Direct Mail Shines in Toty’s Marketing Mix

Background

In 2023, Toty exploded onto the eCommerce scene with safe-in-the-sun, inclusive beauty products—or in their words, “360˚ Suncare solutions.” 

To accelerate growth, the team brought on Brandon Amoroso first to consult on and then lead their marketing efforts. Brandon almost immediately added direct mail to Toty’s owned marketing strategy, to “complement their email and SMS flows.” 

“We wanted to increase the number of touchpoints with customers, especially those who ordered but never signed up to receive emails from us. Direct mail gives us a way to continue to communicate with those customers, get them to repurchase, and make our media spend more effective with retargeting."

-Brandon Amoroso

Let’s shed some light on those tactics.

The Tactics

Brandon has been addressing two major pain points for Toty (that many eCommerce brands face), via retargeting and retention postcards: 

• Driving customers to make their first purchases: You’ve spent money to convince those window shoppers to walk in the door, but they haven’t whipped out their credit cards… Yet.
• Solving the “one-time buyer problem:” You’ve driven that first purchase, but you may be break-even or in the red. Gotta bring ‘em back again to get in the black.

Driving Customers to Make Their First Purchases

Brandon has leveraged one of PostPilot’s retargeting features, MailMatch^TM, to convince people to hop off the Fence of Indecision and make their first purchases. 

MailMatch enables brands to send mailers to physical home addresses based on email addresses alone—in Brandon x Toty’s case, they were postcards:

And like all other direct mail campaigns using PostPilot, it was a no-sweat process. 

• Campaign setup: Brandon simply uploaded Attentive email lists to campaigns in the PostPilot app. For example, this included a segment who signed up for email between 5–30 days ago and had not yet converted.
• Postcard design: Our in-house design team mocked up postcards based on assets Toty provided, and the Toty team approved the designs.
• Matching, Printing, and Mailing: PostPilot matched physical addresses to Toty’s email subscribers, then printed and mailed postcards to them.

“The PostPilot team is hands-on with setup and implementation. So, it’s been a very low lift for us. I wanted to run with it and iterate, and we handed it off to [Emma, our Account Manager]. Now, we're thinking about ways to make our targeting a little bit more specific as our customer base gets larger and larger.”

-Brandon

Solving the One-Time Buyer Problem

To drive second purchases, brands can leverage email, SMS, direct mail, and digital retargeting ads. But if customers are unsubscribed from (or unengaged with) email/SMS, only direct mail and digital retargeting remain. 

While we wholeheartedly support digital retargeting as part of any thoughtful marketing mix, the best digital ad on the planet can’t literally put a message into all customers’ hands. 

Only direct mail can.

So, to reach all one-time buyers, Brandon put postcards to work:

In the initial testing, postcards were sent to three customer segments based on last order date (LOD):

• LOD of 60–120 days ago 
• LOD of 120–240 days ago
• LOD of 240–365 days ago

However, after the success of those second-purchase campaigns, Brandon added 6 new automations to dynamically send postcards to customers who hit additional LOD marks. The automations fire off postcards at 30–90-day intervals instead of 120-day intervals, and when a customer repurchases, they’ll no longer receive the postcards.

Translation: hands-off programmatic mail that dynamically plugs the funnel and increases the chances of driving additional purchases among one-time buyers.

The Results

“I use PostPilot versus other direct mail solutions because PostPilot handles everything. Marketers and creative teams at brands aren’t direct mail experts. They’re not set up to plan and design for direct mail. It means we got a seamless onboarding experience and went live very quickly. And now, we can just hand over the creative assets and then PostPilot does the rest.”

(We can’t argue with that. But let’s talk numbers.)

Both retargeting and retention have performed well for Toty:

• Retargeting with MailMatch: Avg. 5x+ ROI
• Second-purchase campaigns: Avg. 4x+ ROI

That’s fewer dollars in the hands of Meta/Google and more customers protected from the sun.

And with these strong results, Brandon is doubling down for Toty. 

As he explained, “There’s much more to be done with direct mail. More automations. Birthday campaigns. Targeting more segments.”

We’re here for it, and we’ll report back when those results roll in, too. 

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