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Mini Katana Activates AWOL Email Subscribers with PostPilot
In just three years, Mini Katana has become an eCommerce legend.
The replica Japanese sword brand, founded by Isaac Medeiros, is already close to $10 million in revenue. Even more impressive: Its growth has been mostly propelled by its irresistible TikTok and YouTube videos.
“We currently get 300 million to 400 million views a month on our content,” said Medeiros.
Mini Katana also has smartly built a massive email list from all that traffic so they can continue to market to them. But only a fraction of subscribers are buying.
The company uses MailMatch, a PostPilot feature that identifies physical addresses based only on email information, to connect with those prospects who have engaged with the brand and not yet purchased. And it’s getting a remarkable 5x ROAS.
In this case study, we’ll explain how it works, and share the other campaigns that are killing it for Mini Katana.
The Problem: Keeping Exponential Growth Going
The first year of its existence, Mini Katana did $2.5 million in sales; the second year it hit nearly $10 million, and it’s on track to continue its incredible growth.
The brand’s email list has also exploded. In the last six months alone, they’ve added more than 500,000 emails to the list.
But the conversion rate was below 1%.
“We're driving so much traffic to the site that's low intent,” Medeiros said. “Because it's all coming from these hundreds of millions of views we're getting organically each month. It's just kind of what we expect."
Email open rate is low because historically, Mini Katana’s messages were dominated by drops and sales, not the entertainment that drew people in the first place.
The Promise: Postcards Reach People Who Don’t Open Email
To juice growth, Mini Katana decided to press on a number of levers and see what yielded results. They included Amazon, paid, and direct mail.
Mini Katana used PostPilot to test a winback campaign that was sent to customers who had ordered three times in the past, but hadn’t purchased in more than three to six months.
It’s getting Mini Katana a 9x ROAS.
“It had such good results that we decided to automate it and do another round of winbacks,” Medeiros said.
Having proven the power of postcards to reach email ignorers, he decided to try MailMatch.
The Postcard: Turning Email Subscribers into Customers
When someone subscribes to Mini Katana’s email list, PostPilot’s proprietary feature matches that email address to a postal address and drops them a postcard.
The card has some dramatic flair, in keeping with the brand. It includes a discount code to entice recipients to make a purchase.
PostPilot turned the campaign around at warp speed, Medeiros said.
“It’s all been super easy,” he said. “PostPilot did the first round of designs, we gave them to our team and sent them back the same day, and it launched.”
“We're very constrained with manpower right now,” Medeiros said. “The white-glove service makes it so much easier to execute. It wasn’t just the design but the segmentation and the strategy. All I have to do is go, Does this make sense? Great, let’s go.”
Looking at the data for received cards (not the ones that have been mailed in the past week or so), the ongoing campaign continues to generate a 5x-plus ROAS.
The Postscript
Mini Katana is leveraging direct mail throughout its marketing funnel, from prospecting to abandoned cart to winbacks. The abandoned cart campaign consistently achieves a ROAS of 8.3x.
For Black Friday this year, the brand is planning an exciting new effort: a Cardalog, using it as a gift guide.
The team has learned from checkout questions that 40% of its customers are buying a sword for someone else. They’re leaning into gifting, and are considering creating Cardalog gift guides around Father’s Day and even customer birthdays.
“I think they’ll do really well for us,” Medeiros said. “Given our track record with PostPilot, I’m sure they will.”
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