Ready to increase your revenue?
Join thousands of ecommerce brands using PostPilot to acquire more customers & keep them coming back again (and again).
No contracts. No minimums.
The Beard Struggle Slashes Through Digital Noise with Direct Mail
TLDR:
- The Beard Struggle (TBS) launched a direct mail program to fight noisy inboxes and unlock another marketing channel.
- The team leverages postcards that are programmatically triggered based on buying behavior plus holiday winback postcards.
- TBS’s results are uniformly viking strong: minimum 6x+ across all campaigns.
Background
The Beard Struggle (TBS) team is well-known for their successful marketing tactics, including partnering with a number of beardy athletes with highly engaged followings.
Yet they face the same fundamental marketing challenges as everyone in ecommerce: improving retention and being seen in crazy-crowded owned channels.
To throw a few viking elbows and let out a repurchase-driving battle cry, TBS team launched their direct mail program with PostPilot.
“PostPilot offered us a solution that stood out: adding a personal touch to our customer outreach and helping us reach customers in a unique, tactile way.”
-Faiysal Kothiwala, Founder & Chief Bearded Officer @ The Beard Struggle
The Tactics
“Direct mail has provided us with a new channel to stand out in a saturated market. It's helped us cut through digital noise and connect with customers in a personal way, improving engagement and increasing loyalty.” -Faiysal
Incoming: three of the (many) ways Faiysal + co. are leveraging direct mail.
Winning Back Beard Warriors… Automatically
The magic of programmatic direct mail is that (as with email) you can build set-‘em-and-forget-‘em automations that trigger mailers to be fired off based on chosen parameters.
For TBS, we’re firing off postcards based on RFM parameters and hitting customers at key winback and anti-churn moments in the lifecycle—specifically, at the 90-, 270-, and 520-day marks.
To ensure that the messaging matches the timeframe, the copy is dialed up with each successive postcard.
At the 520-day mark, customers are being resurrected with postcards:
Automated Direct Mail for Very Important Vikings
Important History Lesson: Viking military commanders used direct mail to recruit elite raiders. Previous recruitment strategies, such as town square announcements, were ultimately ignored due to crowded square conditions and a lot of yelling. So, they used direct mail to cut through the noise and get messages into raiders’ hands. Incredible, right?
Important Note: None of that is true.
But: TBS is using direct mail to reach their own VIP customers and recruit them to their Brand VikingsTM loyalty program.
These Brand VikingsTM postcards create a particularly compelling experience for TBS customers—they’re getting an exclusive membership offer they can hold.
This too is automated.
When customers hit a certain spend threshold, we automatically send them this mailer.
“The PostPilot team has been incredible to work with. They’ve guided us through the entire process, helping us with strategy and implementation, and they have designed all our mailers, which made it easy for us to integrate direct mail into our marketing efforts.”
A Better BFCM for Beards
Direct mail drives strong ROI year-round, but it extra-shines over the holiday.
When the digital noise is the loudest, and customers’ eyes glaze over as they look at their crammed inboxes, behold:
(If that doesn’t catch someone’s eye, we don’t know what will.)
Over BFCM, we recommend that our customers lean hard into winbacks, and send mail to:
- Customers (whether or not they’ve purchased recently) subscribed to email/SMS
- Customers (also whether or not they’ve purchased recently) unsubscribed to email/SMS
Turns out, a gorgeous postcard and an incredible offer can not only bring recent customers back for more but also reactivate seemingly long-lost, unsubscribed customers.
And that’s exactly The Beard Struggle was able to do.
Results
“We’re looking to expand our use of direct mail further. We want to experiment with different types of campaigns, and as we continue to grow, direct mail will be a key part of how we build deeper relationships with our customers and increase lifetime value.” -Faiysal
Hear, hear.
The Beard Struggle’s results with direct mail? Viking strong.
- Automated winbacks: 6.1x–10.6x ROI, depending on purchase recency
- Brand VikingTM loyalty: 15x+ ROI
- BFCM Winbacks: 6.7x–10x+ ROI
Across the board, viking strong. The “lowest” ROIs are from winbacks targeting customers who last purchased a year and a half ago (or longer).
We’re absolutely thrilled about the team’s results, and we can’t wait to see the additional scale in TBS’s direct mail program.
Great for the brand, and great for beards around the world.
Next Case Study
.webp)
.jpg)
