Trigger Based Direct Mail Marketing: Engaging Customers at Every Stage

Your customers’ inboxes are over-freakin-flowing with emails. They’re getting pelted with digital ads. You’re in a cage match against a frillion other brands. 

But hitting their IRL mailboxes? Way, way, way less competition. It’s a way to step out of the cage.

And, by running a trigger-based direct mail program, it’s a way to automate revenue by dynamically firing off mailers based on behavioral signals.

That was a mouthful. 

But let’s take a look.

Set It and (Almost) Forget It: How Triggered Direct Mail Works

You might be thinking, This sounds cool, but figuring out a new channel, and designing all these mailers must be an absolute nightmare dumpster fire of megadeath doomage. 

Honestly, it’s the opposite. 

Direct mail platforms (like, ahem, PostPilot) make it even easier than setting up an email flow. 

Because while it is like an email flow, we set it all up for you. 

Here’s our general process:

Based on your brand’s first-party transactional data, your dedicated account manager will set up direct mail to be printed (in one of our printing facilities) and mailed as soon as retargeting and retention triggers are hit. 

⭐ Triggers range from specific onsite behavior (spends X minutes on Y page) in order to target and convert anonymous site visitors to winning back customers after they’ve passed an expected second-purchase date.

The mailers (whether they’re postcards, trifolds, or handwritten cards) are designed by our in-house art team. They’re absolute legends, and they’re far and away the most experienced direct mail designers in the world—at this point, they’ve designed tens of thousands of postcards for thousands of brands.

Retargeting and Reactivating Customers… Automatically

We’ll go a bit deeper into this now.

The beauty of trigger-based direct mail is that you can set up different triggers to send postcards based on where a shopper is in their journey.

Retargeting Triggers: 3 Possibilities

Engaged Non-Buyers

The idea here is sending a follow-up postcard to warm prospects who signed up for your list, went through your welcome flow, but didn’t buy yet. (We have a whole product around this: MailMatch^TM.)

Specific Trigger: We might set a trigger for 5-10 days after signup, or whenever your email flow ends.

Some brands, particularly around the holidays, will set up a multi-postcard flow: they’ll send a postcard after their welcome series ends, and if that doesn’t drive a purchase within 10 days, they’ll send another, and so on. HexClad did just this leading up to BFCM and saw ludicrously strong results, ultimately driving millions over Q4.

Cart Abandoners or Checkout Abandoners

Specific Trigger: (Didn’t think we needed an explainer on this one.) After someone goes through your abandoned cart/checkout flow, we can send them a postcard. 

This might be 5-20 days after abandoning the step in the buying process. We can also time the postcard to arrive as your flow is still happening and send an additional one after it ends.

Anonymous Site Browsers

The TLDR: We have a proprietary tracking pixel (SiteMatch^TM) that takes <5mins to install and enables you to ID, score (buying likelihood), and mail to people who’ve popped onto your site but who haven’t signed up for anything and haven’t purchased yet.

Specific Trigger: There are a frillion different possibilities here, but one example might be when customers view 3 specific pages and spend more than 5 minutes on your site. Beloved pizza oven brand Gozney used this to great effect, seeing a 10x ROAS by hitting anonymous browsers with our trifold Cardalogs^TM.

Retention Triggers: 3 Possibilities

Not Making Second Purchase within Expected Timeframe

This can be from first-to-second, second-to-third, third-to-fourth (and so on) purchases, but the most common we see is driving second purchases. 

Specific Trigger: If your typical first-to-second purchase date is 30 days (this is fairly common), a postcard would be automatically fired off at the 30-day mark.

Reaching Churn/Lapse Threshold

Brands vary in what they consider a “churned” or “lapsed” customer. Whatever your definition is, that can be your trigger.

Specific Trigger: If you consider your customers to have churned after 365 days, a postcard would be printed and mailed at that point.

Total Spend or Purchase Threshold (And the Multiple Possibilities)

If a customer hits certain behavioral parameters, mailers with relevant offers can be sent. (Great explanation, PostPilot writing person.)

Specific Example: If a The Beard Struggle customer hits a certain spend threshold, we automatically send a postcard to them inviting them to TBS’ loyalty program. 

(By now, it’s clear that triggered postcards can slot into your marketing mix with minimal fuss. But what kind of ROI are we really talking about? Let’s look at the results some brands are seeing.)

Mail That Pays Off 

If all this sounds too good to be true… It’s not.

It works.

Well enough, in fact, that direct mail starts to get a line in the marketing plan right alongside email, Meta, and Google—even at the biggest brands.

With consistent testing and optimization (which we’ll do for you), the returns often get even better over time. 

For the easiest channel launch of all time, reach out to us.