Low-Cost Campaigns You Must Run to Win BFCM

BFCM is here, and your brand better be ready to beat the competition. How can you strategically and cost effectively come out on top? PostPilot and our friends at Kynship will show you how.

Black Friday/Cyber Monday is almost here. And this year will be more competitive than ever. 

Brands are pulling out all the stops to make their numbers. That’s wise, because the challenges include soaring CPCs, overflowing customer inboxes, privacy limitations on iOS and a wobbly economy. 

If that weren’t enough, businesses that rely heavily on SMS marketing are expected to take a hit from the iOS16 update, which will automatically filter texts into different categories (including junk). 

But there are powerful and cost-effective strategies that can help you win this holiday season–while avoiding a lot of the competitive drama. 

PostPilot, which has modernized direct mail for modern ecommerce, and Kynship, a leader in growing sales through influencer marketing, can show you how. 

Re-engage with inactive customers, convert those fence-sitting prospects, and begin seeding micro-influencers. These approaches might just be your secret weapons for the holidays and beyond. 

1. Wow with a Winback 

Smart marketers know that your best future customers are actually your past customers. 

Past customers are more likely to make a purchase than people who have never bought from you before. And, they’re less expensive to convert. In fact, one of the more powerful ways to build profits isn’t to get new customers–it’s to increase the lifetime value (LTV) of customers you’ve already spent money to acquire. 

Postcards are an easy, impactful way to bring lapsed customers back to your site. 

Italian truffle brand Urbani proved that last holiday season. Leonardo Plebani, whose marketing agency DTC Gang works with Urbani, ran a campaign to see if they could win back big spenders who seemed like a lost cause. 

The campaign targeted VIPs who hadn’t made a purchase in at least a year, and who weren’t engaging through email or online. It seemed possible—even likely—that they had completely lost interest in Urbani.

But that turned out not to be the case. Urbani scored a whopping $80,000 in sales and a 1,500% ROI. Though the cards included a discount, many recipients didn’t even use them and simply bought at full price. And the winback had a long tail: customers continued to shop even after the holidays were over.

These lapsed customers still liked Urbani—they just needed to get the message in the right way. 

Creating your own winback campaign is easy, with PostPilot’s native integrations and in-house printing: 

1. Create your winback segment in Klaviyo or Omnisend.
2. Sync the segment with PostPilot
3. Create a campaign targeting that segment.
4. Design your card (or let PostPilot’s experts do it for you). 
5. Watch the conversions come in.

Don’t have the bandwidth to make it happen? All PostPilot’s subscriptions include concierge service, which can handle everything from strategy to design to stamping.

2. Convert the Fence-Sitters

If you’re like many brands, you have plenty of people on your email list who haven’t yet become actual customers. 

We have a way to convert those brand-curious customers: prospecting with postcards. Direct mail with a generous BFCM offer is shown to convert. 

Here are some of the reasons postcards work: 

• Customers like mail. According to one Epsilon study, 50% of consumers like direct mail better than email. And 60% of them actually like their physical mail. 

• People open mail. Direct mail has an open rate of 90%, That’s head and shoulders above the average 20% open rate for emails. 

• Response rates are higher. The 2018 DMA Response Rate Report says direct mail has a 9% response rate, compared to 1% for email and social media. 

• People get the feels with mail. Snail mail prompts a stronger emotional response than email, says research from Temple University. 

But how do you prospect your email list with direct mail? With PostPilot’s proprietary MailMatch™ technology. MailMatch™ can identify physical addresses for customers on your email list with up to 80% accuracy. 

Luxury baby gear brand Orbit used MailMatch to reach high-intent customers based only on email addresses. The company went after people who had visited their site multiple times, and scored a 1600% ROI. 

This form of direct-mail prospecting is cost-effective because it’s focused. It hits people who are already interested in the brand. And PostPilot scrubs each mailing list to remove addresses that are likely to be undeliverable, preventing you from wasting money. 

Though there’s serious data behind MailMatch™, it’s easy to get a new prospecting campaign started. The feature is included with all PostPilot subscriptions. 

3. Use Shared Mail for Uber-Cheap Customer Acquisition

The absolute most affordable customer acquisition tactic today is to use shared mail. Although traditional shared mail tends to be coupon books and envelopes stuffed with a frillion random offers (which is a step above cold calling)...

PostPilot reinvented shared mailers from the bottom up:

Now, we send out multiple editions every month based on themes, targeting customers based on our vast data set. This ranges from targeting new and expectant mothers (e.g., our "New Moms" mailer above) to high spenders by gender (e.g., our "Modern Male" edition).

Turns out it really works, and a shared mailer lifts all brands: you're not competing for wealth, just the cost per send.

• Cost per send: $0.10
• Average ROI: ~3X

4. Begin Seeding Micro-Influencers 

Consumers see straight through fake reviews—they want authenticity. Finding creators who really love your product and are willing to recommend it to your followers will help your brand stand out among the noise on social media.

 The most cost-effective way to do this? A product seeding campaign. In other words, sending your products to micro-influencers with a following of ~5,000-100,000. We recommend micro-influencers for a few reasons, but the two most important are their content creation abilities and their connection with their community of followers. 

They have a strong voice, and know how to convey it with engaging and authentic content. That’s a superpower you want to tap into as a brand.

And the cost to start seeding micro-influencers? Well, aside from time, it’s only going to cost you the cost of your product (i.e COGS). 

For detailed steps on how to do this, you can read Kynship’s best practice guide to influencer seeding. Make sure you use their ‘no strings attached’ messaging when reaching out to influencers to increase your outreach success: 

‍

When you send out your product to opted-in influencers, use The Influencer Seeding App to streamline this part of the process. It will save you having to create orders individually.

And once you’ve got the influencer-generated content, the second stage to a seeding campaign is getting your ad account setup to test and scale winning creatives to drive sales. 

Kynship recommends trusting Facebook’s machine learning system to pick these for you. This means setting up Dynamic Creative Testing Camapigns, optimize them for conversions, and turn on Cost Cap Bidding to make sure you are only spending money on the creatives that are driving results for you.

Need some support getting your first influencer seeding campaign off the ground? Book a call with Kynship to get started.

Make it Your Best BFCM with PostPilot & Kynship

PostPilot was made for savvy DTC marketers like you—marketers who are fed up with wishy-washy direct mail tactics and are ready to incorporate automation into their strategy for maximum impact.

PostPilot is like Klaviyo for direct mail—an out-of-the-box direct mail automation software that helps you send perfectly-timed promotions and create memorable moments that increase customer loyalty and boost your bottom line.

Stop leaving LTV and incremental profits on the table and start sending delightfully personalized on-off triggered campaigns instead—all in literal minutes!

The best time to try PostPilot was yesterday; the second-best time is now. What are you waiting for? Try out our direct mail automation platform risk-free!