There are many ways to amplify your brands message online leveraging technology platforms. In the past decade, smart direct to consumer (DTC) brands had nurtured their brands and built strong brand reputation by engaging with potential customers on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit etc. Social media platforms were and still remain powerful and effective ways to educate, entertain and engage with your brands target audience. Content and messaging is still king and social media helps bolster that connection with real people that helps breed loyalty and bottom line growth. 57% of consumers increase spending with a brand that they feel connected to. Consumers rank social media, TV/radio followed by email and direct mail as the top channels that give brands the opportunity to connect to social based on “Brands Get Real” Study by Sprout Social.
Most digitally native brands had in the past decade, abandoned traditional channels of engagement such as direct mail. This was largely driven by an explosion of social media platforms and the rise of the big three platforms Meta, Google and Amazon. With social and search gaining popularity, channels like direct mail were relegated to the sidelines for almost a decade.
Post iOS updates and the likely death of third-party cookies in 2023, DTC brands are getting to realize the power of direct mail in helping lower customer acquisition costs and grow at a healthy blended ROAS. Some of the world’s most successful DTC brands leverage email, SMS, and direct mail marketing campaigns with a goal to land strong personalization and build deep engagement with their customers. An omnichannel marketing approach builds a strong moat for a brand and enhances customer experience and brand loyalty.
Customers today have an undeniable power over the purchase process and smart marketers want their brands to stay connected with their customers at every step of the customer decision journey. Customer are in absolute control of their purchase journey from pre-click to making a purchase.
Which is why the most successful brands focus on helping meet customer needs and fill gaps through the customer journey from the pre-click or discovery phase to the actual purchase and beyond (specifically the post-purchase journey as well).
Here are some of the top DTC brands that use Direct Mail or Postcard Marketing along with their Email and SMS strategy
Beardbrand:
Campaign: the goal of the campaign was to land a successful winback of its lapsed customers. While Beardbrand saw tremendous success as a DTC brand one of its key challenges was to winback unengaged customers offline. In this case study, Beardbrand generated staggering results by using postcards to reach VIP customers who aren’t easily accessible via email.
Situation: With iOS updates and the post -covid scenario, digital acquisition channels were getting expensive. Beardbrand needed a solution to control rising costs and at the same time engage with their most profitable VIP customers that hadn’t made a purchase for more than 60-90 days.
Solution: Shaina Golay, Beardbrand’s art director always believed in the potential of postcard marketing. “It wasn’t that people weren’t seeing the ads or even that the ads weren’t working,” Golay says of their recent ad campaigns. But the costs were outweighing the results. Golay’s early efforts with direct mail i.e., the launch of a prospecting campaign didn’t exactly work well. It was complicated and time-consuming (she worked with multiple companies and had to do the design herself). The ROI too was disappointing.
Using an automated direct mailer solution like PostPilot, Beardbrand created a postcard campaign that focused on Beardbrand’s hard-earned customer list. There had thousands of satisfied customers the brand could no longer reach through email, because they had unsubscribed or stopped opening email messages. Here is where the brand saw an opportunity with direct mail marketing. The VIP winback campaign was directed to customers who had bought from Beardbrand thrice or more but had stopped buying for more than 60-90 days and weren’t engaging with their email or digital ads.
The front was personalized with the customer’s name and spoke to the “seasoned beardsman” who might be due to replenish their supply of “the most trusted grooming products.” The back showcased some of the brand’s best-selling products. A call-to-action and a coupon code to save $20 on their next purchase of $50 or more. The coupon was notable for two reasons – one, Beardbrand rarely discounts its products – two, the postcards used single-use unique coupon codes (SUCCs).
Answer: No. Both the cards had the same code, and each code could only be used once. That made attribution a breeze: As soon as cards began landing in people’s mailboxes, and orders started rolling in, the codes linked each purchase back to the mailing offer.
Result: An ROI of 2500% and an influx of orders
Postcards were sent to 1,119 customers who had shopped from the brand at least three times but hadn’t made a purchase in at least 6 months. (In the screenshot below, (LOD – Last Order Date) is the number of days since they’d unsubscribed and the number is how many times, they had made a purchase more than twice). The mailing brought in $13,000 in sales, for an ROI of almost 2500%.
Many VIP customers took advantage of the discount offer, but most of the sales were at full price ($8,000, compared with $5,700 in coupon sales). This data point suggests that they were re-engaging with the brand for reasons beyond the one-time bargain.
OrbitBaby:
Campaign: the goal for this campaign was to acquire high AOV customers using direct mail campaign. Orbit used PostPilot’s MailMatch™ to send physical mail to potential customers, targeting existing email lists they built with consent.
Situation: Orbit Baby focused a lot of its initial scale efforts on rented platforms like facebook. With iOS updates and rising customer acquisition costs, orbit baby wanted to diversify beyond facebook and quit relying on one platform for customer acquisition.
Solution: Orbit Baby used the power of MailMatch™ on the PostPilot platform to target potential high intent customers based on email lists. Krantz was a forward-thinking CMO at Orbit Baby who was always looking for new channels and smart growth strategies. He wanted to diversify Orbit’s acquisition strategy away from online ads. But because expensive strollers were generally a one-time purchase, he only had email addresses for the leads. With PostPilot’s proprietary MailMatch™ technology, he was able to send postcards to abandoned-cart customers and other prospects.
For their first campaign, they created a segment of high-intent customers.
They targeted people showing intent to purchase, coming back to the site multiple times and land multiple product views. Their email list was nearly 4,000 strong. MailMatch™ found addresses for the majority of the email lists. Orbit baby wanted to land messaging communication based on the sales stage their prospects were at in the marketing funnel.
The PostPilot ™ mailer created had a front side that focused on simple lifestyle images of consumers using the the product. The focus was to demonstrate various use cases of the product.
The back of the postcard had customer reviews of their customers that helped build credibility with new shoppers. It also had a montage of visual testimonials from their customers. This built an emotional image of user generated content with happy families carrying the stroller shown in every shot. Also, a discount coupon of $50 was offered to consumers to incentivize the purchase.
Result: the brand achieved 350%+ ROI
The postcard mailer ended up generating a nearly 350% ROI based on coupon tracking. The coupon was unique to the postcard campaign so sales could be easily attributed, though the actual ROI is higher since buyers often forget to use the coupon or find a different code
With the huge success of the above campaign, Orbit Baby now plans to automate everything, so as new customers fall into different segments, postcards automatically ship out to elicit deep personalization, engagement and ultimately a purchase from their brand.
Bulletproof:
Campaign: Keeping in mind repeat purchase and high LTV goals, bulletproof used direct mailers to drive retention as the primary campaign goal
Situation: As customer acquisition costs got higher, the brand started suffering with one-time buyers and low repeat purchase rates. The brand needed to craft a retention-based strategy to build a strong moat and prevent a leaky funnel.
Solution: re-engagement campaigns via direct mailers
Bulletproof created a series of re-engagement campaigns targeted on the below customer profile:
a) Customers that purchased last month but stopped buying in the given month
b) This lack of purchase in the current month, triggers a re-engagement campaign
c) This campaign incentivizes the customer with a discount code to make a future purchase within a limited time period.
The reason Bulletproof uses a combination of email and direct mail was that not all customers subscribe to the brands emailers. Some may have unsubscribed too. Also, data tells us that impact of using email plus direct mail typically sees a higher conversion rate than an individual campaign on a single channel.
Result: the campaign generated a staggering 1000% ROI
Key Takeaways:
a) Customer retention is the lifeblood of any DTC business
b) A re-engagement campaign accelerates retention
c) An omnichannel approach leveraging email, SMS and direct mail marketing helps increase brand trust, credibility and build exceptional ROI impact
CYSM:
Campaign – CYSM has mastered the art of executing integrated marketing campaigns with direct mail marketing integral to their marketing mix. Some of the campaigns that they have continuously utilized direct mailers are as below:
a) Holiday Campaigns
b) Special Announcements
c) Lifecycle Triggered Campaigns
With a whole lot of noise during the holiday season, CYSM leverages postcard marketing to stand out from the clutter. Direct Mail Marketing has helped them save advertising costs during the holiday season, as postage costs remain fixed all year. The brand has been able to successfully control rising ad costs while delivering a good ROI for the brand.
Special messages announcements: CYSM also converts its regular customers into loyal brand ambassadors by sending highly personalized messages and offers. When a popular product is out of stock, CYSM ensures back in stock notifications reach its valuable customers via email and direct mailers.
When a high intent email gets missed by their customer, they ensure they have a direct mailer at their doorstep with a high converting message and offer that is hard to miss out on.
Valentines Day Direct Mailer Postcard:
Special messages announcements, CYSM also converts its regular customers into loyal brand ambassadors by sending highly personalized messages and offers. When a popular product is out of stock, CYSM ensures back in stock notifications reach its valuable customers via email and direct mailers.
When a high intent email gets missed by their customer, they ensure they have a direct mailer at their doorstep with a high converting message and offer that is hard to miss out on.
Triggered Campaign to put LTV on autopilot:
The number one priority after customer acquisition is to re engage the customer to increase LTV. CYSM does this in many ways depending on what they purchased. After the first purchase a welcome message with a site wide discount is a priority.
The campaign also focuses on making personalized suggestions based on the customers historical purchases and smart bundles are offered based on frequently purchase items. Promoting and cross selling complimentary products are another key focus area for the brand.
Also, learn how Urbani Truffles used postcards to win-back high value customers here.
Guidelines to build an effective direct mail strategy:
a. Build a deep understanding of your audience
b. Have a clear marketing goal for your direct mail campaign
c. Leverage cross-sell and upsell efforts to drive value for the customer and AOV for the brand
d. Acknowledge VIP customers consistently
e. Promote new products, variants and models via direct mail marketing
f. Educate your customers via product demos, use cases and benefits
g. Raise awareness of major sale events, holiday sales and promotional offers
h. Target new prospects to widen your reach with postcard marketing
i. Focus on building discount codes, coupons, custom landing pages and custom phone numbers
With that are you now ready to take your brand to the next level of profitable growth and win over more customers? Learn more about why direct mail marketing rocks and is the number one ROI driver when it comes to DTC stores. Email and SMS marketing work in synchrony with direct mail marketing and are powerful revenue drivers to scale growth. Gain more insights into how email and SMS marketing work together to scale DTC stores.
Concluding Thoughts:
Postcard Marketing can be a highly effective channel to increase revenue and customer retention. Direct mail generates a higher response rate than any direct digital marketing medium – 5-9X greater than email, paid search, or social media – hence the opportunity is huge. According to the USPS, promotional postcards are more than 5X as likely to be read and scanned compared to other forms of direct mail.
