How a Direct Mail Marketing Strategy Is The Secret Weapon For Inbox-Weary Customers

Before you read any further—we know you’re probably not here to learn about direct mail. 

So we don’t waste your time with the what. You know what it is, but you're looking for a way to determine the next steps for your business and direct mail marketing strategy.

That’s cool, and we can definitely help. Here we’ll dive into the critical aspects of adding direct mail as a marketing channel, the goals you should aim for, and the steps you can take to make it happen. 

Adding a direct mail marketing strategy to your omnichannel bingo card

Incorporating direct mail as an additional channel in your marketing program doesn’t mean you should lose sight of adjacent marketing channels. 

Instead, think of direct mail as a way to amplify your marketing efforts.

How? A few key ways:

1. Reconnect with customers who aren’t engaging with your emails anymore

Surveys show that 74% of people feel overwhelmed by email clutter in their inboxes. With every brand sending marketing blasts via email, it makes sense that the average consumer may turn a blind eye to the constant messages.

Brands like Dr. Squatch have struggled with this in the past. After learning that only about 10% of a brand's previous customers actually receive email and SMS messages, the Dr. Squatch team created a postcard campaign targeting customers who hadn't made a purchase in 7 to 9 months.

The result? A 12.66% conversion rate and an average ROAS of more than10x.

2. Achieve seamless multichannel integration

42% of consumers (across all age groups) visit a brand’s website after receiving direct mail. 

But these campaigns can be used beyond driving website traffic. Components such as QR codes, relevant URLs, and discount codes encourage customers to engage with any of your digital channels.

Increasing mobile app downloads, loyalty program sign ups, subscription purchases, and social media follows are all actions customers can take after receiving a postcard.

3. Deliver personalized messaging

Like digital marketing, direct mail can be highly targeted using demographic, geographic, behavioral, or repeat purchasing data to create a postcard that resonates with the recipient. 

In other words, we believe in integrating both online and offline messaging for a comprehensive marketing strategy that truly connects brands with customers. And yes, it works during every stage of the conversion funnel. 

The goals of a direct mail marketing strategy

Every eCommerce business needs a healthy balance of acquisition and retention; direct mail supports both sides. Keeping that in mind, your overarching goal is to create longevity for your business, customer relationships, and growth.

So what goals should you set? There are three core ones we suggest:

1. Drive revenue 

Surprise, surprise—everyone wants to make more money. When implementing direct mail, your goal is to generate 5-10% more revenue in addition to your adjacent revenue streams. 

Emphasis on the “in addition to.” We’re not saying direct mail should replace your current inflows—they amplify them. Remember, these campaigns are meant to be treated like a 1+1=3 formula. 

2. Take it full-funnel 

Many folks see direct mail marketing as an additional way to increase acquisition, which is true. However, direct mail works best when you scale it into a full-funnel approach—enhancing customer acquisition all the way to retargeting. 

Approaching direct mail marketing this way will naturally help you

• Lower CAC and Meta Taxes: Direct mail does well without a hefty price tag. Take advantage of the simplicity of cold prospecting, finding lookalike audiences, and converting anonymous site viewers by sending them a postcard to remind them of your products.  
• Lower CRAC: Direct mail can turn expensive customer re-acquisition into a low retention cost, and direct mail can be used to reach out to inactive, churned customers. 

3. Automate it

Once you’ve run your earlier tests with direct mail, brands start leveraging programmatic direct mail programs. 

A few examples (among dozens) of the programmatic approach:

• Automated winback campaigns: Customers hit certain behavioral parameters and get mail. E.g., Customers haven’t purchased in between 180-365 days, have made 3+ previous purchases, and have spent $100+. As soon as they hit those variables, they’ll get a postcard driving them back to your brand.
• Automated cart abandonment: Add a postcard to the end of your email abandoned cart flows via webhook and automatically send a postcard if the recipient doesn’t convert after the flow finishes.
• Automated browse abandonment: Automatically send postcards to warm leads who visit certain pages on your site. 

In short, automate revenue, and track real-time results.

4. Build a halo effect

When you’re well-established in the market across most channels, you’ll see a significant spike in engagement across those channels when you start mailing.  

This is the halo effect at play.

For example, when customers abandon their cart, the first thought is to trigger an email flow. This flow may be 3-5 emails long, spanned over a 2-3 week period. Instead of sending each of these messages to a customer’s inbox, you can spread the message across channels. 

Incorporate SMS, push notifications, and direct mail. That way, you aren’t filling up a customer’s email inbox with messages they’re likely getting from multiple brands at once. You’ll stand out because direct mail is less cluttered, and they’ll be more likely to catch your next email because now you’re top-of-mind.

How to incorporate direct mail into an existing marketing mix 

Here are some simple places to start for that full-funnel direct mail strategy. AKA, direct mail’s low-hanging fruit. 

1. Tack direct mail onto your existing flows 

Leverage your existing customer list and create a Winback campaign to remind customers who haven’t purchased in a while about what’s new.

Here’s how Mini Katana did it: The replica Japanese sword brand grew its audience by gaining popularity on TikTok and YouTube. Then, they used that momentum to build an impressively massive email list. 

The problem was that while site traffic was significantly high, conversion rates fell low. To juice growth, Mini Katana partnered with PostPilot to test a Winback campaign sent to customers who had ordered three times in the past but hadn’t purchased in more than three to six months. 

This campaign crushed, reigning in 9x ROAS—proving the power of postcards when it comes to email ignorers. 

2. Enhance the VIP experience

Use direct mail as an additional perk of becoming a member. Whether it’s your general or VIP-tiered members, direct mail can be a unique experience for specific customers. 

Need some ideas? Remember, direct mail postcards can be extremely personalized, so use this to your advantage to create an exclusive experience like:

• Opening a birthday postcard with a gift offer to claim online.
• Receiving a milestone postcard for your 10th purchase with a discount code. 
• Reading a handwritten note in postcard form with meaningful words from your brand.

…Just to name a few.

Direct mail postcards can enhance the customer experience in many ways; you just have to get creative.

3. Go the extra mile and retarget warm leads

Want to aim high? Retarget warm leads who have engaged with your brand but need an extra nudge. These customers may have added items to their cart or browsed certain category pages, but they need help sealing the deal. 

Use MailMatch™ to plug that funnel further. MailMatch finds the mailing addresses of those who need that extra push and sends them direct mail postcards. Again, think about abandoned carts, customers who clicked a link via email but didn’t purchase, or any other activity that shows someone is highly engaged but hasn’t pressed purchase.

Take Bones Coffee, an ecommerce coffee brand known for its unique and exciting flavors. Bones Coffee knows that after purchasing, customers typically return when their coffee runs out after a few months of special brews. 

However, sometimes customers don't, and Bones Coffee has to be strategic about winning them back. 

To avoid the increasing cost of digital advertising, Bones Coffee teamed up with PostPilot to develop an impactful direct mail campaign that delivers results. Using PostPilot’s Klaviyo integration for audience segmentation, Bones Coffee sent 12,000+ postcards to groups of customers who haven’t engaged with their digital channels for over six months to showcase their new seasonal launch. 

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This direct mail campaign was a hit, bringing in over $21,000 new sales and amassing a 7.35x ROAS. 

These customers have re-engaged with Klaviyo and are ready to be nurtured again. This opens the door for Bones Coffee to rebuild that brand-to-consumer relationship and employ omnichannel marketing to keep them engaged. 

Technology and tangible postcards together for a flawless strategy. The 1 + 1 = 3 formula strikes again. 

4. When acquisition ads are seeing diminishing returns 

For many companies, if a marketing strategy works well, it can be challenging to move away from attractive numbers and try something new. 

But we can all agree that singular acquisition efforts eventually find diminishing returns on incremental spending. This calls for trying new mediums to become less dependent on one channel. 

Diversifying your customer inflow presents some risk, but when you start to see those diminishing returns, ask yourself, “Is there another way to bring new eyeballs to our product who aren't engaging with the medium we're currently invested in?”

The answer is yes. And there are ways to do so with direct mail cold prospecting on lookalike audiences. 

How does this work? Use lookalike audiences to target direct mail campaigns to people who share similar traits with your best customers. Reaching out to those with characteristics comparable to those of an existing customer base increases the chances of resonating with these new prospects and driving conversions. 

But does it work? Is direct mail effective? 

The short answer is, yes! 

The long answer is that direct mail is effective at every step of the funnel, and here's proof to support it:

Acquisition

Direct mail can be your go-to strategy for customer acquisition. Take a look at Caden Lane, a San Antonio-based company that sells stylish baby clothes, matching family pajamas, swimsuits, and personalized gifts.

The brand uses channels like Google and Facebook for its marketing strategy, finding varying levels of success. With an interest in direct mail marketing, the brand started researching ways to acquire customers by going directly into their mailboxes, but they struggled to nail their postcard strategy.

This led them to work with PostPilot. Together, we built a mailing list of 60,000 expecting moms to create a cold prospecting campaign. From there, PostPilot also created a postcard that was sent to those awaiting their little ones in hopes of sparking new customer acquisition.

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Caden Lane had initially hoped to break even, but the campaign generated more than a 3.8x ROAS.

The cold prospecting direct mail campaign confirmed that many expecting parents wanted to buy from Caden Lane; they just needed a little reminder to prompt them. 

Retargeting

Gozney, a commercial-only pizza oven maker company, was able to retarget and convert anonymous website visitors with direct mail. Here’s how:

Gozney wanted to strengthen email and SMS while effectively nurturing prospects through a long consideration period. Their beautiful pizza ovens are high-ticket items, and Gozney sought an effective way to keep their pizza products top-of-mind for customers.

Partnering with PostPilot, Gozney launched a SiteMatch™ campaign to see how direct mail could help with customer retargeting. 

From there, it’s simple. 

• A SiteMatch pixel gets added to Gozney’s eCommerce site via Google Tag Manager or the site’s backend.
• Around 20-40% of anonymous site traffic is matched to a physical address. 
• To boost performance, existing customers and visitors who don’t demonstrate valid intent signals are filtered out automatically. 
• A list of valid anonymous site traffic addresses is created. 

Gozney sent Cardalogs™ featuring a few of their products, encouraging those previous visitors to peek at what’s new.

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The SiteMatch results were impressive, with $116k in revenue on 151 orders and 16x ROAS, showing that direct mail for retargeting really sparks things up.  

Retention

Direct mail is the gift that keeps on giving. After customer acquisition and retargeting, direct mail impressively contributes to customer retention. 

Take a look at M&S Meats and how they implemented direct mail into their strategy: 

M&S Meats, a Montana-based jerky, snack sticks, and sweets eCommerce brand, faced the common challenge of breaking through customers’ crammed inboxes. They hoped to leverage existing customers to generate more revenue in that window but were cautious about adding new channels. 

Working with PostPilot, M&S Meats opted for a tangible and top-of-mind strategy to showcase their new product photography: postcards. 

Together, we focused on reactivating previous gifters, which were broken down into four segments based on recency and frequency of purchase. This segmentation allowed PostPilot to easily track how each cohort performs to optimize targeting on future sends.

M&S Meats' postcard initiative was a smashing success, with a 110% YoY increase in holiday revenue and an average 15x+ ROI.

Absolutely smoked it!

Direct mail has worked for 100+ years, and it still crushes 

Direct mail is no longer just a thing of the past. Direct mail marketing is a timeless strategy that helps you throughout every step of the conversion funnel. 

Here, we’ve given you the why, the what, the how, and the proof. 

(But if you're NOT convinced yet, we have dozens of other direct mail case studies for you to peruse.)

Now it’s your turn to tell us all about your business. Drop us a line to automate a full-funnel channel with PostPilot today.