#10 Antonio Hersonski | Why print marketing and how to make it ROI-positive

Welcome to Inside CRM, the podcast where we explore together the tools, trends and tactics to improve our customer relationship management. I'm Jessica Janssen, the host, but also CRM expert myself, with over a decade of experience. In each episode, CRM professionals join us to share their knowledge to sharpen our CRM skills. Let's get started.

Welcome, Antonio. So the first time I saw him was in a video call. Then we saw each other again here at the meetups, and I was struggling a bit to connect because I have that always if I get to know people in a video call and it's hard to remember the face, for whatever reason, I have that problem. Well, it was great to see you again and we started talking. And what is especially interesting with you is the print topic that we want to discuss today. But before we go into it, let's do a little introduction about yourself. What's your background?

Yeah, so, yeah, I've been in CRM now for about eight years, and I really love CRM. I transitioned from a sales job into more of a marketing job. And then at some point I realized I want to do CRM because it combines basically a very analytical aspect and also technical aspect and then also creative aspect. So it's basically everything that I really want combined. And, yeah, I'm passionate about it. And at the moment I'm working as head of CRM at Carton Marai, which is a company focused on personalized print products. And before that I worked at get you Guide. That's where I'm at, Jesse. Yeah, and there I was responsible mainly for the app. So I was pushing a lot of app initiatives for GetYourGuide. And now that I joined, two years ago, Karten Malai, I. I discovered a new channel, basically, which is direct mail, print mail. Very old school, but it's also exciting. And, yeah, I'm here to talk about it.

Nice. So I know that quite a lot of people are hesitant to start with print. So what was the reason why you said, let's go for it?

I think for our product, it just makes sense. So our product is printed. That's why we know that our customers love printing stuff. And of course, there are also, like, certain business metrics, so we have a higher price point. For example, it doesn't make sense for very cheap products, for example, because you pay up to a euro per touch point or sometimes even more, depending on what format you're choosing and what the volume is. So you have to think about, does it make sense for my product, what's the margin of the product and also how expensive is it? So how much is the company actually? But essentially you can treat it as any other performance marketing channel and look at the return on investment at the Romas, essentially. And that's what we did. So we looked at what, how much am I investing and how much am I getting back from that channel, and that it's just essentially a business case. And if it makes sense for the product, for the business, for the audience as well, and then you can try it. There are ways to, to measure your success. I guess we can talk about tracking later. But yes, say it. And yeah, also for us, we do a lot of performance marketing, but we also have a huge market share. So that means we're the market leader in our, in our industry. And when we do Instagram, Facebook ads, we know that a lot of our existing customers will come back, which makes the channel extremely expensive. And I know a lot of other businesses are facing the same problem. But then print becomes more profitable than other performance marketing channels because you're targeting your customer base.

Yeah, makes sense. So would you also say, when you think about the channel set in cm, is it like something that you would start from the beginning with print, or is it other channels that you would prioritize?

No, of course, we started building out email as the classical CRM channel, also app push and app messages, et cetera. I think that was basically the groundwork. And then we looked at where can we combine it with print. When there were multiple opportunities that we looked at and tried out, what were the use cases?

Do you want to have a sip first?

No. Good. Yeah. So, for example, we have a huge product portfolio. We have like around 500 products in our portfolio, which is a lot. But we do, for example, wedding stationery. You can get your wedding invitation, your wedding card invitation. And then we offer for the wedding menu cards and that you can personalize. We offer stickers, we offer wine labels, for example. So everything that you essentially need that is printed for your wedding, we can offer that as well. And then we know also, so when the customer orders a wedding invitation card, we know when the wedding is. And then around that time, we also know that the customer will be looking for potential products. And then we send a print mailing to that customer around the same time, we know this will be relevant to the customer. So these are use cases that make sense. But also we have a very seasonal business. For example, Christmas is very important. Easter, Mother's, Father's Day. So this gift business is also a huge, very important part of our business. So we use that as well to really push and basically amplify our CRM measures with print.

Also with other channels, you often have the opportunity to combine it that you say, I do email and push, for example. Have you tested that and have you seen uplifts through that?

Yeah, so of course we combine it with, with email and of course we see an uplift and it amplifies the message of the print. What's also interesting that we tested out is whether it makes sense to send the email before or after the print mailing. And we found out that sending the email before the print arrives at the customer actually works better for us. So that was also an interesting finding that we saw. And also what we do now is because we combine it usually we also really try to have a similar message so the customer sees the same image imagery in both email and the print touchpoint. So, yeah, a message that just makes sense for the customer, so nothing that is really conflicting. And then we combine like the voucher code, for example, we send the customer voucher code that is in the. In the print mailing and also in the email.

You were mentioning already tracking how do you track the impact of print?

So of course most of our print touch points have a voucher. So voucher redemption is one way, but also the best way to track it because, yeah, sometimes we have like voucher redemption rates up over 20% or something like that, 20, 30% now for Christmas it's even higher. So because everyone is using the voucher, but the best way to track it really is to have a control group. And before I joined the company didn't really do that and I guess that was a big mistake. But now basically everything that we do, every print touchpoint that we have has a control group. So we can measure the success against the control group that didn't receive the print value.

And how's the technical setup? What kind of tool are you using to make that actually happen in an easy way?

Hopefully, yeah. We have worked, I think, with four or five different printing houses, depending on our needs and what kind of format we want, et cetera. So it's a bit complicated, but we're trying to streamline it. So the technical setup that we currently use is Optilize. So Optilize can connect to masses and allows us to basically implement the print touch points in the email journey, for example, as a touch point in the automation. So that works quite well. But then sometimes we also work with Deutsche Post directly, for example, for Christmas, now we're sending out mailings through the Deutsche Post and then it's not automated. We upload our customers there and then they send it out. So yeah, it's a manual process. But yeah, as we have and increasing the amount of automated touchpoints that we have, we will be using optionize more and more.

Why do you then use for those specific use cases Deutsche pos what's then the difference in the operations that you need there?

Because we have a huge Christmas campaign and it's a lot of customers and the decision was made because Deutsche was just cheaper. Yeah, they have a lot of different printing houses so sometimes they can be more competitive when it comes to pricing. But then also now we're considering like streamlining everything and having one partner for that might actually overweight the additional costs because it is a lot of effort. You know, working with two different partners also has it difficulties. So I think optilize is a good solution especially if you want to do automated for manual stuff. We currently still use Deutsche Post.

Can you imagine like the channel has some specialties compared to others. Like you have digital products but now it's something haptic. So what are your learnings there?

So yeah, I guess that's what why a lot of CRM managers are a bit hesitant because it's an entire entirely different world compared to email. It's a CRM touchpoint. But yeah, you have to think about the paper for example. So what's the weight of the paper that you want to use, how it feels and you have to think about the format. There are also different formats that you can use. You can send out booklets, you can send out flyers, you can send out letters in an envelope, you can send out postcards for example. So these are all decisions that you have to make. What kind of format you want to use, what format has the best cost to benefit ratio as well. So what you're currently seeing is basically that our best performing formats are for example not the booklet which is very expensive to produce. But I guess our customers don't want to or don't have the time to to basically look into that booklet with like 12, 15 different pages. They want something smaller. So for example, the letter performs quite well, but it's also slightly more expensive than the postcard. And at the moment where we're looking at it depends how Christmas works. But it could be that the postcard, even though it has a slightly lower conversion rate might be better for us because it's cheaper.

Yeah. Just looking into the round, anyone has.

A question, how large is your control group out of your entire database. Yeah, that's one part of my question. The second part of the question is also previously been trying to drive direct mails. I think it's taking a very long time to get everything produced. It's quite labor intensive. I'm curious to understand what the lead time is from the point in time of development to the point of sending out that letter.

Yeah, first part of the question, how big is the control group? So our standard value is usually 5%, but it depends on how big the audience is and what the conversion rate is. So if you know the conversion rate or can compare it to another similar campaign that you ran, you can basically calculate the uplift that you need to have a significant result. You can calculate how many customers need to be in the control group and based on that, so basically you need the entire volume of the customers, you need the conversion rate, what uplift you are trying to achieve and then you can just calculate how big it needs to be to have a significant value. And the second part of the question is because it's not scalable, right, it's difficult to produce. So yeah, I think the key is to have a standardized process. And also I think what a lot of people struggle with and what we struggled with initially as well. For emails, you don't build emails just from scratch every time you send out an email. But for print, for the first times we used it, we build the print mailings from scratch, which doesn't make sense because emails you have a template and then you reuse modules and blocks, you can do the same thing for, for print mailings, for direct mail. So if you have a format, go to format like a postcard or a letter, then you can just build your modules that you need for the print mailings and then the designers or even CRM managers can just combine it and. Yeah, and do it. But yeah, of course it takes more time. But I guess it's also the people who are working on it and they need to have a routine in doing that. Then you need a process that is clearly written down for everyone and transparent. And then also, yeah, the printing partner needs to know your needs and basically you don't want to decide on the paper and the format every time you send out something. You would have goto standard kind of paper, standard format that you would use every time. And then also blocks, you put everything together. Yeah, yeah, it will take more time because you also need to proof, for example, with emails it's a bit faster, but I think yeah, you can decrease it and we've decreased it also drastically. I mean, the past we have used like months and now it's just down to a couple of weeks.

How do you make sure that it is a clean control group? Are they only receiving the direct mailing?

Yeah, we have a global control group that doesn't receive any CRM communication. And that's a smaller percentage, of course, of the entire audience. But we use that also for the print mailing, for example. And that allows us basically to measure the entire CRM communication against nothing, essentially. And then what we do. But yeah, we've done different things, but sometimes it makes sense to have a control group for email that is separate from the one that you have for print mailing. Sometimes we have a control group then receive email and the print mailing. Yeah, different things. But I'm also a fan of not over complicating things. So we have the global control group in place. It doesn't receive any CRM communication. And they're usually two different experiments running on the email specific email campaign and the specific print mailing campaign.

I have a question on the average age of your customers. So where is that? And do you treat cohorts differently with communication channels based on their age?

Yeah, we don't know the exact age of our customers because we're not asking for birthdays, but from research, et cetera, we know that they're around like end of 20s until like end of 30s, something like that. So most of our customers are young moms with kids, families, et cetera. And the other part of the question.

Yeah, I was wondering if the age range would have been broader. Do you treat them differently like in their 20s, 30s, 40s and so on? Do like elder people get more letters and younger more emails or something like that?

No, I mean, what we do, for example, when we see that a customer is not responsive to email. So for example, now we're sending out a reminder for Christmas where we target customers that are not responsive to emails. Yeah. So this is also an interesting way we're trying now because it makes sense because some customers don't read emails. It's not because they don't like our brand. It's not. Not that it's not because they're not loyal. It's just because they maybe don't even use the inbox that they registered with on our platform. And then it's hard to target them, it's hard to reach them. But with a print mailing, we don't know the open rates. Unfortunately you cannot track that with print mailings. But yeah, I think it's higher, definitely higher because everyone opens mailboxes at some point.

So yeah, let me quickly repeat the question of the audience. In print you have the option to select different formats, the weight of the paper and more. But there's the risk that people might not like the product that you've sent. How do you eliminate the risk?

It's very hard to really find out for example what kind of paper the customer prefers as a specific one because the differences might be so small that we just decided we're not going to test different papers. For example, we went to Brand and asked brand, what do you recommend that made our lives easier Because I also don't believe that there will be a huge difference like in terms of the paper quality. Maybe in the format there could be, maybe we could test out different things and we have a small B2B part now that where we have a different format, we test out different formats for them. But yeah, I think when you want to scale you have to simplify also things and then you have to make sacrifices at some point and especially for things that you're not sure how to measure like the paper, etc. So yeah, I don't think in my opinion it makes, it doesn't make sense to test like different papers because the difference will be so small. People who work with print, like our print designers, they feel the difference but for the customer doesn't really care about it unless it's like rapid quality, it doesn't, yeah, doesn't matter for the customer. We have a high standard but it's also what we're not doing is investing a lot because then also you need a valid business case. If you have a super expensive paper and then finishing also on top gold and foil or something like that, then yeah, of course we have, we have thought about it but then it makes the print mening so expensive that it might not be worth it. And then again yeah, you, the customer wouldn't probably care about it anyway.

I have actually multiple questions. My first question is beside your regular campaigns, like your Christmas campaign, do you use print mailings also in your automation setup? And the second question is, are there any limitations you have in terms of maximum sendouts, minimum send outs? And the third question is how do you handle content? So when a customer doesn't want to receive it, do you get any feedback back? So can do it step so I can ask again.

So yeah, we use it for automations where we have predefined funnels, we send out automated print mailings. So for example I mentioned for wedding where we know that the customer has purchased product A and then product B makes sense after X amount of months. So this is an automation. We have a couple of other predefined channels, funnels essentially. Then we also have CLV products like the Photobook for example. We know also that the Photobook product can become relevant after X months after the initial purchase. So complementary products for example, we also have automations in place for that. So maximum, I don't think that there's a maximum. You could.

Yeah.

And in terms of cost. Yeah, basically how much you're willing to spend and how much does make sense. Print is not email. So that's why you have to be selective about the customers that you're targeting. Essentially you need to look for out for a higher conversion rate in this audience. So if you make a mistake and not mistake, but if you make the email audience largely larger than it needs to be, then maybe you'll have some unsubs, that's it. But if you target customers who don't care about your print men and because the product is not relevant, then you're potentially losing money. So that's why I strongly recommend being selective. So look for customers where you're confident that the product will be interesting. And also we are selective about within the product categories. We're also selective about like the average order value of the customer or CLV depending on how recent the customer is. You don't want to target like a for example low spender because the risk will be high as well when it comes to postage and I think for most countries, or at least for Germany, I can speak about Germany, Austria and Switzerland and also France, the limit is 5,000 because below that you're paying a lot when it comes to postage. So after 5,000 there's just a threshold that you reach and then it becomes much more cheaper for you to send it out. So it's a price thing. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, it doesn't make sense to send it out also because if you think about the effort that you're putting in to five, five customers, you're not designing everything. Luckily you don't need like a double opt in for print. So that's a good thing. But so there's like a small note, a small print where we inform the customer about unsubscribing by just calling us directly and then customer service writes down the email and then it's just pushing our CRM system some from, from a Google sheet. So yeah, then the customer is excluded from the next Print mailing. So we have a separate print opt in field in our CRM tool that allows us to exclude those customers.

How do you send it? You send only to buyers or can you also send it to the leads?

Yeah, in theory, yes. What we also do, for example now we use it for acquisition. I'm not responsible for it, but yeah, we also use it for acquisition. So we buy addresses and then send them print mailings and then the same process basically, if they don't want to receive. Yeah, they just call customer service.

Unique codes versus general codes or generic codes. What are the pros and cons from your perspective? Like I know that printing unique codes is more expensive.

Right.

But it has the advantage. The tracking is much more precise. They cannot be handed on and stuff like that. Yeah, I don't know. What's your perspective on this topic?

Yeah, recently we, we checked how much cheaper it would be to have the generic code. We usually use only individual codes and the difference was so small. If you want to save 200 or €300 for the entire print mailing. Yeah, it wasn't a huge difference for us. It wasn't much more expensive. So that's why also all the reasons that you mentioned tracking is more precise than. Also when we tried out a generic code at some point it took maybe two weeks and then it was on some portal. Yeah. On some platform and yeah, we had to take it down and it was difficult because they're not legally obliged to take it down. Your code. Yeah, that's difficult. So that's why it doesn't make sense from my perspective to have a generic code.

Actually some companies don't mind it if it's being shared on platforms and whatever.

Yeah, but then it kills your tracking. Yeah, it does. Yeah. And then you don't know where the customers are coming from. I guess now with the control group it might mitigate the risk a little bit. But in my opinion it's not really worth it, especially if the costs. It's not much, much higher to have an individual code.

Thank you so much on your deep dive to print. I think that was really interesting and I get maybe does anyone of you are thinking now about getting a print channel? We converted one person maybe if I.

Can say something to that. It is expensive, but we also know that. But they are also different print touch points. And I think the most important or the most expensive part of print mailing is not the printing part but the postage. So basically delivering it to the customer and you can save a lot of money by just using parcel inserts. For example, if you have a physical product, you can use a parcel insert. You can put it into your parcel. What we have like free small gifts and we also put that in our parcels, like samples, for example, of our products. That also makes sense. And yeah, or sometimes we just on one of our pages, for example, for calendars, we also have like a small code or QR code, whatever, which also serves as a CRM touchpoint. So integrating it in our product itself is also possible in the parcels and saves you a lot of money as well. Yeah, if you're skeptical, you could maybe start with something like that and then think about sending out direct mail.

That's a great tip. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. Here are your experience with print.

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