&Collar Drives 6 Figures Sending Handwritten Cards to VIPs

Background

&Collar has grown its menswear empire on relatable messaging (“dress shirts suck”), fantastic products, and genuine connection with customers around creating better shirts—&pants, &socks, &ties, &more. 

& while founder Ben Perkins would likely personally meet and thank all of &Collar’s customers if he had a teleporter and a less busy schedule, sometimes we have to play the (post)cards we’re dealt and use other futuristic tech… 

Like full-funnel programmatic direct mail & futuristic handwriting robots powered by PostPilot to send thank-you notes at scale.

“I keep seeing my email open rates drop—especially given clampdowns on compliance and deliverability. But with a PostPilot campaign, I know it’s going to get into someone’s mailbox, and I know that person is going to interact with the card. They’re gonna check it out, probably keep it on a table or desk, and they’ll find themselves on our site. I’ve done it myself when I’ve gotten mail from other merchants.”

-Ben Perkins, Founder @ &Collar

The Tactics

Acquisition &Retargeting &Retention with Direct Mail

Don’t worry, we’ll get to the robots shortly.

Acquisition

On the acquisition side, &Collar has leveraged PostPilot for cold prospecting campaigns, targeting both male and female lookalike audiences with postcards.

Lookalikes with direct mail? Sounds time-consuming for a brand.

Nope. 

&Collar used PostPilot’s complimentary account management and in-house design team to launch the campaigns. 

Here’s how it went down:

• We built lookalike audiences based on &Collar’s best customers.
• Our design team created postcards based on &Collar’s brand assets.
• We printed &launched the campaign.
• &Collar tracked real-time results in the PostPilot app.

&Retargeting

To drive never-buyers to their first purchases, &Collar has used MailMatch^TM, which enables brands to send direct mail to physical addresses based on email addresses alone.

Using MailMatch, &Collar has targeted customers who signed up for email but who had not purchased in over 30 days. In other words, the team “reduced their Meta and Google taxes.”

&Retention

Although &Collar has used direct mail for a number of retention initiatives, including post-BFCM retention and VIP winbacks, we’d love to highlight their “Sunset Winback” campaigns, which targeted customers who last purchased a full year ago.

These postcards drove single buyers to repurchase after not having purchased for 365 days and got customers back into the fold.

It prevented those customers from churning, brought them back into the fold for additional purchases, and drove them back onto their email list.

Handwriting Robots for Hire

I get “handwritten” cards from State Farm that are clearly not handwritten, so I was a bit skeptical—I asked [Mikaela, our Account Manager] to send a sample, and I immediately saw these are the real deal. All the handwriting options look very real, and I said, “Okay, let’s do this.”

-Ben

PostPilot’s handwriting robots’ “hands” never tire. So, when Ben wanted to send thousands of VIP customers personalized handwritten cards from &Collar and its subsidiary, Flight, the robots were up to the task. 

For &Collar’s card, you couldn’t find a guy happier to be dumping a drink on himself:

The beauty of this card isn’t simply in the ultimate act of anti-stain rebellion (i.e., a dark beverage + white shirt) but in the messaging. It’s a heartfelt thank you from Ben, and there’s no sales pitch. There’s no discount code.

Repeat: no discount code.

And for Flight, the team took the same approach:

In this case, the card was sent from Mackenzie, Flight and &Collar’s VP of Marketing, thanking customers for being part of the newer brand’s journey so far. 

Once again, no discount code or drive-to-buy (fly-to-buy?) to be seen here.

Results

&Collar’s full-funnel mail is delivering.

• Acquisition: &Collar’s male and female cold prospecting campaigns drove a 4.9x and 5.8x ROI respectively. Again, on cold prospecting.
• Retargeting: Their MailMatch campaigns, targeting non-buyers, have driven a 10x+ ROI.
• Retention: Two “Sunset Winback” campaigns drove over a 7x ROI apiece, and other winbacks drove 10x+ ROIs.

But what about the robots?

(Check it out!)

Customers so frequently just get pounded on the head with notifications and CTAs from all directions. It’s been a one-way street for too long. We’re trying to open up a “two-way commerce” where we can do things like simply say “thank you” to our VIPs. It’s genuine, and we’re getting the message right into their hands with postcards.

-Ben 

It’s genuine, and it works. 

The no-discount, no-CTA thank-you cards still drove customers onsite. In total, the cards drove over $200k in revenue, at super strong ROIs. 

• The Flight cards drove a 8x ROI
• The &Collar cards drove a 15x+ ROI

(And that revenue? It was at full margin.)

There’s something special about getting a sincere message directly to a customer, and the only way to guarantee that happens is with direct mail. 

Handwriting robots optional… 

But recommended.