In this episode of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast, Brett Curry is joined by Michael Epstein to discuss the resurgence of direct mail as a powerful tool for eCommerce growth
They explore how direct mail is driving retention, building customer loyalty, and even serving as a successful acquisition strategy when used effectively. Throughout, Michael debunks common misconceptions about direct mail—highlighting its effectiveness when paired with data-driven targeting and other marketing channels.
Here are some key takeaways from the episode:
- Direct mail for retention & loyalty: Learn how direct mail can enhance customer retention and build long-term loyalty, especially in today’s crowded digital landscape.
- Direct mail as an acquisition channel: Often overlooked, direct mail can be a highly effective cold acquisition strategy—if you target the right audience.
- The power of data in direct mail campaigns: By leveraging aggregated data, you can identify high-propensity buyers, refine your targeting, and even create lookalike audiences to improve relevance and engagement.
- Standing out in the inbox: Direct mail not only adds legitimacy to your brand but also captures attention in ways digital ads often can't.
If you're looking to scale your brand—whether through retention, loyalty, or acquisition—this episode provides actionable insights into how direct mail could be the missing piece in your marketing puzzle.
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Chapters
(00:00) Introduction
(07:10) Direct Mail Misconceptions
(10:41) Retention and Loyalty with Direct Mail
(16:59) Direct Acquisition with Direct Mail
(24:53) Data Targeting for Direct Mail
(33:17) The Importance of Clearly Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile
(41:11) PostPilot's Modernized Catalog
(46:16) Conclusion
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Show Notes:
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Connect with Brett:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce
- Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/
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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.
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Transcript:
Michael:
You really need to start thinking about it as a medium mix and how those channels can work together to grow your overall revenue
Brett:
Well. Hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we're talking about growth through direct mail. Now, I love this topic. I'm an ad nerd from long ago, I did TV and radio back in the day. I helped companies with direct mail. I love stuff that other brands are not doing. And so we're going to talk today about how to grow using direct mail for increased retention and loyalty, also acquisition, and some new things that the smartest, best, fastest growing brands are doing. And so my guest today is the co-CEO of Post Pilot. You're going to learn more about them as we go, but Michael Epstein is my guest. Michael, how's it going, man?
Michael:
Good. Brett, always great to hang with you.
Brett:
I love, absolutely, dude. We got to do OMG hosting an event at the Google, YouTube LA offices. Recently post pilot was a sponsor. Thank you for that. But my favorite part of that was that I got to see you and we got to hang out there at the Spruce Go hanger. Google's amazing offices for just a little bit. And so yeah, give us kind of the quick rundown for those that don't know who are you and what is post pilot.
Michael:
Sure. So yeah, that office made me a little, just a little bit jealous.
Brett:
It's insane. Holy
Michael:
Cow. Anyway, yeah, so Michael Epstein, one of the founders of Post pilot along with Drew Sunki and been e-commerce operators for 25 years at this point, mostly running eight, nine figure brand turnarounds. Direct mail was one of the tools in our tool belt that we used to get quick wins from a lot of these brands who had accumulated huge customer lists over time, but most of them had been unengaged or disengaged over time. So we wanted to find quick wins and direct mail was one of those, but it was really clunky and the stereotypical experience of spreadsheets and finding a printer and batch and blasting and trying to figure out ROI. And we just said somebody needs to build Klaviyo for direct mail, so
Brett:
Klaviyo for direct mail. Love
Michael:
That. Yeah, that's what we did with post pilot, which is a direct mail platform natively plugs in with Shopify Klaviyo on your e-com stack and just makes it really easy to launch and track really targeted direct mail campaigns. And we're going to talk about how we've evolved, I think, into becoming more like meta for direct mail too on the acquisition side, which is really exciting.
Brett:
And it's so cool. Like I said, I've been a fan of direct mail for a long time, but why do you think, Michael, before we dive into retention and loyalty and acquisition using direct mail, why is direct mail having a day right now? Because I believe that?
Michael:
Yeah, it's a great question. I think one, it's always worked as a channel. I think the main reasons that it's been around for a hundred big brands have done it for a long time, continue to do it. I think the big reason that a lot of brands hadn't embraced it was because it was so hard. I mean, knowing these are brands that grew up launching on Facebook and are digitally native marketers, and to think about designing a print piece and figuring out how to mail that thing and figuring out
Brett:
How to, where do I begin?
Michael:
Yeah, it it's hard. And we wanted to make it really easy. And that's one thing that I think has gotten adoption way up. And then the other thing is digital direct mail has become more attractive relative to digital over time. I think starting with the iOS update of a few years ago where it really woke brands up to realize that one, they needed a more diversified marketing mix. If they put too many eggs in one basket, they were putting their business at risk. And then you just saw this volatility that occurred for a long period after that. It was like, we need to build a more resilient business. We need to start opening our eyes to other channels. And also it became more attractive on the cost side. So digital ads get as competition drives up costs over time. It used to be, obviously the direct mail looks super expensive relative to a 5 cent Facebook click, and so why would we do that? But now as costs continue to rise, direct mail and postage essentially stays relatively fixed, and so it just becomes a more attractive channel over time. Now it tends to cost less than the cost click. So I think those are the key factors that are driving the engagement.
Brett:
Yeah, totally agree. It's one of those things where the cost of postage mostly stays like this. I guess I don't really know who follows the cost of postage other than you guys probably, but it stayed relatively consistent, whereas the cost of digital ads has gone up. Now, I do want to say full disclosure, I'm an investor in post pilot, but I do want to underscore I'm an investor because I'm a fan, not I'm a fan because I'm an investor. So I invested because I'm like, yes, we need this. Brands need this, our clients need this. I'm going to invest in the company, but want to get that out in the open. And so I think one of the other reasons, Michael, why direct mails having a day right now is because I remember a ton back in the nineties and the early two thousands back when some of our listeners were just kids, and maybe you were a kid, Michael, I don't even know, but you open the mailbox and it is just stuffed full of postcards and coupon mailers and all kinds of other crap that you don't want.
And so the mailbox was just absolutely cluttered. Now I go to the mailbox and I've got two things or three things. There are a lot of days when there's not much in the mailbox, and so you mail something, it's going to stand out, people are going to see it, and it's also novel. I remember the first time I got a postcard from one of my favorite D two C brands and I was like, what is this a cool brand online is mailing me some paper? This is crazy. And so I think that's all part of it, right? We've got the ability to grab someone's attention, and I know we'll underscore this kind as we get into retention stuff, but there's really no way to reach all of your customers, right? We're big believers in email and SMS, you mentioned you're the klaviyo of direct mail.
We have an email and SMS department at OMG. We love it. It's very successful. But what are great open rates on emails? 30%, maybe 40%. That means 60 to 70% of your top customers aren't opening your emails. So this is a way to get in front of more of your customers and also to reach new customers as well. So really excited about this. What are some of the misconceptions, Michael, and we may have already addressed some of them, but what are some of the misconceptions about direct mail for D two C and retail brands that you would like to bust?
Michael:
Yeah, good question. I think one that it's hard. So again, the typical experience has been hard, spreadsheets, printers, all that stuff. We've made it really easy. We could launch and we've launched people within 24 hours who come to us cold and we handle everything for them, strategy, set up, creative, everything. So one, we make it really easy and two, that you need to always deconflict your channels, meaning I only want to send to people who haven't engaged with email in like six months. And that is something that we actually just published a bit of a study on this where we ran a bunch of analysis. We have tons of data from tons of brands where we looked at brands who were sending to their existing email subscribers and also sending direct mail, and we saw a three x incremental lift on
Those people who were getting booked. Now you can be more conservative and we make it easy to filter out people who are actively engaged with email. So people who have opened or clicked an email a few times in the last 30 days, maybe you want to not send to them and that's fine and make it really easy to do it. But I think the misconception is that you always have to be conflicting every, and that goes for retention and even acquisition. And I think what the big brands have really figured out, the ones who are still growing and still at scale, and this, I think better than just about anyone too because you talk about display ads and you manage a ton of different channels and they all work cohesively and together, and that halo effect, you get totally multiple touch points, lists, all those channels versus trying to say, I want to be super focused on, focused on only incremental ROAS from my YouTube and then only incremental from my Facebook, and then only incremental from my SMS, and you're putting a cap or ceiling on your growth. If you really start to think about that, you really need to start thinking about it as a medium mix and how those channels can work together to grow your overall revenue.
Brett:
Yeah, I totally agree. And I think it's one of those things where there's this old adage of you reach a customer one time, they probably won't remember it, right? You reach them two times, now they're beginning to pay attention and maybe see you reach them three or more times. Now you feel like you're everywhere, especially if that's in multiple different mediums. So I see a meta ad and then maybe I search and I see a Google ad, and now I get something in the mail, holy cow, you are everywhere. And now that message you're trying to get me to remember, I'm beginning to see it now and maybe I'm ready to take action. So I love that the combo of email and postcard, three x incremental lift for those that saw both, that is not surprising to me. And I think that kind of underscores, Hey, this is a simple thing to add to your mix. And so let's talk. I want to get into acquisition because I think there's some really exciting stuff there. And I know that's something that 99.9, or maybe that's an exaggeration, but 99% of people listening to this podcast are not doing. But let's talk about first postcard marketing, direct mail marketing as a retention strategy or as a loyalty strategy. What are some of the top strategies you guys incorporate for better retention and better repeat sales?
Michael:
Yeah, great question. There's a lot of low hanging fruit there, and you mentioned it earlier. If you look at your email, obviously it's a great tool. We'd never say don't send email, but if you look at your open rates and engagement, you're only reaching a fraction of those people, and that's your best audience. And those are people that are engaged in a blog from your brand. And so the easy wins are starting to layer on direct mail campaigns, and you can set them up as automations and flows just like you would with Klaviyo or an email flow where after a certain amount of time they haven't engaged with your email yet, it's been 90 days, they haven't taken the action that you want them to take. Send them a postcard, trigger a postcard to go out to that person. And again, you'll see incremental lift from hitting that audience who has not engaged with your other channels in your digital channels, in your attempts to reengage them.
You'll see incremental lift by sending them a card, easy wins, and around big tent pole events, black Friday, mother's Day, Valentine's Day, whatever it is, you can also start to focus on reactivation and go back. You'd be shocked at how far back you can go with a lot of these audiences and profitably reactivate them. People that haven't engaged with your email or other channels in years, three, four years, in a lot of cases, you send 'em a card and it just wakes them up and you get a profitable return, and it tends to be much more profitable than cold acquisition when you can reactivate some of these long, long defective customers. So those are some of the easy wins. Win backs, churn, reactivation, reactivation of long defective customers. You can send them as one-off sort of tentpole campaigns, or you could set them as triggered automations. And you're always going to find easy wins. I'd say almost a hundred percent of the time, we can find different pockets and different cohorts that are going to respond really well and it's going to deliver incremental revenue, and then you just set it and forget it. You just leave them on autopilot. It's just going to keep cranking for you like an email sequence does.
Brett:
Yeah, and if you look at this as a compliment or like a supercharger for your email and SMS programs, I think that's a really good way to look at it where, hey, where do we make the most money through email and SMS marketing? Well, it's by designing some really great flows. So when we come in and work with the client, this we do first, we look at welcome flows, we at card abandon in flows, we look at post-purchase flows and a series of others. But yeah, all you have to do is make one of those steps, and it's usually not step one or step two, maybe it's step five, step, whatever, throw postcards in there, right? If they have not taken action on any of the other touch points, email or SMS, put postcards in there, it's low cost. And again, it's going to be one of those differences may create a little bit of an aha moment for your customer and get them to respond.
And then to your point then, what are we doing? We're doing back to school sales. We're doing Mother's Day and Father's Day sales, we're doing labor day sales, we're doing of course, cyber week sales, things like that for your big ones, corporate postcard marketing to your best buyers or to your VIP list or to a win back list. And so let's talk about this a little bit, Michael, because I'm sure the main question people have is like, Hey, what kind of results can we expect? And I know that that's, as marketers, that's so tough, right? It's like it all depends on so many factors, but what kind of results are you seeing here in a few of the different scenarios? And then what does it cost? What's our cost per piece for doing stuff like this?
Michael:
Sure. So typically the range when brands are starting to send on retention campaigns, the range that we set is sort of a baseline, tends to be in the five to 10 x row. It's significant, but what we also tell brands is goal, and again, I'm sure you know this with Facebook and Meta and other channels too, the goal isn't necessarily to maximize your roas. The goal is to maximize your contribution, your overall
Brett:
Contribution.
Michael:
And so the key is learn. You can test into all these different segments and cohorts and then learn which ones are profitable and keep expanding your audience such that you can maximize the amount of revenue you're generating from these customers at a profitable return. So great, we launched 180 day win back to repeat customers and it got us an eight x roas. Let's go to a year, let's go to two years. We're still getting three X at a year or three x at two years. Fantastic. It's still profitable for us. It's incremental. We should be doing that all day long. And that's how you really start growing as a business. You're not maximizing to roas. You're maximizing the total profit dollars coming into the business. So that's typically a range that brands see starting out, and then it's like how do we expand?
Brett:
That's great. That's great. Yeah, and I love the way you positioned it really. It's more contribution margin dollars. That's what we take to the bank. You're not taking RU to the bank, but we do want to measure those things. Almost always these activities are incremental, right? Because you're not sending these to people that have just responded to a direct mail or just responded to email or SMS or something. So this is new. These are winbacks. So it is incremental, which is really powerful. Then what about in terms of costs? I'm not talking about all in costs and stuff. I know there's lots of factors and depending on what you're printing on and things like that, but give us a ballpark. What are these costs per piece to send out?
Michael:
Yeah, it's real simple. 55 cents for a four by six, that's like a fully loaded cost. So card goes out 55 cents, that's really it. And
Brett:
That's printing, that's postage, that's everything.
Michael:
Yeah. The only thing it doesn't include is if we're targeting cold audiences where there's just a charge to pull that data to target a cold audience, but for those existing customers, 55 cents, there's no minimum. So as many as get sent out is what you get charged.
Brett:
Super simple, super easy. Love it. Let's transition to prospecting or to direct mail for acquisitions. And I know there's a couple things that play here. One is who are we mailing to? And I would argue that the who is more important than the what in most cases, but who are we mailing to? What are we sending set up direct mail for acquisition for us?
Michael:
Yeah, sure. So there's a couple ways that we think about acquisition. Went direct mail, there's warm acquisition, which is targeting people who have engaged with your brand in some way and not converted, think more like retargeting. And then there's cold acquisition, which is pure prospect. And so on the warm acquisition side, we have the ability to match email addresses to a postal address essentially in real time. And so say somebody opts into your email, but they go through your full welcome sequence and they still haven't converted by the end of the welcome sequence, we know the chance of that customer or that prospect converting starts to decline rapidly over time. We've got to get that person to convert or you're unlikely to ever see them again. So similar to a win back campaign emails tried to get them to convert through that welcome sequence, haven't converted, match that person to a postal address, retarget them with a card, and we see a strong incremental lift from doing that.
If we go a little one step colder, it's site visitor retargeting, which we call site match, and that's where people are browsing your website anonymously. They haven't opted into your email list or bought, and we can actually identify a portion of those people and match that to a postal address and then retarget them with a card as well. And with a lot of our new tech, we're looking at factors not only about how they engage with your site, which pages are browsing, how long they spend, other factors like that, but we actually know a lot of things about that individual and we can say, oh, this person also looks a lot like your ICP. We definitely want to target them and get a card in front of them. This person doesn't look anything like your ICP. Maybe we actually don't send them anything at all. The idea is to maximize return. We always think about not maximizing the number of cards we send. It's maximizing the return on those cards and having a level of confidence that the people we're sending to are the ones that are likely to convert. And that way you can scale more. That's
Brett:
Really great. So you can see, hey, these are site visitors and we can match a certain percentage of those, so let's do that. But then let's also look at some other lists and some other data that you have access to show us is this an ideal client, is it not? And we'll just mail it to those that look to be ideal. Talk us through how many site visitors, obviously we're just getting started online, this is not the thing we're going to launch, but at what point does this method work? Do we need 10,000 visitors a month, a hundred thousand visitors a month where we can actually get a meaningful number that we can mail to?
Michael:
Yeah, I think 10,000 visitors a month is probably a minimum baseline for where you want to be. And again, there's not a minimum. It's more about having enough volume that you can get statistically relevant results and results that move the needle for your business. If you're really small and these segments or these audiences are just going to have very few people in them, it's not the right time for you. We're all busy as entrepreneurs and business owners and marketing managers. We should focus our time and effort on the things that are going to move the needle for the business. So you want to have at least some level of scale that that's going to work for you.
Brett:
Even if it's a low cost, low dollar cost, it could be a high opportunity cost. And so where you putting your attention, where you're spending your time makes a ton of sense. Now, I know we can go beyond that, but does it often make sense to start there to nail offer and language and what the direct mail piece looks like? Is this, you advise people begin before they go to different audiences?
Michael:
Yeah, typically, yes. And it's also to just get a baseline of performance. When you're talking to net new customers, the expectation is it will perform better when you're targeting to a bit warmer of an audience than pure cold prospects. So we think about it historically, a lot of direct mail has been top down, let's go super broad and super big, super cold to start with a big budget and then start to work. Then we get into customers. We actually think more bottom up. So start with the low hanging fruit, start with the bigger wins, totally prove it out at each level of the funnel. And once you've gotten some validation that okay, warmer acquisition is delivering a consistently good return, now we can start to look at cold acquisition and we have some really cool tech and tools too enable brands to do that too.
Brett:
That's great. So we want to talk about that a little bit more. Kind of broadening that cold acquisition there is kind of the who and the what, so to speak. When you're targeting site, what are you sending them? Is it postcard? Is it a trifold or a bifold? Is it something else? What are you, and I know it depends, but what are you sending to those site?
Michael:
Yeah, typically for warmer audiences you can get away with a postcard. So lower cost and what they at least have some familiarity with your brand. So what they really need is a nudge and some reinforcement to take that action that you're trying to get them to take. Whereas the colder you get, the more you typically need more space to be able to tell that brand story, educate people about your assortment, about your value props about your brand. So for those that are watching this online, here's an example, a trifold that I'll hold up so you can sort of see how big it is. This is what we call our card log and the really nice next
Brett:
Cloud. There you go. What an awesome brand. Yeah. So now that, okay, so mailer's super impressive. I'm seeing examples. I've got, was that a celebrity chef? I actually couldn't tell. It was a little bit blurry, but you got a chef there. You price some cooking tips, things like that. Who are they mailing that to generally?
Michael:
Yeah, so that's typically going to some of these colder audiences. So when we talk about acquisition where you want to show larger assortment, you really want to educate people on what makes hex clad so special and unique. You want to pull in the social proof elements, all that stuff that you would want to tell about your brand. You can fit into a format like that. And you can also use this for some of those long-term reactivation campaigns that we talked about earlier where a lot has changed about your business. So think brands with a larger assortment, clothing brands in particular are a great example of that. You've launched an entirely new collection, you've got a whole new seasonal collection that you want to show off. Larger formats give you the ability to show all of that assortment of product. And just like our postcards, our catalogs have the advantage of having no minimum and no turnaround time, like traditional catalogs, we can trigger these just like a postcard.
Brett:
Amazing, amazing. So let's talk then a little bit about the who for going to colder audiences because I think this is the part that's likely going to blow some people's minds. There was a time when we were doing direct mail back in the day that most people were just looking at, okay, I'm choosing zip codes based on income, household income based on where they are. And that's about it. And then you could begin to layer on things like Equifax data and stuff like that, but talk about all the ways you can build audiences for direct mail now.
Michael:
So this is really exciting. We've been working on this for a long time over a year and we've spent millions of dollars investing in building out what we believe is the largest and most powerful data set that you could build for direct mail. And we've built our own AI and through our in-house data science team that we think allows you to leverage that data in ways that provide much better targeting than what's ever really been again available in direct mail. It works historically, it's worked a lot like you described. We're going to find, we're going to either drop it to a zip code or we're going to find a list broker and that list broker is going to give us an audience and we're going to send to that audience and we're going to wait a while and then we're going to try and put some spreadsheets together to match who from that audience ended up buying.
But it's relying on these individual list brokers to sort of give you this audience. And what we've done is we've aggregated a tremendous amount of this data from a wide variety of sources into our own data warehouse. And what we found is that when you can look across multiple data sets this way, it exponentially improves the efficacy and relevancy of that audience. And think about it more like meta where they have so many signals about all these individuals, what they're browsing, what other sites they're visiting, what everything that they know demographically and psychographically about that individual. We've been able to compile all of that. Plus we work with a ton of brands and we have a ton of insights and learnings that we can aggregate and use to train our AI such that again, we get these proprietary signals that we can use to really dial in these models.
And we've seen the performance and we've benchmarked our performance against all the sort of traditional list brokers or people that brands are typically acquiring these direct mail lists from. And we've seen in some cases differences of two, 300% in performance. I won't say it's for every brand and it's going to work for every brand. What I will say is if you're going to use direct mail and test direct mail as a new hold prospecting acquisition channel, the best chance of success you'll have, I have no doubt we'll be using our technology. So beyond what we've seen has been possible and the results that would typically be expected, we think we're going to give you a really good shot. And this is, again, think of it like Meadow. We're building lookalike audiences by using your first party data, looking for other people, looking at thousands of attributes across hundreds of millions of US consumers and finding people that look like your best customer, not just with superficial demographic data.
Yeah, this is a 45-year-old male makes this amount of money and lives in this state. It's like, and they shop at Nordstrom and they drink Bud Light and they drive a Chevy and they have two kids under the age of five, all these different things about them. And that's going to give you again, the best chance of success using direct mail as a cold acquisition channel. We did one case study recently with a baby brand targeting expectant mothers in their third trimester. We have a ton of data, very specific, we can get super dialed and that's what to your point, it's the who more than the how, just like
Brett:
Other acquisition. Yeah, I'd rather speak to an ideal customer like a derometer third trimester with a pretty good offer that's going to do better than a great offer to someone who's not pregnant and we've got a baby product, so you got to talk to the right person. So yeah, I think you're about to break down other insights from that baby mailer.
Michael:
Yeah, that's just a really good example. And that got in some cases like a Forex on cold prospecting, again
Brett:
On cold prospecting.
Michael:
It's crazy not. We want to be on typical really transparent and set expectations accurately. Most brands who are testing out cold prospecting are very comfortable in that one to two xas range,
Brett:
But that mimics, that mimics meta. That's what you see on YouTube. So that one to two xas for cold traffic, that's great.
Michael:
Exactly. And the other thing that we've been able to build that makes it again more like a digitally native channel is because we have, we're connected, we're integrated with Shopify and we're able to track these transactions in real time and put 'em in a dashboard for you. We're also able to feed that data directly back into your acquisition model. Think of it like the learning phase of meta at first. You launch a campaign, you wait while meta starts accumulating data and signals from that campaign and feeding that information back into the model to optimize that model. We actually are doing the same thing. So it's not even like you just launch once. You wait, you see what happens and then you start the process over again. It's we're actually feeding that data right back into the models and optimizing those models over time just like you would see in a medic.
Brett:
Super interesting. Let's use a couple of examples. We talked about the baby example. I'll give you a couple more. You can choose whatever makes the most sense. So say I'm selling men's joggers, that's a product that we could talk about or hex clad cookware, if that's easier. What are you recommending? So we've started with our site abandoner list and that's who we're kind of targeting first. We prove out some concepts. Now what audience are we going to next?
Michael:
Yeah, so these are cold prospects, again, lookalike audiences of your best customers. Some of the attributes that for a brand that we recommend having to give you sort of the best chance of success. One that you have an A OV of, ideally around a hundred dollars or more. And think of it like medi, it's very tough to crack cold prospecting at a 25 AOB on meta. It doesn't matter how it
Brett:
Totally, yeah, just the baseline costs of media and it's actually using direct mail is a perfect way to look at it. There's hard costs there to buy the paper and pay the postman and all that stuff. There's hard costs on meta as well. Yeah, getting cult prospecting below $25 CPA. Yeah, almost unheard of.
Michael:
Yeah. So that's a great data point. Having some product market fit that you've been able to demonstrate some scale with. So the fact that you've been able to scale meta to become an eight figure business and have found that product offer,
Brett:
It means cold audiences convert, right? It means you've got an offer, a product that people who've just heard about you actually want.
Michael:
That's exactly it. And so demonstrating that, don't necessarily recommend brands try their first cold prospecting campaign ever on direct mail. Use meta to get some of that validation,
Brett:
Absolutely
Michael:
That traction. And then use this to diversify your mix and find higher return on those incremental, those marginal dollars that you're investing into acquisition. Then you might once you start capping out in meta. So those are some of the characteristics that we suggest. Great fits are brands that have strong LTVs. So again, you can invest at a one X or a one and a half X and know that you're going to, you can keep feeding that, keep scaling that profitably because you know that there's LTV coming in behind it. Brands that are in apparel, jewelry, what are some other baby products, crush home accessories. Those kinds of brands that have decent LT v, decent LTV and have reached some level of scale are great candidates to be testing.
Brett:
Yeah, it's so good. So let's compare and contrast for a minute. So campaigns that you've seen that have been unsuccessful versus direct mail campaigns that have been successful and ideally exceeded expectations, what's the difference? Is it the mailer, is it the offer, is it other factors? What are you seeing?
Michael:
Yeah, great question. I think one of the biggest things is can we really accurately describe that audience? Can we pinpoint who that customer is and is that a distinct customer? So without sort of throwing anybody under the bus, we've seen some brands who have a very niche product but doesn't apply to, there's no clearly defined customer for that brand. So I can think of there's an auto accessories brand and it's like, who's that? Without going too detailed on what exactly it is, it's just something that you couldn't really describe who that customer is clearly. And that's going to impact our ability to really narrow in that model such that we have a clearly defined target audience. It goes back to what you were saying earlier about the who is so important. If your product sort of applies to everybody, you have no clearly defined ICP, it's going to be very tough to make the numbers pencil out on direct mail.
Whereas we go back to the expectant mother example that is a very clearly defined audience. We went to expectant mothers in their third trimester of pregnancy because we determined that that was the ideal point when they were thinking about buying these clothes for a newborn. You went too early, it wasn't on their mind yet. You went too late, maybe you missed the window. That's something that we can really clearly define and that tends to have a ton of success. So we'll also tell you one, we've seen this a lot, we'll sort of tell you if we think just based on experience, we think it's likely to be a fit or not be a fit, we would rather not send this campaign if we don't have conviction. Believe me, we hammer this with our team all the time. We don't want to send stuff that we don't have some level of confidence is going to work. We don't want pissed off brands, period. And then we'll also run models and see what the models tell us. And does this demonstrate a good distinct audience that we feel is reasonable to go after? Or is it telling us like, look, there's no strong signals in this
Brett:
Audience. That's great. That's so good. Let's use another example. So we've worked with some brands. I can picture some stories or some conversations in my head where asking, I got choked up, Michael, I'm going to get a drink of water. I talk about this stuff. I get so excited. Take two on that. Here we go. Sorry Nick, sorry gang. I'm going to make you work a little bit here for your editing. Editing. So I am thinking of conversations that I've had Michael with customers where we talk about, hey, who's your ideal shopper? And they say things like, well, sometimes they're teachers or sometimes they're professionals and they make 75 to $250,000 and they leave in these areas. And I'm like, that's not an audience. That's that'ss really, really vague, but you can drill in a little bit more. And so one thing we've seen, and I do wonder if you're using this where, hey, I'm selling high-end clothes and I know that my buyers also buy from the normal brand or Lululemon or some of these other brands, they're shoppers of those brands.
We've gotten a couple of mail pieces from vori, which is kind of like the California Lululemon or whatever. I don't know if you guys did it or not. The great pieces, very tempted to buy did not, but very tempted. I wonder if that's kind of what they're doing. So I don't know that a visited re's website or anything, but maybe it's because we buy from other clothing brands that we're getting sent this. We found that type of audience targeting to work well on YouTube as an example where it's like our buyer's kind of mushy, it could be all these various things, but one way we kind of zeroed in on is the people that buy from us also buy from these other D two C brands or these other challenger brands or whatever. Can you guys access that data at all? Are you using that as you're building lists?
Michael:
Yeah, great question. And this is something that comes up and it's something I want to be really particular about, and that is that we never share customer data with any other customer. You would never be able to say, I want to target my competitors' brands or I want my competitor's customers, or I want to, again, I'm North Face, I want to go after Patagonia's customers give me that audience. We never ever would or will
Do that. There are some data sources not leveraging that sort of first party data that we have aggregated that says this person shops at Target a lot. This person shops at Nordstrom a lot. This person shops for cosmetics, luxury cosmetics at Nordstrom or at Target. This is somebody that buys this brand from Walmart. And those are signals that are part of the thousands of attributes that we have on US consumers. So we absolutely use those signals to identify who the high propensity buyers are in specific categories of products, luxury, women's apparel, makeup, jewelry, whatever that might be. But what we do not do, if you ask us to do it, we'll tell you the same thing. You cannot target another brand's customers. We don't share that information. And in no way does that information get disseminated across brands and across audience.
Brett:
Yeah, and I mean that's good business. That's smart. You got to do it legally and ethically and all those things, which I think totally makes sense. But what you describe the aggregated data, the not first party data, that's what you need and that's what we do and we're targeting on YouTube. It's like we're saying, Hey, we want to target people that buy from Warby Parker that buy from Bonobos or that buy from normal brand or Fary or something like that. And Google, Google's not giving you the actual customers, but they're using some anonymized data to find, hey, these are people that are like those that browse those sites, shop those sites, and you've got access to some of that same data, which is super powerful. And that I think is just another way to narrow down that cold audience that's more likely to purchase from you.
Michael:
Yeah, absolutely. And our AI is trained on a lot of this aggregated data and we do have a lot of signals from a lot of
Brett:
Brands
Michael:
That allow us to improve the AI training, but that's different than being able to say, again, these are a ton of proprietary signals. We a ton of brands, but it's again, not the ability to target another brand's customers. And to your point, yeah, I mean that's what Meta does today. Even more so, right? We all have the meta pixel installed on our site. It is telling brand A that you just visited brand B website. Yeah, you're producting in market for that product right now, totally serving you the ad. So it's something that I think as marketers we might not think a lot about today, but that's what's happening across all of your, it's happening marketing channels right now. You're visiting this site you just bought from that site you just bought three times from this brand that makes you a great prospect and that's the ad that you're for brand C or D, and so that's why you're getting served that ad. So I think we've become also accustomed to that, but without thinking a lot about it, we're applying a lot of the same types of learnings with our models.
Brett:
Yep. Totally makes sense. Well, Michael, we're about out of time. Anything else you're really excited about, else you guys are testing that you want to let folks know about before we talk about how they can get in touch with you?
Michael:
Sure. And it's related to acquisition. We've actually rolled out a modernized version of the catalog and I'll hold one of those up.
Brett:
This is exciting to me again, because they're so novel. Yeah, that's so awesome. So man, if I get a catalog in the mail, I almost never get them. I'm pretty likely to browse through it. And if you compare that to time on site or something, it's pretty significant, right? I get a catalog, I'm probably going to open it up and look. So can you show that one more time for the folks watching the video? What brand is that that we're looking at?
Michael:
This is one that we designed that's actually a combination of a few brands around a specific theme. So you can see
Brett:
Nice,
Michael:
It's really cool how it's been
Brett:
Me, so kind of sharing the cost across outdoor retailers basically.
Michael:
But what we love here is that you can do so much with 16 pages or more
Brett:
Where
Michael:
You can weave in content that makes this an engaging piece that you actually want to read and hold onto and great merchandising. So being able to put that story together, tell again your brand story, weave in content about we have brand that did makeup tips and showing all the different shades and things like that. You have so much space to be able to do that, that it's great. I think the problem with catalogs historically has been it's six months of lead time. When you talk about securing paper, finding a printer, that printer typically has a three or four month waiting period just to slot in because of the way this production process works. Again, you have to source audiences, you have to run hundreds of thousands at a time. That's just how the industry is always. And so we've introduced a way to do it much more efficiently.
Minimums are much smaller, starting at more like 50 K versus hundreds of thousands. Lead time is more like four weeks versus three to four months. We can build these audiences using our same technology. And so for brands that are looking to potentially move up to more of a catalog format, we've made it really much more accessible, much easier. We designed the whole thing again in days like other things versus you having to dedicate your creative team for months to put one of these together. And the interesting thing is they actually don't cost much more than a postcard.
Brett:
Wow.
Michael:
The reason is, even though it's a lot bigger, the reason is just the process for running these types of products at larger scale,
Brett:
Scale
Michael:
And at one time is just a lower cost way of producing them. So it actually allows you to send something like this in the 60, 60 and change cent range. It's crazy. Which is crazy. And we've optimized the format, we've optimized all these things to get the cost down as much as possible, but it allows you to do it. There's just a little bit more of a commitment and timeline than there is with just sending a postcard where you could send one and you could send it
Brett:
Super interesting. Again, I think there's a progression here, right? Use postcard mailers for retention, for loyalty, for win back, then use it for site. So those are browsers type do not purchase, then start testing some of these cold audiences maybe with a trifold or something. And then you go catalogs. But Michael, I don't know if it's at your house, but I know for me, I'm on my computer, my phone eight, ten, twelve hours a day, right? Working sometimes when I'm home, I don't want to look at anything digital. And if I get something cool in the mail, it's kind of fun to look through it, right? Or I can even think of times, I've still got two young kids, I've got eight total, but we get Amazon toy catalogs around the holidays or whatever, and my 7-year-old Benjamin, he'll open that thing up, he'll circle things, he'll be like, Hey dad, I'm, I made a wishlist, which usually ends up being a hundred items or something, but it's just fun. You engage with these printed pieces in ways that we don't engage with stuff online. And so I think it's a really interesting add to your marketing mix.
Michael:
Yeah, you're exactly right. And there's studies about this, but you can just sense it, sense it. Having that physical piece from a brand one is much more memorable than a digital ad or an email that's sort of forgotten almost instantaneously. And it also makes your brand feel a lot bigger and more trustworthy,
Brett:
Legitimate legitimize
Michael:
It. We hear that all the time. And there's against studies on this stuff that I won't quote, but basically think about it for yourself. You get a piece of printed mail, you get a catalog from a brand, and it just adds, as you said, a level of legitimacy and trust and it's this capturing of attention, and that's what we're all competing for right now.
Brett:
So, cool man. So cool. Well, Michael, this has been fantastic. I love this topic. I love creative marketing tactics and strategies that other brands are not using, and my guess is that your competitors are not using direct mail, so you should absolutely consider it for those who want to know more, those who want to talk to you, those who want to explore post pilot a little bit, what's the best way for them to take next steps?
Michael:
Yeah, just hit me up directly, Michael, at post piot.com, copilot.com website, find me on LinkedIn, find me on Twitter, happy to answer questions, let you know what we think might make sense for your brand.
Brett:
Love it. These guys are smart. I've known him for years. I trust him. That's why I invested with 'em. And yeah, hit up, if you got a question, you're wondering if this could work for you, email Michael, and he will shoot straight with you. And Michael, if I'm not mistaken, you've kind of upped your LinkedIn game a little bit, right? Are you posting more on LinkedIn? I know Drew Sinski is committed, he's consistent, but you guys both have good LinkedIn games going right now.
Michael:
I'm just trying to keep up with Sinski. I
Brett:
Dunno that I, that's difficult, man. That's difficult to do.
Michael:
Hey, we all are right? We
Brett:
All are. It's Drew's world. We're just living in it, trying to keep up,
Michael:
Trying to be out there for sure.
Brett:
Yeah, that's awesome. So check out Michael Epstein on LinkedIn, on Twitter out Drew Sunki, check out your boy Brett Curry. I'm posting consistently now, Michael on LinkedIn at least 3, 4, 5 times a week, something like that. So hit me up as well with that. Michael, thank you so much, man. It's been a ton of fun.
Michael:
Always, Brett.
Brett:
And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? If you've not left that review on iTunes, please do so. It makes my day, helps other people discover the show and you'll feel good about yourself. You did a good deed for the podcast space. And so with that, until next time, thank you for listening.
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