Programmatic Direct Mail: How to Automate Revenue in 2024

Programmatic direct mail is the cutting-edge approach to direct mail: using advanced targeting, AI, and automation software to drive full-funnel revenue with physical mail. 

If you're looking to learn more about programmatic direct mail, read on.

PostPilot is the most advanced programmatic mail platform out there, and our singular mission is to make direct mail a no-brainer for consumer brands.

Ahead is a rundown of how (with PostPilot) you can use programmatic direct mail marketing across the funnel and the suite of services we offer to help you do so.

Let's go.

Programmatic Direct Mail Marketing Across the Funnel 

Programmatic direct mail powers all levels of the funnel—customer acquisition, retargeting, and retention—and it's a thoughtful digital-physical hybrid channel. In short, it uses the power of software to put your message in customers' (and potential customers') hands.

Let’s break it down.

Customer Acquisition 

We know how brutal the acquisition environment is right now. Meta and Google ad costs are ludicrous, so you feel like you’re paying a high price to lose control of your marketing channels.

But direct mail overcomes these digital customer acquisition limits while slashing CACs in the process. 

Too good to be true? No, it’s just how we do business.

Take a look at how we enable programmatic direct mail for customer acquisition: 

Cold Prospecting 

Think of this like Meta, but for direct mail campaigns.

With our feature AcquisitionAI, we can can spin up AI-built Lookalike Audiences in a matter of hours, so you can send mail to people with similar characteristics to your VIPs.

TLDR: it finds more like your best. 

We’ve found that all our mailers work well for AI-driven prospecting campaigns:

• Postcards: Three sizes of postcards, printed in our own facilities. Launch in a week or less.
• Cardalogs™: A trifold, allowing brands to showcase products in a concise, attention-grabbing format. Also launch in a week or less. 
• The Modern Catalog: Our take on traditional catalogs, except vastly faster to produce and launch, with significantly lower MOQs. Designed by our in-house team at no additional charge. 
• Shared Mail: Reap the cost benefits of a shared mailer ($0.10/send) but with superior targeting and brand presentation—without getting lost in a random coupon book. Designed and led by designers from legendary magazines Domino and Dwell. 

Direct Mail Acquisition in Action

Check out Caden Lane, a San Antonio-based company that sells stylish baby clothes, matching family pajamas, swimsuits, and personalized gifts.

Caden Lane’s marketing team uses prominent channels like Google and Facebook with varying levels of success. With an interest in direct mail marketing, the brand started researching ways to reach customers directly in their mailboxes, but they struggled to nail their postcard strategy.

This led them to contact PostPilot. Together with Caden Lane, we designed a test Winback campaign with an initial budget of $10,000, sending postcards to VIP customers who hadn’t purchased in at least 90 days. 

With this campaign, ROAS surpassed expectations and prompted Caden Lane to see if direct mail could also deliver on its biggest challenge: cold prospecting. 

First, PostPilot built a list of 60,000 expecting moms. From there, we also created a perfect postcard that was sent out to those awaiting their little ones. 

The Results? A 3.8x ROAS on a cold audience, far surpassing the brand’s initial hopes of breaking even. 

The postcards confirmed that many expecting parents actually want to buy from Caden Lane—they just need to be able to receive the message. The hurdle of hard-to-reach leads = solved.

Happy baby, happy CMO. 

Retargeting Leads

Ah, yes. The power of retargeting and reconnection. 

How are your online retargeting campaigns doing? 

Even if they’re successful, here’s the thing: direct mail gets 28x better engagement than online campaigns that your prospects may not see. 

And there are many ways to use programmatic direct mail for retargeting (as we’ve reengineered it) to automate revenue:

• Convert anonymous site visitors with SiteMatch™: Think Facebook retargeting—but at their front door.
• Reconnect with subscribers that haven’t converted yet with MailMatch™: No address? No problem. Target and convert customers with direct mail based on just their emails.
• Reach out to cart abandoners with CartMatch™: Target and convert customers with uncompleted orders using hyper-effective direct mail.

Many online shoppers need an extra nudge to hit “purchase,” and if you keep these automations as "always-on" campaigns, you'll have an ever-nudging tool in your marketing toolbox.

In the case of HexClad, their email list and site traffic grew fast, and nudges were needed. Paid social ads, TV commercials, and big-name endorsements meant the list has grown rapidly.

With tens of thousands of potential leads, HexClad was a great candidate for MailMatch, which sends direct mail campaigns to prospects based on email addresses alone. 

However, email inboxes are stuffed with marketing blasts from every brand a customer has ever engaged with, and HexClad wanted to remain maximally visible. Programmatic direct mail reinforced HexClad’s credibility and ensured that newcomers remembered the products during their BFCM holiday shopping.

HexClad’s MailMatch campaign went out to more than 21,000 of those on the brand’s email list who had never converted. The segment helped generate $800,000 in sales during the campaign window. 

HexClad went above and beyond with its retargeting strategy, leveraging MailMatch to reconnect with 3,329 VIP customers who hadn’t placed orders in over 70 days. 

This VIP Winback campaign with MailMatch raked in $143,900 in sales, showing that shoppers react positively to the physical reminder to repurchase.

A big win for HexClad’s 7-figure programmatic direct mail program and some well-done retargeting campaigns.

Customer Retention

Okay, now that you have your customer base and have reached conversion, how can you ensure that these folks engage with your brand long-term?

PostPilot knows how to deal with that—integrating programmatic direct mail for customer retention.

Cleaning Up with Winbacks

Leverage a Winback campaign if you need to show customers who haven’t made purchases in several months what’s new. 

Look at Dr. Squatch—a natural soap company that used this strategy to drive millions in revenue.

Dr. Squatch encountered a common problem: email and SMS marketing were simply insufficient to keep customers engaged with the brand. The truth is that often, only 10% of a brand’s most valuable audience—previous customers—is getting the message. 

Diagnosis: Significant missed revenue opportunities for Dr. Squatch. 

Doctor’s Orders: A programmatic direct mail postcard campaign that targets inactive customers using PostPilot. 

The results: A 12.66% conversion rate and an average ROAS of more than 10x, suggesting that Winback campaigns using direct mail postcards—like in the case of Dr. Squatch—really clean up nicely. 

A Flawless Second-Purchase Campaign

Fix the 1-time buyer problem we all run into with a campaign that entices first-time customers to return for more. 

Beauty brand Grande Cosmetics is no stranger to second-purchase campaigns using PostPilot.  

The beauty industry is highly competitive, with new cosmetic and beauty brands entering the space every year. So, how does Grande Cosmetics retain customers when nothing stops these folks from buying from another brand?

The answer is programmatic direct mail, to solve that one-time buyer problem.

Grande Beauty promoted GrandeMASCARA using a direct mail campaign. The postcard included a discount code that gives customers 20% off their next purchase of their mascara product. 

This second-purchase campaign, including the discount code, was perfect for encouraging customers to return to Grande Beauty for all their mascara needs—helping the brand stand out among a busy beauty crowd. 

Replenishment

Even if you don’t have a subscription program in place, you know the power of repeat purchases for consumable products for that beautiful predictable revenue. 

Brands are using postcards either in addition to or instead of a replenishment email flow to drive repurchases. 

We recommend using BOTH email and programmatic direct mail. 

However, you can use postcards alone if you want to drive repurchases among repeat buyers who may have unsubscribed from email/SMS. 

In the case of the brand Gains in Bulk, when a customer is added to a Klaviyo segment (made up of customers who haven’t purchased after a certain period of time), we fire off a postcard for them: 

I mean, that guy makes US wanna buy again. 

🫢

Here are the results from another supplement brand’s replenishment campaign, from only a few weeks: 

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These replenishment reminders work great for other consumables, too:

• Cleaners
• Beauty
• Soaps 
• Food/Bev

Churn prevention 

In the same way that you can tack on a postcard to the end of other flows (winback, abandoned cart, etc.), you can add one to the end of your subscription churn flows. 

Here’s one that Huel sent out this year:

Results from these types of campaigns WORK.

Below are results over a 5-month timeframe from a campaign that targeted customers who last churned 50-60 days prior:

You can reactivate your subscribers and increase LTV, too. 

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Real-Time Data Tracking for Programmatic Direct Mail Campaigns

The sine qua non of the programmatic mail approach is having real-time dashboards to track the progress of your campaigns.

Example:

This 9-figure brand has automated a winback campaign to drive hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue every month (actually, they've automated many winback campaigns), and as soon as a purchase from this particular segment comes through in Shopify, it's automatically updated in the brand's dashboard.

For any direct mail campaign launched via PostPliot, brands can track real-time results.

(Yes, that even extends to catalogs.)

In every campaign dashboard, brands can track:

• KPIs (revenue, number of orders, ROAS, CVR, mailers sent, and $ spent on the campaign)
• Segment details
• Design assets showing the front and back of the mailer used
• Discount code information (not pictured)
• Delivery data (e.g., mailing addresses suppressed)

Direct Mail Across All Channels: A Full-Funnel Approach

Direct mail can be used across all channels at every step of the conversion funnel. 

But 1 + 1 = 3. 

In other words, we believe in integrating both online and offline messaging. And we work well with others to make this easy. 

PostPilot’s native integrations with Shopify apps allow us to help grow your business further and amplify your company's other channels in its tech stack. Take a peek at some of our partners:

• Klaviyo: Use your Klaviyo data and customer segments to create effective postcards that hit customer mailboxes at just the right time.
• Attentive: Combine direct mail and SMS to create marketing campaigns that reach customers at multiple touchpoints.
• Omnisend: Create targeted campaigns that reach customers through multiple channels—email, SMS, and direct mail.
• Recharge: Send personalized, automated campaigns that bring lapsed subscribers back to grow subscription sales.
• Loyalty Lion: Encourage customers to reach new tiers and offer special rewards to prompt customer loyalty. 
• Repeat: Automated and effective data-triggered touchpoints to target customers at the perfect moment. 
• Loop: Grow customer LTV through subscriber engagement and reactivation. 
• Sendlane: Unify your email, SMS, and direct mail to perfect your multi-channel alignment.

Learn more about us

Places to start:

• Learn more about PostPilot
• Check out some direct mail examples designed by our superstar in-house design team.
• Read a popular success story: how GOOD AMERICAN uses PostPilot to drive full-funnel revenue with direct mail.

Or, if you're just ready to chat, head over here.