Happy Sunday!

As you read this, I hope you’ve got your feet up, a beverage in your hand, and you’re excited to dive into direct mail. Before we dive into that, I wanted to share some stats I got from Northbeam (digital ad attribution software) this week. I’ll likely turn this into a graphic similar to how finance sites show stocks. These include the changes in ad budget per channel and their CPM.

YoY Channel Budget Changes:

  • Spend is down 10%
  • CPM is down by 18.7%
  • Spend is up 17%
  • CPM is up 15.9%
  • Spend is up 32%
  • CPM is up 12.8%
  • Spend is up 2%
  • CPM is down 40.5%
  • Spend is up 113%
  • CPM is down 35.9%
  • Spend is up 501%
  • CPM is down 28.3%
  • Spend is down 56%
  • CPM is up 33.5%

So what’s the punchline? 1. You should be using an attribution platform like Northbeam to ensure you’re properly tracking the individual contribution of a channel. 2. Start investing in Microsoft ads, Pinterest and YouTube!

If you missed this week’s episode of Limited Supply, I recommend checking it out. Moiz and I dove into The Infomercial King, who uses acquisition funnels with 1-800 numbers to sell millions of dollars of product! Check it out on Apple or Spotify.

For today’s email, I wanted to get tactical again and dive into a channel that for the longest time had a $75k minimum spend or barrier to entry — direct mail. Direct mail is a channel that has started to get more popular amongst brands that are spending dollars on customer acquisition, and its mainly driven by the rebrand and launch of PostPilot. They built a platform that makes direct mail easy to navigate, like Klaviyo, and it’s been a success for many brands.

Over 150M residences across the country receive mail. That’s homes, not individuals! According to the census bureau, there are 2.6 people per household. So with direct mail, your potential audience is roughly 390M. To compare that to digital, Facebook hopes to have 243M people in the USA by the end of this year on their apps.

I don’t say this to compare direct mail and Facebook. The worst mistake any marketer can make is judging a marketing channel based on their results in a completely different channel. If you’re judging within a category, such as Out of Home, or Paid Social, that’s fair… but comparing FB ads to Direct Mail is silly. When you test, you should aim to use the same LP or URL that you see work for other campaigns, similar messaging or “hook” to get consumers excited, and test with retargeting before prospecting.

Direct mail is a channel that I wish I had tapped into sooner. About 6 years ago, I ran my first direct mail campaign, where I believe our test budget was around $80k. To be honest, I can’t remember how it performed as I wasn’t leading the initiative, but I remember we didn’t continue running it, so I presume it didn’t do well. The campaign focused on customer reactivation — assuming we couldn’t email them again and didn’t want to spend money showing them ads with Facebook. More recently, I’ve been excited about using direct mail for prospecting and retargeting, and I’m excited to dive into the 5 key pieces: Purpose, Attribution, Audience, and Creative.

Purpose

Every iconic brand you know and love, from Macy’s and Nike to Vans and American Express, uses direct mail. It’s not because they love sending junk to your mailbox… it just works and is cost-effective. The big brands know direct mail works — think about the iconic Bed, Bath & Beyond 20% off coupons that used to live in the car's glove compartment!

Checking the mailbox is something everyone has to do and ends up doing. Using a company like PostPilot, you can spend 49 cents to reach a single person in a heavily defined demographic. It’s similar to B2B podcast advertising — it’s “upper funnel,” but they’re highly targeted, so if you give good reason to the listener, it can act like a lower funnel channel.

Personally, I think if you’ve got a great ads funnel working with Meta and Google with spending over $250k per month, I would say you’re at a spot where you could test direct mail. The investment level depends on what vendor you work with. ShareLocal Media has a minimum of $15k. PostPilot has a minimum of 89 cents (seriously, this is their pricing page). You should do your own research on which vendor is right for you.

Attribution

These are 5 things you can do for direct mail attribution. I recommend doing all 5 together for the most accurate picture.

  • Use a coupon code. Something contextually relevant goes far and stays memorable. Using “POSTCARD48” won’t be remembered, but “WELCOME20” for 20% off will!
  • Use a vanity URL like nik.co/LP. The URL looks clean and straightforward; it’s easy to remember, too. But when you go to the URL nik.co/LP, you’ll see the UTM parameters at the top that can help you identify the traffic in an analytics platform.
  • Address match. This is a simple excel query to determine where and when your orders came from and to which addresses you mailed something.
  • Post-purchase survey. Tried and true — use a post-purchase survey tool to ask customers, “How did you hear about us?”
  • Holdout test. A holdout test allows you to see the true incremental dollars driven by the channel. For example, a HOOX client in beauty figured out their iROAS (incremental ROAS) with direct mail is ~$6, whereas the platform showed a higher ROAS.

Audience

When you start out using direct mail, I recommend starting with an audience of people who are already familiar with you. This allows you to make sure you don’t have obvious kinks in your funnel and you can validate how messaging performs for a channel. Because retargeting ads have a higher engagement benchmark, you can learn more about your messaging, creative, and site experience before opening up to prospecting.

When doing direct mail, you can upload customer data you already have or buy data (which is what most people do from a variety of vendors). Two common ones we use with our clients:

  • MailMatch — This allows you to put high-intent visitors from your site into an API that turns IP addresses into mailing addresses so that you can send postcards like abandoned checkout emails.
  • Credit card data — You can buy segments like “Whole Foods shoppers who pay with AMEX” or “Amazon shoppers who spend more than $500 per month” and send them specific offers.

Creative

Direct mail creative is similar to good Facebook creative. It’s bright, visually stimulating; there’s an angle and a CTA with a trackable link. These are our best practices for direct mail design:

  • Consistent visual identity to the URL printed on the card.
  • Prominent logo, and consistent color scheme, so it’s easily recognizable when the consumers go through their mail.
  • Clear, concise messaging. Easy to read copy (3rd-grade level or less).
  • Include both QR code & website URL (vanity links with UTM parameters)
  • A strong call to action + incentive with expiration to create urgency.
  • Dynamic personalization (e.g., adding the recipient's name in the design) to improve engagement.

I can’t speak for other shops, but most of the time, we’ll work directly with PostPilot’s creative team to turn around an on-brand design in 2 days for our clients.

Have you tried direct mail yourself yet? Reply and let me know if you did and how it did!

On to some fun stuff…

Vendor of the Week:

Rebuy — The Shopify app that everyone should use to drive more AOV, UPT, and ROAS on your ads.

Have you ever wondered how brands with lower AOV (personal care, supplements, etc.) can raise their AOV and run ads without burning their paid budget? It’s because they're waiting as soon as you get to their site and add a product to the cart. Rebuy is the software powering all that upselling and smart recommendations.

When you add a body wash for $14, you’re hit with a recommendation to upgrade to a 3 back and save 20%. Now the cart value went from $14 to $33.60. When you get to the Rebuy cart, you’re presented with the offer to move that body wash to a quarterly subscription, and you’ll get 10% off. The cart value is now $30.24, and the customer checks out. After making a purchase, that customer is now presented with the option to add shampoo + conditioner ($14 each) to their subscription order, and they’ll get 50% off their first month.

In one Rebuy journey, we went from a $14 order to $44.24 and got a subscriber. Using the recommendation engine inside Rebuy, you can recommend offers to customers based on their chosen products. You can even use the Rebuy recommendation tech to send smarter and more precise texts and emails with Klaviyo.

If you haven’t installed Rebuy, I genuinely believe you’re already behind. We haven’t even talked about their Rebuy Cart, which we use for our clients almost immediately. I highly recommend you sign up for a demo.

If you’re ready to get more from each customer, check out Rebuy on the Shopify App Store here!

LP of the Week:

Nori is one of the most beautiful products I’ve seen recently, and they came to HOOX for a landing page to sell their handheld steamer.

Click here to see the LP

After running this on paid channels, they saw nearly a 9% conversion rate from prospecting traffic. If you had to ask me why this did so well… I would say a few things:

  • The design is so sleek, and minimal and gives the information you need to make the purchase
  • The angle of the page was to cater to a female professional, and I think we did that well
  • In the HOOX process, we put together a section where we write down very honest roadblocks of why someone wouldn’t buy, and we addressed every single one very well.

If you’re ready to have a team of 25 professionals build you a landing page in less than 3 weeks that convert, click here to make a purchase.

If you’re still on the fence about whether or not you need a landing page, click here to book a demo of HOOX, and we’ll walk you through our process.

That's all for this week

That’s all for this week’s newsletter. How was it? Helpful? Feel free to reply with your candid feedback — your words can’t hurt me; they’ll only strengthen the content (JK, they might hurt, but it’s okay).

I’ll be at The Whalies this week in Austin if you’re around, and I’m getting excited about Grow LA next month, too!

I hope you get those 9 hours of sleep tonight and stay hydrated. I’ll see you next Sunday with some awesome learnings from The Whalies.