Triple Threat: Three Unified Email, SMS & Direct Mail Tactics That Convert - EP 37

Recency and frequency tend to be the strongest indicators of likelihood to come back. But then because we now have all of this additional data, we can also look and say, just because you bought once, you might look very different at the individual level. Those people are different. We also might know somebody else doesn't have kids and somebody else shops at luxury stores and other people shop at Walmart. So we know all of those things about these people as individuals. And we've now started incorporating that into the segmentation and triggers that we're building because rather than just relying on recency and frequency, we can look at who is actually more likely to come back again, who's less likely to come back again based on all these individual attributes we know about these people. If you're getting a 5x reactivating customers at a year, don't stop there. Go to 2 years and see if you can get a 3x on that, if that's still profitable for you. Think about the combination of both maximizing returns but also maximizing the total profit dollars you can generate from the channel. It's just sort of like everyone's just immune to it.

Yeah. And it's, and it's, I think that events, they lean too heavy because I understand like tech companies all want to speak, but just being straight honest about it in the market, like most of them aren't that good at it. That's just the reality of it. There's only a handful of people that are actually fantastic at this stuff. Yeah. And they're not bringing value. They're just asking about things on stage that aren't driving it. And I know you've been a veteran and you've been around the space and, and just in business for a while, but a lot of the people that are on stage are not. Totally. So yeah, a lot of the changes for Commerce Roundtable are going to be different this year, and we're going to go try a lot of new stuff out, and that includes bringing Gary Vee on stage.

That's awesome.

Yeah, good for you guys.

Yeah, always, always trying to make it better and innovate and trying to make things better as we're just trying to grow this thing, and we'll see what happens with it. Good, good. Anyways, today we're talking about direct mail, man. So are you ready?

I am ready.

Hopefully, huh?

If I'm not ready at this point, I don't know what I'm doing.

Yeah, Chase is gonna bring in the hardball. So with that, let's shoot this thing in 3, 2, 1.

From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far, or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you You gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.

What's up everyone? Welcome to Send It, where we discuss anything and everything retention marketing, specifically in email and SMS marketing. My name is Jimmy Kim and I'm here with my co-host Chase Diamond. All right, Chase, we've got a special, special guest here to talk about episode 37. The title of today's pod is Combining Email and SMS with Direct Mail: Integrated Offline and Online Retention. And so we've invited someone very special. Chase, you want to do the official, official introduction and then we'll let him tell his actual introduction?

Yeah, of course. Uh, Michael's a buddy. We actually met, I think at this point, 2 or 3 years ago in person for dinner, actually at a Commerce Roundtable, uh, event type thing. So it's been a couple years. He's a great guy. I think I actually invested 2 or 3 years ago in your company as well, Postpilot. So that's exciting. And you're an OG in the space. Um, he's started and kind of run multiple 8 and 9-figure brands for north of 25 years. He doesn't look that old, but he has a lot of experience and he's run a lot of kind of PE-backed turnarounds. And as mentioned, he's the co-founder of Postpilot. And for those of you guys that don't know, they're the leading direct mail automation platform for thousands of D2C brands. Michael, if I butchered anything, I'm sorry, but welcome to the show.

No, man. Love to see you guys always. Go yeah, go back with both of you a while. Excited to be here, and I I appreciate the compliment. I wake up every morning with in pain for no explainable reason, so that reminds me that I actually am kind of old.

You know, as you age, you know one thing I've noticed as I'm in my mid-forties now is like your mindset doesn't change, and you think you're like that same 21-year-old. But yeah, your body just does not react the same way.

Oh, 100%. I mean, Drew and I are still throwing around like old school, you know movies. We're both graying and again, like wake up to pee 6 times a night.

That's TMI, Michael. TMI. Anyways, today we invited Michael to share strategies. We want to talk tactical because, you know, we've talked about this before and we talk a lot about email and SMS. But when you think about other channels and we've got future pods, we're going to talk about other channels too. But we want to talk about channels that are important for retention. Direct mail is very popular. And I was telling Chase, Michael, I was just at a recent trade show sub-summit over in Dallas, and you guys were there, but so were like 6 other direct, uh, direct mail companies. And I was surprised by that because I feel like there's a rise of direct mail coming up because of the saturation that's happening in email and SMS. And I'm sure you agree with this, but like, I think that people are realizing and going, hey, wait a minute, Everyone left these channels. Let's go explore those channels. So today we invited Michael to come talk about 3 strategies to combine direct mail with retention and how to leverage those direct mails with great email and SMS. So look, I want to kind of start with the most important question that people are going to ask, and we'll kick it off here, Michael. So what does direct mail such as— what makes direct mail such a powerful complement to email and SMS in today's digital-first world? And how do you see these 3 channels working together?

Give me the Big picture, man.

Let's start there.

Yeah. I mean, the main thing is like, look at your open rates and, or run a segment, go into Klaviyo or SendLane or Omnisend or whatever your ESP is today. Build a segment of all people that have purchased from you at least once all time. And then build a segment of all people who have done that and opened or clicked an email in the last 30 or 60 days. I would bet that probably less than 10% of your existing customers, your best audience, people who have bought from you before have actually engaged with an email in the last, you know, 30, 60, any recent period of time. So we would never say like replace email with direct mail. You should try and get as much conversion, as many conversions off an email campaign as you can. first. But where direct mail becomes super powerful is for those folks that haven't taken the action that you want via email. And that's— it's really a larger percentage of your overall list than you think. So there's a lot of low-hanging fruit by just tapping that audience of people that haven't engaged or taken the action that you wanted over email with a direct mail campaign. And yeah, it's more expensive, and that's why we say Do email first, but then let direct mail pick up that high percentage of folks that haven't engaged, and you're gonna get incremental revenue by doing that.

Cool. That makes sense. I got a bunch of questions, I guess, that kind of piggyback on that. So you mentioned kind of, I guess, someone that's purchased one time or more. Is there a case of ever breaking out like people that have purchased one time versus 3 times versus VIPs, or? In direct mail, is it best just to treat them kind of all the same?

No, it's a great question. And our best practice is tracking each of those types of recency and frequency cohorts independently, so that you can look at the incremental lift of each of those cohorts independently and decide what are the right characteristics and what's the right sort of recency and frequency I should use to target these people profitably, because what you're going to find is a one-time customer, you might be able to go back, you know, 60 days, 90 days, 180 days and profitably reactivate that customer. But for a two-time customer, maybe you can go back a year, maybe you can go back 2 years, 3 years. And it's finding those sweet spots to ensure that you're sending the right message at the right time such that you're maximizing incremental revenue from each of those different cohorts and not sending to people who are either too far gone, like they're no longer profitable, they're gone, we can't get them back, or are already likely to convert off of email. And so maybe it's too soon. We don't wanna hit those people with a postcard yet. It's finding, it's tracking each of those cohorts and finding those pockets where you're gonna maximize incremental lift and then automating around that data.

Cool. And then one more follow-up question on this and then we can kind of move on. So you talked about buyers, right? Regardless of the frequency, we talked about buyers being kind of maybe the first place you'd start. Outside of buyers, is there another use case that makes sense? Like, I don't know, spitballing, maybe people that abandoned their cart or their checkout and haven't purchased. Like, are those people worthy? Like, what other segments essentially are some go-tos for people to be thinking about with direct mail?

Totally.

So I know this is retention-oriented. podcast, but like it's full funnel.

Sure.

So definitely you can use it for acquisition use cases as well, and you want to think about it at different stages of the funnel. So a lot of low-hanging fruit to start where you're going to find some easy wins is just like reactivation of existing customers who you haven't heard from in a long time, but then you want to start moving up the funnel and acquisition starting with warmer acquisition, people who have actually signed up for your email list, but then never converted is a great place to start. And again, like tends to perform really, really well across all the brands that we work with. So that's, again, people signed up for your email list, they go through your entire welcome sequence, they still haven't converted by the end of the welcome sequence, you gave email a chance to work. Now we match that email address to a postal address, which we can do about 80% of the time and hit them with a card. And now again, you've gotten a new customer off somebody who hasn't responded to your email. And that tends to be a high percentage of people. Like the percentage of people that sign up for your list and ultimately convert is not that high. So getting another chance to drive incremental lift off of that is another easy win. And then you just keep moving up the funnel and we can go to cold prospecting by building lookalike audiences as well based on Your best customer list. It's just like Meta. We have thousands of data points on hundreds of millions of consumers, so we can build highly relevant, high-intent prospects using a lot of proprietary data.

Hey there, it's Chase, and I really hope you're enjoying this pod. If I could have just 30 quick seconds of your time, I'd love to invite you to our thriving, growing community for retention marketers. Jimmy and I realized that there were no centralized communities for retention marketers, Like yourself and myself, where we're specifically focused on email and SMS. Most of the communities out there seem to be just for founders or for execs only, and this is really why we're proud to share on this pod that we have over 350 marketers like myself and yourself and Jimmy in a closed community on Slack. We talk all day every day about all things email and SMS. So if you're listening to this podcast, I want to invite you to. Come and join us. And the best news, it's literally $1 to get started for a trial. And with that, you're gonna get access to the Slack community, our weekly private newsletter where we share actionable things you can do as an email marketer. And then we also have special meetups and webinars that are specifically retention focused. And with that, you're also gonna have direct access to not only myself, but Jimmy as well. So hit us up, ask us what you have, and we're gonna be able to deliver you the answers. And then last but not least, you're gonna get some special discounts and some other really cool perks. So this is where we're hanging out. It's the best way to come hang out with us, talk with us, talk with others like us and like yourself. So you've gotta come join us. And again, it's called the Ecom Email Certified Community, where you can learn more at ecomemailcertified.com or just check out the show notes for a direct link. Hope to see you there. And now we're back to the pod.

Got it. That's really interesting. So you're, you know, you've basically talked about 3 different things here. We talked about the customer, we talked about kind of like the Prospects that are doing high intent, and then even the cold prospecting that you can kind of use through direct mail, which is not new, right? Like in the, in the old case of sense, right? I came to this from like the car dealership world. We used to use direct mail all the time. We'd send these huge flyers out that had like thousands of cars or whatever it was. And it's like, come check us out, we're running this huge sale. And we definitely used to do a lot of cold prospecting through that. So I totally get that. But I want to, I want to double tap backwards a little bit on one of the things because you started talking about it a little bit, but we didn't get really deep into it. But I wanna talk about successful campaigns. Like, how are we taking those 3 channels, right? Email, SMS, and direct mail. And how are we kind of timing those? How are we putting them together? And what does the messaging look like? Like, how does that all work together if someone, you know, when you're explaining this to someone for the first time and they wanna understand how to add it, what does that look like?

Yeah. So typically, you will help a brand test into a variety of these different segments or cohorts. And in some cases, we'll combine it with email. So, you know, reactivation campaign targeting a sale event or promotion that you're running, Black Friday, Mother's Day, whatever it might be, or just highlighting a new collection that you're launching, whatever it might be, we wanna test into a bunch of these different customer cohorts. And you can pair that with email in some cases, because again, if somebody has been on your list for 6 months, 12 months, 3 years, and still hasn't come back, like, it's probably time to hit them with another channel as well.

Sure.

And those 2 can work as complementary. We often see combining digital and direct mail tends to provide a lift across both channels because everybody, you know, this isn't, this is pretty common knowledge. Like you hit people multiple times through multiple channels, you see an increased likelihood to convert across all channels.

Yep.

So if we can do that and provide incremental return on that, it's a great investment. What some brands will also do is they'll filter out people who are actively opening emails. So yeah, maybe they haven't bought from you in 6 months, but we've seen them click an email in the last 15 days. They're probably still actively engaged in email. We can suppress those people from your campaigns so that we're not paying to send a card to people who are more likely to be engaged with email. So either of those strategies works. It sort of depends on, you know, the goals and what we agree to do, but— and budget. But in any case, the goal is to drive incremental lift.

Got it. That makes sense. So let me ask that follow-up, like, question here. And I get the incremental lift, but, like, what other key data points are you guys looking at when you're identifying, you know, if a customer is ready for that direct mail piece? Like, outside of just, like, Lapsed time and like non-connection. Is there other things that you guys are looking for?

Totally. So recency and frequency tend to be the strongest indicators of likelihood to come back and buy. Again, you know this well from the email game. Uh, but then because we now have all of this additional data, we can also look and say, we know that, you know, just because you bought once Jimmy, you bought once, and Chase, you bought once, and both of you bought 60 days ago. You might look very different at the per— you know, at the individual level. Chase, maybe you spent $25 the first purchase, but Jimmy, you spent $250 on your first purchase. Those people are different.

Yeah.

We also might know, Jimmy, you make X amount of money, and Chase, you make Y amount of money, and you have kids and somebody else doesn't have kids, and somebody else shops at luxury stores and other people shop at Walmart. So we know all of those things about these people as individuals, and we've now started incorporating that into the segmentation and triggers that we're building. Because rather than just relying on recency and frequency, we can look at who is actually more likely to come back again, who's less likely to come back again, based on all these individual attributes we know about these people.

That's cool. That's really cool. And this kind of, I guess you kind of just touched a little bit on what I was going to ask and what I was thinking about. I guess I'd love to give you an opportunity to kind of expand because it's related, but also differentiated in terms of like personalization and dynamic content in direct mail. Because, right, like an email and SMS, people have expected kind of this customization and this, you know, specific type of things you can include. How do you tie in kind of the personalization and dynamic content in the direct mail?

So the platform that we've built enables you to send individually triggered cards essentially in real time. And that was really one of the big breakthroughs is you're not doing the batch and blast. Jimmy, like you mentioned, using it for car dealerships. Historically, direct mail is like, I'm going to find a bunch of people in a zip code or something like that. I'm going to send it to all of them at once, and then I'm going to wait and see what happens and measure those results. What we're doing is triggering it just like an automated email flow.

Cool.

So in real time, you know, say Chase, you buy a 60-day supply of supplements from a brand. We wanna say, wait 63 days, and if we don't see Chase come back by day 63, we're gonna trigger a card on day 63 that says, Chase, we haven't seen you in a while. It's time to for a refill, come on back, we'll take 10% off. So that's all happening. They're individually triggered, individually personalized, and sent in real time. So that's one of the big differences. We can personalize the content on the card, the creative. We can greet you by name, unique coupon codes so that you don't have to send a static code out to everybody. All that stuff is dynamic.

Very cool.

No, that makes total sense. And, you know, having that triggered effect, so you guys are Physically, basically, I know you guys like own your own print shop too, right? So you guys are literally sometimes just printing a handful of cards in a day for a single person just to get it shipped out because a brand could have different people in their cycle ultimately, right?

If you came to our facility, what you would see is a million times a day, like individual cards spitting, coming out from, from a ton of different printers. And they're all intermingled because again, they're all, it's across thousands of brands and thousands of campaigns are active at any given time. And because they're individually triggered in real time, you would just see a line of cards coming down conveyor belts, one from Brand A, and then Brand B and Brand C, and each one is personalized.

Yeah.

So it's, yeah, it's, it's wild. It's pretty crazy.

Wow, that's super crazy. Okay, I have the question that everyone's gonna be wondering as we talk about this. What do brands make? Like, what's the lift that they see? You know, like, I know, like, true incrementality, you really see that, but like, In dollars and cents or percentage or something, tell me what ROI looks like when you think about direct mail adding this. Like you take a brand that's never done it, they're just doing their typical email and SMS and you add direct mail. What do they see typically? Hey, okay. I'm disrupting the pod for just a quick 60-second break and a quick little shout out to our title sponsors of the podcast, Omnisend.

Okay.

For those that don't know, Omnisend is an all-in-one email and SMS marketing automation platform. Specifically designed for e-commerce brands. They make it super easy to engage with customers, drive repeat sales, and create those seamless personal experiences we're always talking about. Here's 3 things I love about Omnisend. First and foremost, they're trusted by over 125,000 e-commerce merchants worldwide that absolutely love them. With a 4.8 rating star with over 6,000 reviews on the Shopify App Store, it's an obvious choice for your email SMS and push needs. Secondly, I love great customer support, and Omnisend, they're absolutely nailing it. They're responsive, their help docs are great, and their team is absolutely fantastic. And third, they have great features and better pricing. Pricing matters just as much as features, and Omnisend, you're gonna get both of those. And they have all the features you need for your store, and their pricing is absolutely fantastic. In fact, recently I just heard a story about 2 community members that made the switch and One reduced his price from $8,500 to $3,500, which is huge, but even bigger, that $3,500 included SMS, which is absolutely wild. Then another agency I just recently talked to, they just switched their entire client base over and he's been saving his clients anywhere from 30% to 60% off their bill, which is allowing them to take that money and reinvest it on the top of the funnel so they can make more ads and make more money. Omnisend nails these 3 things that I care most about. Great support, great features, and fair pricing. Plus, I just helped Chase make the move to Omnisend with his own personal email list, and their migration was super easy. They even have a team to help you, support you, and they have a great automated tool to bring your contacts right over. So if you're looking to take your email marketing to the next level, I highly recommend checking out Omnisend. They got the tools, the automation, the expertise to help your brands grow and thrive. Head over to omnisend.com/sendit To learn more and start scaling your customer engagement today. Now let them know Chase and Jimmy sent you. Now let's get back to the pod.

Yeah, good question. Yeah, everybody wants to know.

So yeah, everyone wants to know because this is what people want to know. Does it make me money, right?

Yeah. So a couple of ways to think about it. One is just sort of general targets or baseline numbers that we try and set as an expectation for brands. We're typically targeting like a 3 to 5x incremental lift. for retention type campaigns and typically a 2 to 5 for like warmer acquisition campaigns. And most brands tend to be happy in like the 1 to 2, 1 to 3 range for pure cold prospecting campaigns.

Okay.

And then the goal, just to take it one step further, is like, is to how much can you scale profitably? So think about it just like Facebook. If you're spending $500 a day on Facebook, You might get a 5x return, but you want to go now. You want to double your spend to $1,000 a day. Maybe you drop down to a 4.5x return, but that's good because it's still pro every incremental dollar you're investing is still profitable. So you want to keep feeding that, and direct mail and the way we run direct mail tends to work the same way. So on the retention side, if you're getting a 5x reactivating customers at a year. Don't stop there. Go to 2 years and see if you can get a 3x on that, if that's still profitable for you. So it's a long-winded answer to your question, but it's how we think about the combination of both maximizing returns, but also maximizing the total profit dollars that you can generate from the channel.

Got it. Okay. So I understand that. And what about cost-wise? Like, I know there's all sorts of costs and fees, whatever, but like, what's a typical, like, single postcard cost a person? Like, I'm just curious.

Yeah, $0.55. There's no—

$0.55, including postage or before postage?

Including postage.

Oh, that's not bad.

It's an all-in cost. We don't— the only additional cost for a card that you would pay is if you do prospecting with us. There's a cost for using that cold audience recipient of $0.07. But other than that, that's the only cost. Everything else is baked in, and we can do creative. You got account management, all that stuff. 55 cents a card for a 4x6, 60 cents for a bigger card, and we can do other formats.

What's a stamp cost these days, like 50 cents or something?

Anyways, like a first-class stamp is 73 cents today.

This is how you know I haven't sent anything in a while.

Like 20 cents, you think?

Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say the last time I remember sending something it was like 27 cents, so I'm, you know, it was a long time ago. But okay, so it's even cheaper than first-class mail stamps. So even if you wanted to do it yourself at your house, it would be inefficient for you to do it yourself ultimately.

Yeah, I mean, certainly. And, you know, postcard postage is a bit less than a first-class stamp, but still, to like print and, and pay, you know, list rate, we obviously send a ton of volume. So, you know, we try and keep the cost down. We, we are very focused on driving costs down every way we possibly can because it maximizes our volume. Like, it's in our interest to do that because it gets you a higher return. Obviously, your return is directly correlated to cost, and if you can get a higher return, you're going to come back and ask us to spend a lot more. So it's in our interest to drive costs down. We want to keep it as low as possible. Cool.

That's awesome. That's really cool. I mean, I'm, I'm sold. Um, that's, that's awesome. One, one other question kind of related to some of this kind of operation performance stuff. Like, so direct mail, right? It's a little bit slower. There's a little bit longer lead times, right? I think some people might argue.

Yep.

How do you recommend— I guess you kind of talked a little about this before when we talked about like the 3 channels of SMS, email, and direct mail. But how do you recommend like brands kind of handle this slightly longer lead times of direct mail? When also trying to do real-time email and SMS?

Yeah, it's a great question. So timing the delivery of your direct mail around specific events like Black Friday or Mother's Day, or you're launching a new product and you want to hit at a certain time, like you're never going to be on the nose, everybody gets it exactly at the exact expected time. We typically recommend brands Launch about 2 weeks before a major event so that it lands a handful of days before that actual event that you're targeting. Not everybody checks their mail every single day. People check their mail and it sits on the counter for a few days. You want to— you want it to arrive, uh, with enough time so that they're likely to get it and not wait, you know, oh, I missed it by a day and the sale's already over or whatever.

Yep.

You don't want it so far advanced that it gets there a month ahead of time and then they forget about it by the time that comes around. So that's sort of the sweet spot. And then you didn't directly ask it, but a common other part of that question is the attribution window for direct mail versus other channels. Because with email and SMS, it tends to be, you see the big spike in sort of that 24 to 48 hour period after you launch that, and then it just falls off a cliff because that's just the nature of the channel, but you're going to see, you're going to know sort of how that campaign generally performed within a couple days of launching it. With direct mail, it is a longer attribution window. The sweet spot in direct mail, like the peak, tends to happen around 2 to 3 weeks after the send. And then it starts to, it looks like a bell curve. It starts to, you start to see it come in in the few days after it launches. It sort of peaks in that 2 to 3 week mark, and then it starts to level off, and then you see a long tail of conversion. It's just the thing that It's just different than digital. It sits on your counter for a week and then you see it again and then you take the action.

Are you guys tracking this through, I guess, like a coupon code? Does it track through just like, hey, you're not emailing these people, so the only way that they're reactivating is because we sent the postcard? Like, how do you guys attribute that?

Yeah, good question. So, because we're natively integrated with Shopify, we're able to show you the conversions at the household level in real time. So it's really precise attribution that we know this household got a card on this date and then went and made a purchase on this date. And we can show you that in a real-time dashboard. And then for incrementality, we can run a holdout against that. So we can just take a randomized holdout from any audience that we send and then track the test versus the treatment versus control group. and show you the lift between those. And for other brands, again, if you're suppressing active email subscribers, that's a good way to ensure you're maximizing incrementality. Targeting people who haven't taken the action you've wanted to in a really long time is a good way to maximize incrementality.

Sure.

But that's like how you can do it and feel really confident in the results. And also understand how your campaign is doing a lot faster than the old way, which again is like blast it out, wait 60 days, try and do like a spreadsheet and figure out how many people bought.

That makes sense. Okay. I have a question around creative because I'm curious about this because obviously when it comes to email and SMS creative, very clear on what you're supposed to do, but what do you guys do? Okay. I'm going to focus on re-engagement because that is like the most exciting thing to me about direct mail is that you're right, like 10%, maybe 20% on a really good brand of their customers or their buyers list is ever engaged at any given time. So When you're going out to reengage, right, an email, an SMS, you can only do so much. Hey, we miss you. You know, the typical shit you see in the market. What do you do in a re-engagement creative? Like, what gets people going? Is it just simply a coupon? Are you sending them catalogs of products? Like, what do you guys do?

Yeah.

Which one that works?

Hey, it's Chase taking just 30 seconds of your time because I found something game-changing for e-commerce marketers and agencies. If you happen to be drowning in retention marketing tasks, We have a solution for you. It's AI. There's an AI strategist, AI segmentation, AI email builder. It's called Rayleon, and this is the platform that helps marketers like myself and yourself create everything from emails to custom segmentation based on your data and your email marketing strategy. I mean, imagine getting everything from an audit to campaign planning in just a handful of clicks and in under 5 minutes. Their AI handles everything from segmentation to strategy and creating on-brand copy that actually converts. Brands using Rayon save about 50% of their retention marketing time and see an average of 3x ROI. Yes, you're gonna save time and make more money. Talk about a no-brainer. And this is really why brands like Coast, Ginger Milk, and LifePro trust them and really utilize them and start recommending them to everyone. So head to raleon.io, that's R-A-L-E-O-N dot I-O, for a free month's email AI segmentation playbook in just 60 seconds. Yes, it's 100% free to try, and this will be the best 5 minutes you spend today, I promise. raleon.io. Let them know that myself and Jimmy sent you, and we're now back to the pod.

It, it doesn't, it's not rocket science. Like it's actually not that It doesn't have to be that different. It's less a function of the message not landing than it is just the channel.

Ah.

So when you get a card from a brand, a piece of mail from a brand that you recognize, you've done business with, it's really like you pause for a second, and especially if that piece of mail is personalized to you and maybe has a special offer, like you pause and you look at it, whereas email, a lot of times you're just not You're just sort of missing it. It's in the promo tab or you just miss it, delete it, whatever. So it's more a function of just getting that message in front of them, into their hand and in front of their face. And then it just clicks. It's just the nudge that they need. And a similar question that we get is like, do I need to blast a much bigger discount in direct mail because these are old people that haven't engaged? versus email? And the answer is really no. You don't need to sacrifice a bunch of margin and go with a major discount because it wasn't, that wasn't really the problem. It was simply that they weren't seeing the email or engaging with the email you sent versus that it wasn't a big enough offer. So we say just replicate a lot of what you're doing in email. It's just the channel and getting that nudge literally into their hand that makes the difference.

Sure.

And we do a lot of, we do the creative for probably 95% of the brands that we work with because we just We know what works. We've done this a million times. So it makes it easy, especially to your point, for brands that haven't done the channel before. They don't know, I just create Facebook ads and emails. I don't know how to design a postcard.

Yeah, that's why I asked. I was very curious about that.

Totally.

Cool. Yeah, this is great. I guess kind of one last question from my end, kind of maybe to wrap this up. In terms of opportunities, where do you see the biggest opportunity I guess, for innovation in direct mail? It could be things like related to attribution, kind of integration with other channels, maybe even AI potential. Like, where do you see kind of the opportunities?

Well, I think going back to what you were asking about earlier, Chase, on the acquisition side, I think what we're doing right now on the customer acquisition side with AI, with the amount of data that we've amassed as part of our sort of proprietary dataset is the most interesting stuff that I've probably ever worked on. And it's the most innovative stuff because we're— we have so much data now that allows us to be so precise with identifying potential new customers in a way that just hasn't really been possible with direct mail in the past.

Okay.

And every brand wants new customer acquisition. It's always the sexy thing. So if we can help brands do that leveraging the massive amounts of data that we now have, that's always gonna be really compelling and attractive. But other than that, just innovative ways to help brands understand how the channel is performing.

Yeah.

Because again, it's not something that a lot of brands have previous experience with. So we're doing a lot in even just the reporting and storytelling and, and ways of, uh, helping brands interpret that data in a way that's really actionable. That's some of the other cool stuff that we're— we've been working a lot on recently.

It's awesome.

Are you guys bringing back catalogs at all?

Yeah, yeah. So we, we introduced a product called the Cartalog, which is like a large oversized trifold piece, which gives you a ton of real estate to be able to tell like your brand story, showcase a large assortment. So a lot of the benefits of a catalog in that you have a lot of room to be able to show off product and tell the brand story, but it works like a postcard. So you can individually trigger them and personalize them just like you would a postcard. And then with more traditional catalogs, We are helping brands get into that as well. Once you're ready to sort of get into that, that type of experience, it's a bigger creative lift. There is a volume commitment that you do have to make when you run catalogs because they just, I won't go weeds on the printing process, but like it's, it's a different process to print a full book catalog than it is to run our cards and our catalogs. So we are helping brands do that with like smaller minimums, better targeting, better turnaround time than has historically been available. But start with a postcard. It's like, it's easy, pick up some easy wins. Then, you know, you keep getting more and more sophisticated as you scale up the program.

No, that makes sense. I was just asking because I noticed Amazon starting to do more catalogs lately. So I was like, I wonder if you guys are tapping into that into the future. So yeah, very cool, man. Well, dude, this was really great. Like just giving us a lot of like understanding and like connection pieces for me. I mean, I know Chase and I were just talking about it. Like, We know our channels, and then once we start expanding outside of our channels, we don't know that much. And so we try to bring in great experts like yourself who are building for or working with thousands of brands on exactly this stuff. So this was fantastic. Any last words? Any last comments before we wrap this thing up?

Don't give up your email and SMS program. But if you haven't tried direct mail, you're leaving some money on the table. So, well, you know, chat with us, we'll tell you what we think is going to work and we won't let you do stuff that's stupid. We're pretty adamant about that.

And there's a brand size, right? Like you want to be at a certain size, number of customers maybe before this becomes an effective solution?

Yeah, typically like $3 to $5 million in revenue is sort of the minimum that you want. And it's not because we have some minimum and we don't want to talk to you if you don't send out a certain amount. It's really because I've been an operator for 25 years. One thing I know really that I'm adamant about is when you're getting started, you want to do fewer things and you want to do them really well.

Sure.

So one, focus on fewer things, get some scale, get scale within Facebook and get your email program super dialed. Then start to layer on other stuff, especially because below a certain size, it's not going to move the needle in a meaningful way if you just add on postcards and you're doing half a million dollars Wait until it makes sense for your brand and then it's time to layer that on.

Yeah, that's just shiny object syndrome problems that you see in this market. So cool, man. Well, thanks for coming on and joining us and sharing all this stuff. I think the listeners are going to really enjoy this stuff just because it's new learning and people are always wanting to learn new stuff. So with that, that's a wrap. Episode 37, Combining Email and SMS with Direct Mail of Integrated Offline and Online Retention. If you enjoyed this podcast today, please make sure you like, subscribe, Follow and leave us a rating and let us know in the comments section below what your thoughts are and how you're maybe looking at direct mail. And we'll include Michael's information and PostPilot's information in the comments too. So you can go click on that and learn more and let him know that you saw us on— saw Michael on our pod. And, you know, hopefully he'll give you a hookup or a deal or something or a free postcard or something. I don't know what you'll do, but whatever it is, you can follow this.

Yeah.

You can follow this show on X, LinkedIn, YouTube, IG, TikTok, and so many other places. All right. Last, last thing. If you want to join our newsletter, we've got a great newsletter. We drop a daily newsletter about retention at eCom Email Marketer again in the comments. And then secondly, you can come join our community or you can get certified. Again, we talk about this all the time. You probably heard the mid, mid ad roll from us. But if you want to get certified, want to learn from Chase and I, we've got a great certification program. And then of course, we've got a great private community available too. Come join those. Those are in the comment section below. And last but not least, Drew, I mean, you're— and why do I want to call you Drew? Michael. Drew is his partner. Just—

here's my better looking partner. Yeah.

Michael, where can they find you on social media?

LinkedIn, Twitter, best places to reach me.

Got it. And then Chase, where can they find— where can people find you?

Yeah, most platforms.

Anywhere the world exists, you can find Chase and you can find me also on LinkedIn and X today. So thanks for tuning in. We'll be back next week. We're talking about user-generated content. And integrating that to leverage your views, photos, and all for retention. We'll get into the nitty-gritty around that. With that being said, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week.

From the open to the click, they're the masters of the flow. Just watch your list grow and your leads turn to go. Did we retain you so far, or do we have to extend it? If you want results, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it. Yeah, you know you gotta send it.