Direct Mail Growth with PostPilot, Bums & Roses, and Fresh Clean Threads

Introduction to Traditional Direct Mail

0:00the stereotypical experience is just like old clunky Channel you got a bunch of spreadsheets you got to find a printer you got to blast it out to a bunch of people you got to wait a couple months and then try and find more spreadsheets to figure out what the ROI was I think that's how a lot of the industry still operates today I think what's made it more attractive over time is one The Innovation that's happening in the space so integrated with Shopify launch you know it's more like clavo for direct mail now on the reten side it's like meta for direct mail on the acquisition side realtime tracking all of that stuff has made it much easier and it's become more attractive relative to other channels over time too Gentlemen please join me up here on

Panelist Introductions

0:46stage real quick [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] who am I talking to we'll start on the left come on down closer to me right hey my name is Bryant I am actually not a CEO today when I signed up for this panel I was I am the CMO of a company called bums and Roses which is a new role as of last week hey everyone I'm Brendan I'm the S of marketing at fresh clean threads we are a San Diego based apparel brand and focus on building the best fitting wardrobes Essentials for nearly everybody and I'm Michael Epstein one of the co-founders and coo post-pilot we're Direct Mail automation platform and I've been on the operating side on the brand side for 25 years so come from that world well this is a good topic to bring up because we're this close away from the largest season of our year our Super Bowl moments coming up how would

Defining Top of Funnel

1:59you guys Define top of funnel and before you get to you which you're going to be the last one to answer would you put Direct Mail in top of funnel how would you define top of funnel right now for us we break it up between our two customer cohorts so we have people buying for newborn babies which can either be an expecting mom or A Gift Giver you know at a baby shower or people buying for older kids so for prospecting for the expecting firsttime Mom I would say somebody who doesn't have any kids is in their last few trimesters about to have a kid and then our goal is to go and find them before they do their baby registry so that the 20 people they buy or they invite you know over to their party to buy them gifts buy them gifts from us and then the big kid stuff is more traditional apparel like show pictures to parents of cute kids and pajamas and hope they like the friends that I mean that Niche is

2:57why I love that so much cuz it's a for me for you you can buy it for yourself but it's a lot of the gifting of I get a 5 Monon old so like this everything we're getting is stuff coming into us so your top of funnel is I I would say there's there's a lot of remarketing there's a lot of actually like buildup in your top of funnel because it's still a lot of nurturing would you say there's a is your creative tube different from the top to the bottom you think it's pretty different the top of funnel for pregnant expecting moms is a pretty small Tam there's 3 and a half million babies born in America every year and that's limited like you can only sell to them or people buying gifts for like grandparents or aunts or uncles friends you know stuff like that so the way you educate a prospect for that audience is going to be very different than somebody who already knows your brand already likes your product and

3:49essentially you show them a picture of a new print they either like the print or they don't you know if they like it they'll buy it but there's a lot more education for True top of fun prospecting this makes sense how would

Direct Mail Strategies and Success Stories

4:01you define top of funnel for your brand yeah so we have for someone to go from the top to bottom of funnel on average throughout the year it takes around 2 to 4 weeks during bfcm that is a bit longer because there's people that have been sitting on the fence and so I mean I Define top of funnel as filling that awareness part of the funnel throughout the year and while someone someone says a channel is a certain part of the funnel every channel is sits somewhere on the Spectrum of hitting consumers across that funnel and I think you asked like would I put Direct Mail in that and I think yes but not isolated to top of funnel I think they're we' used it more like cross fun cross funnel because when we were we were running it we actually use Direct Mail as a way to refill the top of funnel cuz we actually were running most of our campaigns for lapsed it was so far long ago that they actually didn't realize wow we actually

4:54we either a bought or they unsubscribed and so I was actually using this as a tactic just to kind of get him back back into the top cuz technically they've already bought but it's been so long do you see that often with a lot of Brands kind of like trying to re-engage a build yeah absolutely so a lot of Brands like to start lower in the funnel and then actually work their way up which makes sense because there's just so much low hanging fruit and it was a great what Breeze did and and your Brands consistently see big easy wins with that reactivation play because these are customers that have gone well beyond the expected time you would you would nor see them back again they've been on your email list they're not engaging with your email list your SMS and it's just a lot cheaper to get back in front of them reactivate them before you lose them for good than it is to get cold acquisition but Brands then start to

5:45work up the funnel as you have success in these lower stages of the funnel you can work up to retargeting so still acquiring customers but match you know people have signed up for your email list but never bought people are browsing your website but never bought and then as you continue to see success then you can start to play in the areas that these guys have had a lot of success in like Kaden Lane as Bryant was describing able to Target expectant mothers in their third trimester like it was that precise of targeting and that's what led to so much success with that brand because it's such a well-defined customer we can find people that have that specific attribute and get in front of them like how we have a ton of data we have billions of attributes on hundreds of millions of us consumers that we've all aggregated into our own data set okay sourc from a variety of sources as well as our own proprietary data from working with thousands of Brands and we're able

6:45to essentially now build lookalike models the way you build meta does so it's basically like meta for male when you when it comes to building cold prospecting audiences and one of those attributes is a mother who has a lot of these specific attributes like the Caden Lane customer does and we know is based on their expected due date is in their third trimester or pregnancy moms sign up for Registries and they put in their due date so they volunteer the information that gets sold to data aggregators so that marketers like me can buy it this is wild this cuz I was for us our space it's regulated space so we were like nervous can we even send this should we send this and the the the short answer is we should send this at all times like our overall like our marketing mix we spend majority on meta can't get away from it we spend a second majority on Google we spent a third coming into Twitter Tik Tok and then the last is we have carved out budgets

7:43and this is it took us a while to get going but now that we're in this routine of this actually this Channel and I'm very curious on you guys what you're thinking about and what your other brands do this creative specifically on one of these needs to go to a page or an experience that is talking about what's going on here like we are trying not to drop on or just like the normal homepage is that something that you guys have built out from the from the asset that was created here all the way to landing at home and then getting onto his own landing page experience for prospecting top of funnel campaigns yes sending them to a landing page usually works better from one of these from a mailer for bottom of funnel winback or loyalty campaigns I usually just send them to the homepage so it sort of depends like in the baby category specifically the mailer might focus on the perfect newborn baby outfit you would send them to a landing page

8:42that would help you build out like here's your swaddle blanket here's your knockdown pick this accessory pair it with a bow like you almost walk the customer through the Journey and educate them and then for everyone else just send them to the website yeah I mean one call out I want to make on this is we're assuming that people are scanning the QR code to convert and like we've done like pretty extensive holdout testing when like we right pick a segment whether it's prospects or retention split it like 5050 8020 right depending on your confidence level and you can measure the incremental conversions generated from the mailers and if you actually com compare that to either the QR code scans or the coupon usage it's like a small all fraction which shows right people see the mailer sits on their desk they pull out their phone they go to the office next day they shop there they come home they're boarded in their Uber they shop again right and so it's more about I think

9:42it's landing pages are important but more for like digital direct channels like meta Etc but yeah that's just my take basically it's dropping a homepage it's kind of like get into the main s side is kind of what you think yeah so Brendan raises a really important point a lot of people say how do you measure how do you measure the results well do you just use a coupon code or do you use a QR and to his point a only a fraction of people even if you've got an offer on your card only a fraction of those people end up using the code on the card they either find something else when they get to your site they find something else online they don't care whatever they forget so the easiest way one we're we're natively integrated with your Shopify store so we know one to one a person at that household went on to complete a purchase in your store and we show you that in a real-time dashboard we know exact we know exactly

10:38when that happens but as Brendan said you can use holdout groups as well to isolate incrementality because we know that some folks who received the card also might have converted off email they might have converted off a Facebook ad so at fresh clean really really sophisticated holdout strategy of just saying we're going to run a bunch of different tests on a bunch of different audiences a bunch of different cohorts we're going to hold out a portion of those recipients 80% of those people will get a card the other 20% are the will see all of the exact same marketing the only difference is they just won't receive the card and you can track the performance of each of those cohorts again in a dashboard and you can say we know that the incremental lift of the from those folks receiving the card was X and if that's profitable you can feel really good this was an effective campaign regardless of how many people ended up using the code or scanning the QR that was on that card specifically so

Q4 Planning and Direct Mail Integration

11:38for Q4 how are you like what does your plan look like a tell me media mix and then B how is Direct Mail going to be involved in this Q4 push yeah we spend heavily on Facebook and Google like everyone else and I'm one week into the new role so figuring it out but the the way I like to Work Direct Mail into a Q4 strategy is typically apparel Brands will launch their seasonal products a few months before Black Friday we're trying to hit all of our lists you know SMS email retention list we're trying to sell out as many of the SKS as we can there'll be a point where anyone who has received emails did not engage with them has made a purchase in the last 12 months but for whatever reason they haven't engaged with the holiday collection we'll send them a direct mail piece and we'll do it in time to where the like 4-we window isn't too close to the cut off for

12:39Christmas shipping and we use it as like a mid funnel strategy to convert people who weren't converting from a text message yeah your turn bro yeah so I mean we actually I actually met the post-pilot team last about a year ago ahead of last bfcm and so we did like a mini test in the month of September of like picking our minimum budget across our various segments and kind of casting wide and learning to not to like grow contribution margin dollars from that initial send but to learn so that we could pick the winning segments and kind of Go Big for Black Friday and so we segmented it I think we were talking like Jimmy kicked it off with rfm actually at the start of this and we took a similar approach for Direct Mail where it was actually interesting that we split it both both based on the recency the frequency but then also like as he was talking about on email engagement SMS engagement but what we found was the

13:46incrementality on the email SMS audiences was almost like just as big as the unengaged audiences so I think just like that extra touch point is still just like very helpful and so even though someone's Eng age if there's incremental contribution margin dollars to be had we were all for it for where would you say like if you haven't done this before just start here yeah so again Brendon those are both very like they've kind of done it they kind of know what they're doing the program yeah so I I'll piggyback off what Brendan was saying and that is that the the mistake that we see Brands make in Q4 is they wait to do a test over Black Friday so they they're like okay we're going to dip our toe in the water and we're going to do that over Black Friday and the problem is that they get a great results over Black Friday but then they're like well we W I wish we could go bigger but we just miss the big event

14:45and you can't go back and and expand from there so the what what he did was exactly right which is start that testing like now September October get the data points now so that that you understand what audiences what campaigns are profitable and then you can scale those over Black Friday and Cyber Monday and into you know throughout the holiday season versus starting there and then you're like great I just left all this money on the table because I just missed the main event when and I you know I did a tiny budget or tiny test well I mean this is basically how we rolled ours out right we did fully lapsed customers and then we're going to go start hitting like more deeper remarketing work our way up to kind of like the top of the funnel area mainly because I don't know if this experience for our customers like I don't know if this is the demographic for them and that's always been My worry is like is this the thing that my customers are going to be and

Audience Targeting and Data Utilization

15:42I'm learning across the demos that are are buying is middleaged like 30 40 50 we have the older demographic trying to buy our type of drink and they're loving mail they they open this is like the thing that they do more than I want to know and so I think this is an opportunity that a lot of people are just not really like why do people think this is an older thing like why is Direct Mail like not it's old school sure I mean it has that connotation for sure people picture it as this like old Legacy Channel and in a lot of ways it is it's been around for a 100 years it's worked but it's just been you know the stereotypical experience is it's just like old clunky Channel you got a bunch of spreadsheets you got to find a printer you got to blast it out to a bunch of people you got to wait a couple months and then try and find more spreadsheets to to figure out what the

16:32ROI was I think that's you know that that's how a lot of the industry still operates today but I think what's made it more attractive over time is one The Innovation that's happening in the space so integrated with Shopify launch you know it's more like clavo for direct mail now on the retention side it's like meta for direct mail on the acquisition side real-time tracking all of that stuff has made it much easier and and it's become more attractive relative to other channels over time too so obviously it used to be one the you know the mailbox was cluttered with all junk mail and your inbox was pristine now it's kind of flip-flopped the mailbox is what now is doesn't have a lot in it email inbox is what's overcrowded so you've got that Dynamic digital saturation on meta people just not engaging as much but also digital channels have become more expensive over time relative to direct mail use be the price of a postage stamp was really high relative to the price of a click on meta

17:33now the price of a postage stamp remains fixed and meta cost continue to rise and now it looks much more attractive from a cost and Roi perspective yeah this is this is the part that I'm most interested in things are just getting a little bit more expensive right like you guys what are you seeing right now in like kind of your area the people you're talking to other brand owners maybe other heads of growth that are making like mistakes on their paid acquisition Channel what would you say in terms of costs like comparing it to other acquisition channels yeah I agree with Michael like cpms are going to go up Facebook's going to become more expensive infinitely probably you know forever this is just another channel that can make your ecosystem a little more effective I know post-pilot has some tools that can Target people who have signed up for an email list but have not made a purchase and they'll go and they'll buy the data to match the email to a physical address and you

18:36can set different triggers like they visited your site they received X number of emails they haven't made a purchase now you can send them a direct mail I think the channels that are cheapest and easiest start there obviously like send an email or run a Facebook ad if you're not getting a conversion through one of those channels I don't think the answer is keep doing it forever maybe in the beginning if you're really small just getting started it's easier turn on digital marketing and you know scale for a while with that but then you hit a point where there's half a million people in your email list who have never made a purchase you've already tried uploading that to meta and running a look like audience or targeting them directly if that didn't work what are you going to do and tools like post-pilot are really really easy to just blow a graphic and hit send so and it works so I think I think everyone should try it like it's a great tool to

19:31have as part of the media mix and then different brands probably based on scale and where they're adding in Revenue like that would dictate how much you invest in where it fits in the mix yeah and I I mean I think I'd say like one of just the most important parts of like paid media paid media is incrementality and like we use house they're amazing incrementality testing partner and I mean I think even some of like the bigger more advanced Brands run quarterly incrementality tests with house however it's still still like relatively difficult it's not as easy as right just putting money into meta and getting having it spit out of CAC to you the next day the one part that I think is pretty cool about Direct Mail is you actually don't need an incrementality testing tool it's part of the like Direct Mail post pilot offering through that holdout testing we were talking about so like that allows you to be very data driven and not have

20:33you don't have to trust the in platform numbers you do on some of these other tools what would you say like people need to be paying attention to for this Q4 what was a question what do you think people need to be paying attention to in terms of how many they need to build out because I see the difference between a full or just kind of like a single page cuz I know when we were having to upload our area like it was like I wanted to make the specific type of creative and the specific type of thing thing for it and I I feel as though we overthought it a little bit when we kind of just should have just went just to get it live yeah I mean we'll do the Creative for you so we know what works we do this for 95% of the brands that we work with and it just goes a lot faster obviously if you have creative you can upload it we can hand you off a creative file your

21:23team can can touch it up and give it back whatever is easiest but typically we generally know it works we follow your brand guide create a p create an asset in a couple days and make it just that much faster but in terms of formats so you've got something like this postcard 6x9 postcard really fast and easy great for retention type campaigns in particular because it really only the customer just needs more of a reminder or a nudge so something like this gives them that nudge at the lowest cost and you want to optimize for cost as you start to work up the funnel you can start to explore other types of formats so here's like what we call our calog and it allows you to tell more of the brand story but it's triggered just like a postcard so literally like one goes out at a time in real time but it's a little more expensive allows you just present more information educate people a little bit more tell

22:25them your Brand Story show more of your assortment and then as you start to get into bigger prospecting campaigns you can look at something like this which is like a catalog and again these you have to run in a little bit a little more lead time and a little bit larger quantity these literally you could do one and you could have it out today or tomorrow but that's just how we think about different formats again something like this is great because you can really show a lot of Assortment great for apparel brands in particular where you want to be able to show Cate or is assortment Styles things like that and this actually costs about a postage stamp it's about seven it's in about 70 cents all in so again relative to the cost of a click on meta relative to just direct mail cost in general it's actually you know right in line and that was my final question I had was like you guys rolled out your lookalike audiences that were like something that we we were

23:24very excited that's why we kind of did it because we can't find those audiences anywhere can you tell us a little bit more about how like they're able to use that now for an acquisition for top of funnel Channel cuz up until this point I've only thought of it as a laps remarketing play yeah so it's still great loow hanging fruit still a ton on reactivation and retention so again you've got these folks that have might have gone years without coming back they've been on your email list the whole time in some cases they unsubscribed in some cases they're just not engaging but you know these these guys and a lot of folks easy wins to start there especially over Black Friday we have brands that go back four or five years in their into their customer file and are still profitably reactivating those customers at a lower reactivation cost than pure net new cold traffic and then again as you work your way up into cold prospecting you should think about it

24:24most brands are looking to Target like a 1 to 2x row s on cold prospecting similar to what they're getting on Facebook and meta this isn't some you know it's it's not like you get a 1 and 1 12x on meta and then you're going to get like a 12x on cold prospecting direct now the idea is diversify your channels don't put all your eggs in The Meta basket we've all seen what what that looks like we've all gone most of us have probably gone through iOS 14 most of us are on D Toc Twitter seeing like I can't log in this week I can't like we know the risk that sh yeah so it's a great way to diversify and find additional channels that can help you scale beyond what you can do concentrating all of your acquisition efforts in a channel like meta but now it works a lot like meta and that you can build these audiences these lookalike audiences and launch and test different audiences different creative and track the track that just like you

25:22would in a dashboard on meta but in a in a completely new channel I appreciate you guys gentlemen thank you very very much and obviously Mike you you have been an OG for so long and you love this the this community environment so I thank you brother for being here my pleasure thank you hold on hold on hold

Q&A Session

25:40on any any questions any oh we got questions oh yeah sit on down hi how's it going my questions for Michael so I run a pet brand for pet birds and our clientele is mostly closer brother oh yeah our clientele is mostly people age 60 and above so do you think actual physical mail would help retention more so than email for that specific demographic yeah and did you you say 60 and above 60 and above and you said pets yes got it yeah so this is actually a misconception a lot of people are like well my customers are really old so that's probably the right fit for you guys but and and conversely it's like my customers are millennials do they really want direct mail I mean Nick that you know Nick could vouch for it as well with his demographic it's actually more of a novelty to and there's a lot of Statistics that supported I won't rattle them off but there's a lot of Statistics that support the younger demographics

26:41are not a they're if you look at their phones they've got like the Thousand unread SMS messages and like their email inboxes haven't been looked at for forever whereas they get something in the mail it's like oh actually I I don't I'm not used to this it's like a pattern interrupt and they pay attention to it to question about older audiences yeah I mean it definitely works there there too these they're they're very engaged I was talking to someone outside who we work with who has you know similar demographic hearing aids and yeah I mean they're very receptive they they look forward to going getting their mail every day and and they they pay attention to what's in there so yeah I love my Costco catalog I get that thing I'm like cranking through that stuff there was I saw another hand right here yeah one and then right there hey guys so I'm actually really close to launching my first post pilot campaign like I I was actually reviewing

27:36like our first creatives back did he convince you to go faster or go slower oh oh faster well so like my question is really just like really all four of you obviously massive proponents of direct mail and post-pilot but just given the position that I'm in like what are the sort of pitfalls that I should look out for you know how do how do I make sure that like I'm just approaching this the right way because it's been just I'll just to give you a ton of credit like it's been an incredibly smooth process so much to the fact that I'm like wait like what am I missing here what am I not seeing here that's a great question yeah my my call out would be make sure when you're evaluating success you're factoring in your cost of delivery and therefore solving for contribution margin of the mailers not just Revenue so like post-pilot doesn't have everyone's cost of delivery in platform so you're not going to see it in platform but right if

28:31you get a dollar incremental like of Revenue and it costs you whatever 50 60 cents or something to fulfill that order if the mailer also cost you 50 cents like you might say hey I made a buck but you actually made no contribution margin dollars and so just as you go from post-pilot reporting in the UI kind of have your back of the envelope math to assess what that means for your contribution margin if you're doing prospecting I would say all data is not created equal I've tested a lot of prospecting data points for different demographics and some of them have worked better than I expected and some of them didn't work at all and so even for something like selling kids clothes you can't just buy people in America who have kids and think that sending them a postcard with a picture of pajamas is going to convert obviously but there are every industry is going to be different but depending on what you're selling and how you would identify your

29:33ideal customer I would spend a lot of time really thinking through three or four hypothesis of what a good prospecting Prospect or a data point would be and then run a few small tests and then once you find one that really works scale scale up from there yeah we we used it to a lot of our laps customers that was my big thing is I really wanted to get my re subscribers back so I pushed specifically our campaign was very similar to this play it was a unique offer that they had to take because they were our past subscribers and so that was like really it was a very deliberate approach to kind of re-engage before Q4 started to hit so I would say I probably would have opened up my segment to be a little bit larger on the at least on the first set kind of on that audience question so let's say if we're segmenting and there's 100,000 people that it suggests in one audience to send a mail or two

30:28and I can only send it to 10,000 people you know and we do that campaign is it going to send it to what post pilot thinks is the 10,000 best people to send it to and then in that case if it doesn't do well should I try a different audience or you know do you just have to go deeper into that same segment before you really get a gist of like if it's going to work for that audience that's a good question are you talking about it of existing customers or new new prospects yeah so typically you're going to start with the high propensity people in that audience and work your way down typically you can reach a level of scale with prospecting that's significant before you start to really drop off in the strength of that that audience so it's not going to be like okay I got extra result on 10,000 people that's going to drop when I go to the next 10,000 people it's more like I got an ex result on

31:25100,000 people you're going to see maybe a little bit of difference when you go to the next 100,000 people so yeah it when you're testing at relatively small scale you want to test a few different audiences and models which we will do because those can perform differently once you find what's working within that and and Briant was mentioning that too test different audiences because not everyone is going to perform exactly the same just like meta once you find the ones that do you can typically start to scale those significantly before you reach a point of diminishing return so kind of like yeah if I can only send it to 50,000 maybe 10,000 to five different audiences more worth it or better I think so I think especially on the asset chesting cuz like it's how how many products do you have 100 how would you do that how would you approach that like he can't segment a 100 would you just go best sellers or top top moving I mean it's like two category two product

32:22categories though we do it around the the customer Persona so again you can build different models like when you think about meta you're in the learning phase when you launch the campaign right so it's testing different audiences it's looking at who's engaging with those clicks and things like with those ads and then optimizing around that it works really the same way it tests different types of personas in different models and we're feeding because again we're seeing those transactions happen in real time because we're connected with Shopify we're feeding that data right back into the model and optimizing it just like meta is optimizing that essentially in real time so that as sub subsequent campaigns and cards go out you're improving it over time and again you're leaning into the models that tend to work again just like in meta you've got X number of campaigns that you launch as a test you see this one's working these four aren't you shut the Ford off you lean into the one that is and you start to test against that one

33:18same strategy great thank you good question it was one in the back get your hands right there we go cool okay I really like the idea of direct mail we sell jewelry online and we sell all across the United States and so I have a question a practical question regarding geography so when running a direct mail campaign or multiple campaigns how does your company help me how does the account executive help me decide where to send the direct mail who to Target do you guys go by like geographical areas I know we talked about customer segmentation but I'm really curious because in Shopify I can see like where my hotspots are like where my customers are located but do you guys have that Insight or do you recommend certain areas or is it kind of like a blanket approach and then you kind of go from there yeah so one you're going to have a dedicated account manager who knows like how to build out a lot of these strategies following our best

34:24practices whether it's retention or or acquisition on the retention side it's you it's more based on customer Behavior so people who have bought more than twice in the last 180 days to 365 days test that audience test that against people who have bought once in the last 180 days to 365 days test it against people who bought multiple times in the last one to two years get a read on each of those different audiences and then again you can scale into the ones that you're seeing are working for you and on prospecting the models are going to work again like like meta if you have a high concentration of customers in California New York and Florida it's going to find that and it's probably going to disperse it based on your your ideal customer the demographics and other attributes about that customer not like we're going to decide we want to send a bunch to Indiana and Wisconsin and New York or whatever so you want to lean on like the AI and the models just like you do sort

35:36of with meta to identify what are the attributes and characteristics that we're finding to be the the most relevant to our customer base and then test a few variations of that does that answer your question yes thank you gentlemen thank you for your time thank you [Music]