Grande Cosmetics Keeps VIPs Coming Back with Direct Mail

In an ultra-competitive beauty market, Grande Cosmetics has found the secret to success: When your products really work, you win customers’ trust.

The brand built its name on its award-winning GrandeLASH-MD serum, which promises longer, thicker-looking lashes in 4 to 6 weeks. Today, it also offers a full suite of hair, brow, lip and skin products, all designed to plump, rejuvenate and otherwise enhance one’s natural features.

Wholesale accounts — including Ulta, Sephora and Amazon — have been instrumental in getting the brand to where it is today, on GrandeCosmetics.com the team can speak directly with customers and offer benefits like a rewards program and discount codes.

“Our own DTC is special to us — it's what we see as our most loyal customers,” said Christie Porter, Grande Cosmetics’ director of e-commerce.

Still, even the most loyal customer sometimes needs a reminder to re-up when their favorite product is getting low. To deliver effective nudges, the brand had to make sure its messages weren’t getting lost in the digital noise. It took a chance on a postcard campaign with PostPilot and was blown away by the results.

Across its three initial winback campaigns, the brand saw $96,000 in sales off the coupon codes alone.

In this case study, we’ll look at how Grande Cosmetics is integrating postcards into its marketing strategy to re-engage valuable shoppers, entice first-time purchasers and cross-sell slower-moving SKUs.

‍The Problem: Customers Are Inundated With Emails

When a customer buys a lash serum from Grande Cosmetics, the brand has a good idea of when they’ll be due for a new tube, since the product is designed to be used daily for three months for full effect.

Reaching them at that point has gotten more challenging, though.

Like most advertisers, the brand’s paid social performance has taken a hit year-over-year due to iOS privacy updates. And while email still brings in significant sales, the channel has suffered from deliverability issues and reduced open rates.

At conference after conference, Porter heard brands talk about the comeback of direct mail, and was intrigued by their impressive results. When she connected with PostPilot, a trial campaign seemed like “a no-brainer,” she said.

Grande Cosmetics had a number of goals it hoped to achieve through direct mail. First, it wanted to circumvent customers’ inboxes, where countless brands are jockeying for their attention.

“They're getting our emails every day, I'm sure," Porter said. "But they're getting everybody's emails."

The company also has a Shopify site geared toward wholesale customers — salons, spas, cosmetic clinics — and there, they wanted to offload excess inventory to make room for new holiday sets.

The Promise: Connecting in the Right Way at the Right Time

Because PostPilot integrates with Shopify and Klaviyo, Grande Cosmetics could easily segment its customer list and send postcards to anyone who hadn’t made a purchase in at least three months.

“We're hitting them just at that point where they're probably due for a refill of their product,” Porter said.

The reminder isn’t drowned out by a slew of other email offers or forgotten under Gmail’s “Promotions” tab. It’s right there in customers’ hands.

Plus, with a limited-time 20%-off coupon code, there’s motivation to act quickly.

The discount is a particular selling point because Grande Cosmetics products are rarely on sale and don’t come cheap. A tube of its lash serum costs $68, while its new melatonin, collagen and ashwagandha gummies run $30 a bottle.

The Postcard: A Pop of Pink and Hero Products

If anything is going to stand out in a mailbox full of white envelopes, it’s a hot pink postcard.

Grande Cosmetics’ signature color palette worked in its favor here, providing a backdrop for its crisp imagery and upbeat copy.

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The front of the postcard features a personalized message with an invitation to “treat yourself” with an exclusive deal. The back has a hero shot of the brand’s top-selling products — its lash, brow and hair serums — to encourage recipients to try out additional SKUs.

For wholesale customers, the brand ran a “buy five sets, get one free” special, promoting it with a postcard campaign celebrating “Christmas in July.” The rare mid-summer deal gave these clients a chance to stock up at a discount while freeing up warehouse space for incoming product.

Grande Cosmetics has an in-house design studio that keeps tight reins on the brand’s aesthetic and voice, so they wanted to make sure the final product was perfect before sending it out. They began by sending over image assets and sample copy to PostPilot’s designers, and then weighed in over a couple of rounds of feedback to polish up the final product.

Now, a few campaigns in, the brand’s designers can take a more hands-off approach.

“It's nice for our design team to be able to pass things off and have [PostPilot] actually execute it,” said Porter.

The Payoff: Six-Figure Sales + DTC Margins

As soon as the postcards hit mailboxes, the Grande team began seeing results.

Most impressive was the VIP winback campaign that offered a site-wide coupon, which gave customers the freedom to buy the products of their choosing at a discount.

This postcard campaign was sent to 16,457 recipients and generated $276,600 in sales.

These are especially stellar results when you consider that the brand is benefiting from DTC margins on these sales — and, in many cases, full-price margins as well.

Across its three initial winback campaigns, the brand saw $96,000 in sales off the coupon codes alone.

While results were trickier to track on its wholesale channel (Grande’s site doesn’t support coupon codes), the team was excited by the uptick in sales following the mailing.

“It was really great,” Porter said. “We helped move through a good chunk of our excess inventory.”

‍The Postscript: Automation and Acquisition

The brand has moved to an always-on strategy for its winback campaign — a set-it-and-forget-it option using the assets it has already created with PostPilot.

It is also experimenting with ways to use direct mail to meet its other priorities, including customer acquisition and cross-selling. The brand recently sent postcards to the segment of its customer list that has never made a purchase through its site, offering a free sample of its lash serum for just the cost of tax and shipping.

The sample has a $25 value, so it’s a good deal for those who are curious about the product but hesitant to shell out for the full-size tube. The brand is already starting to see results.

“It’s a really big program for us, because we feel like once we can get people trying that, we have a whole flow that they fall into, with offering them an upsell to a full size,” said Porter.

The team is also excited to introduce its mailing list to the rest of its product lineup, whether through trial offers, discounts, or other strategies.

“We have a whole catalog now to highlight,” Porter said.

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