5. Get a second purchase to ink profits. Those newly acquired holiday customers were likely acquired when acquisition costs were high and products were heavily discounted. Most brands make little to no profit on that initial sale so it’s critical to convert those first-time buyers into repeat buyers.
3. Pick Your Products and Promotions
A smart offer is one of the essentials of a successful postcard campaign. That goes double for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday season—customers have been trained to expect attention-getting deals.
Aren’t all Black Friday deals created equal? Not quite. Direct mail has a higher response rate than email or online ads—9% compared to 1%—but it’s also more expensive.
Take that into account when choosing your promotions and any products. Lean towards high-AOV items with decent margins, so your marketing campaigns pay off.
4. Dial In Your Creative
If your brand is like many others, you’ve never created a direct-mail campaign. So how do you design an effective postcard? Think of it as a cross between a Facebook ad and an email. (And PostPilot has a free custom design service that can handle it all for you.)
As with Facebook, a powerful postcard has a strong visual and a single call to action. Multiple calls to action can be distracting and even confuse customers.
Postcards can also feature 1-to-1 personalization, just like email. So make sure to include your customer’s name, to increase conversion rates and build a personal relationship.
5. Crack the Coupon Code
Generally speaking, it doesn’t benefit a brand to have coupon codes spread all over the internet. You want those codes to incentivize people to make a purchase they wouldn’t otherwise have made—not to cut your profits on a sale that would have happened anyway.
PostPiliot’s 1-to-1 personalization capability supports single-use coupon codes, so you can connect a code to just one card and household.
BUT, the holidays are an exception for some brands. In Q4, when people are doing a lot of shopping, having your discount codes shared on a public site might be a worthwhile way to boost sales.
If you use a coupon code, make sure it has an expiration date to create urgency and ensure you’re not discounting from here to eternity. But make sure it accounts for the longer life cycle of a postcard—while a marketing email might have a shelf life of 15 seconds, direct mail can linger in a customer’s home for weeks.
Pro tip: Direct mail has a longer lifespan and attribution window. Unlike digital ads and emails that are forgotten in an instant, expect to see sales still coming in weeks after the cards drop. With PostPilot, conversions are tracked in a real-time dashboard.
6. Leverage QR Capability
You want your customers to be able to act quickly and easily when they receive one of your brand’s postcards. A QR code does the trick. Customers can be on your site with just a snap of a smartphone camera.
QR codes have other benefits, too. Use custom URLs to automatically apply coupons, send customers to special landing pages, and help with attribution. What are you waiting for?
Black Friday is coming up fast. Now is the time to pump up your holiday sales and profits with direct mail.
The TL;DR?
Don’t know where to start? Don’t worry. PostPilot’s concierge service can handle everything from segmentation to custom design to stamp-licking—free. They’ll even guarantee your campaign makes money.
To take advantage of this offer for Foxwell Digital readers and get rolling on your best Q4 ever, start here.
Note: This is for U.S. brands doing at least $1M in annual revenue at this time, and ATTENTION: you should know this is one of very few #sponsored posts we do here, but I am doing this because I’ve seen the results first-hand, I know and like the team, and truly believe it's a great investment for any US-based brand to try right now.