Direct Mail Goes Multichannel

Speaker A: Welcome to Nerd Marketing, an original podcast for e commerce operators and marketers looking to level up. Uh, Drew Sinaki and Michael Epstein will bring you actionable strategies from their decades of running eight and nine figure brands, along with interviews and insights from the leaders of some of the most successful brands in the world. Hey everybody. Today on the Nerd Marketing podcast, Mike and I are doing a webinar on multi channel marketing. Specifically how you measure the impact of direct mail campaigns. Campaigns not only on your Shopify store, but on your Amazon store if you have one. We go into multi channel marketing. We also go into a little bit of Black Friday. How you're going to position your brand and best leverage the channel over Black Friday. Really critical channel for Black Friday because CPAs go through the roof. Meanwhile, direct mail is a great way to differentiate your brand. Go back and reactivate old buyers who you cannot contact through email. So if you want to know more about Black Friday, Black Friday marketing or multi channel attribution, this podcast is for you. Enjoy Foreign

Speaker B: we are 44 days away from Black Friday, Drew.

Speaker A: Nice. It's an exciting time. I think now everybody in D2C, that's all we're thinking about. I haven't seen it much out in the market yet. Some people in the software world talking about how to prep for it, but I, uh, haven't seen like a lot of Black Friday commercials starting yet.

Speaker B: Not the ads yet, but we see with all of our brands the planning is happening, which is good. You know, we all tell ourselves that we're going to have this fully buttoned up in July. We tell, tell ourselves that every year. And then inevitably it's still October and we're putting the touches on those plans. But that's okay. That's why we're here.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's why we're here. It's a fun time of year. So we're live for this webinar. We're watching the chat. We want to make this a conversation. Subject today is Black Friday Cyber Monday Prep. Mike and I have been running brands for probably a cumulative 50 years. Got some knowledge on the brand side and now we are the co CEOs and founders of Post Pilot. So we've got some direct mail angles there we want to lean into and we're going to talk about measuring Amazon growth in particular, which is something we all want to do. I think most of the brands we work with sell on Amazon, so let's get right into it. Black Friday is a really interesting time for a number of reasons. First, I think on A macro level, it's a great time because conversion rates go up or the audience is more receptive. You know, it's a byproduct of our own success in E commerce. But we've trained people to buy for that week after Thanksgiving, for better, for worse, people are ready. You know, the audience is there. They are more likely to respond to offers and convert off offers than they are at any other time. On the flip side, it's a challenging time because every brand is trying to get their message in front of the customers at that time. And, um, you end up with this phenomenon where, you know, I was reading like the average email subscriber gets like 300 emails a day for that week after Black Friday. Meta ads. The cost per click, the cost per impression, goes through the roof that week as bigger and bigger competitors enter the ad market. Mike, I was remembering when we ran auto anything, you know, for that week, it was like a big surprise, uh, the first year because autozone and Walmart and Amazon all entered our ad market, you know, blowing up our, our models. So that certainly happens. And it's just all these things point to why you would want to lean in on direct mail. Direct mail is a great channel for that week because the price is capped. What it costs to send a postcard then is what it costs to send a postcard now. It's just a great way to zig when your competitors zag, right? Like the mail box is a lot less crowded than the email inbox. Great way to differentiate. Get your product offering in front of the, uh, customer in a way that is going to convert, do really well. So that's what I want to talk about today. Specifically, we want to deep dive on multi channel attribution. Right? So your marketing's always been multi channel. You know, if you go back forever, like we've got direct mail, you've got stuff going on on Amazon, you've got your pay per click ads, your meta ads. Mike, the slide kind of caught me off guard when I saw this photo of us, which seems like just yesterday we were in this Old Time Pottery. You know, we were doing consulting for Old Time Pottery and helping them with their, uh, e commerce business. So yeah, uh, marketing's always been multichannel. And the problem has always been in measuring, like how these channels are performing and impacting your revenue. Right. So attribution was a lot of guesswork, especially offline, you know, online, obviously you can layer a model on top of clicks. Last touch, first touch, multi touch. A lot harder to do offline. Like how do you measure the success of a direct mail campaign, which is what we do all day? There are ways to do that, but billboards, you know, signage, uh, TV commercials, those things are a little bit harder to attribute revenue to. And it doesn't mean they don't work. We always talk about Byron Sharp, who wrote a great book called How Brands Grow. There's a lot of research in the book, a really convincing case behind how the top brands in every category became the top brands. And he says it's brand salience. The winners in each category, Coca Cola, Nike, they are, uh, wherever the customer are, they're everywhere, right? If the customer is on Amazon, they're on Amazon. If they're in Walmart, they're in Walmart. You know, if they're on tv, they're on TV and they're just pounding their marketing message in front of the customer. You find that the more touch points in front of the customer that you have, the higher the AOVs and the lifetime values and conversion rates from those customers. You want to be offline, you want to be online, you kind of want to be everywhere your customers are. Again, the trouble is, uh, attributing this and sort of convincing your CEO to give you the budget to do it.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I think two quick things on this one. It reminds me of some content that Cody Plofker has been putting out recently, who's the CEO of Jones Road, and talking about the realization that he's come to as he's scaled past nine figures for reach being such a critical metric for brands who want to continue to scale. Once you've sort of hit that sort of tipping point in the size of the business. And, uh, you've got to just continue to be present everywhere, as you said. And the other thing that comes to mind here is it's offline channels, so billboards, tv, direct mail, things like that. But it's also how all of your marketing affects channels outside of your direct to consumer business. So that is Amazon obviously being a big one and we'll talk a lot about that. Retail stores being another. We know intuitively that the marketing that we're doing online through meta, through every channel, including online channel, is creating demand or generating revenue that ultimately gets captured by other channels that you don't see. You don't have the direct attribution into channels like Amazon. But we know that our Facebook ads are driving some volume on Amazon. So I think that's a great segue to this where we dig into that big blind spot that we all have Particularly with Amazon and for direct mail, it's the same as really any channel when it comes to Amazon. You can do geo holdouts and things like that, but they're imprecise, they're expensive, especially for brands that are at scale. You've got to be spending a ton to generate enough statistically significant data to get any strong takeaways from, you know, some of these geolift holdouts or other types of holdouts. Yet we know that 40% of E commerce revenue is happening on Amazon and I think the latest stat was something like 60 something percent of product searches originate on Amazon directly versus you know, Google or other channels. So we know it's happening but there was just no way of measuring it with a level of precision unless you were using like specifically Amazon ads. Right.

Speaker A: And I think this is not a direct mail only issue. Email, you know, you send out an email campaign, some of the recipients are going to go buy on Amazon and you have no way of tracking that. Right. Meta, uh, certainly like all your marketing spills over into Amazon. The challenge has always been measuring that. And I think what Mike and I are really excited about and what we kind of built out at Post Pilot is a way to capture those Amazon orders in your attribution. 20% or so of direct mail campaigns drive orders on other channels. That number we've read before and nobody has any hard and fast data behind it. We went ahead and built the tool to sort of measure that and I guess the punchline is we're going to give you what that number is probably in six months as brands use our platform.

Speaker B: This is the big announcement that's been getting a lot of attention and people are asking all about it after we announce it, which is Postpilot Halo, which is the first time you're able to get clear insight into orders that your marketing campaigns are driving, specifically your direct mail campaigns are driving to Amazon directly. So you might be sending a campaign that the call to action might be to come back to your website. But I know personally, I'm sure you do too, Drew. I start my product, uh, like as soon as I want to buy something, my first place I go is Amazon. I, I typically don't go to the brand's direct website because I already have my prime account and I know I'm going to get it in two days and all that stuff. We all know this as marketers again that that's happening. So with Halo, we are sending your direct mail campaigns, whether that is to existing customers or new prospects. And we're able to show you how much revenue and conversions are coming back to your Shopify website, which we've always been able to do through our native Shopify integration in real time, because we have all of that ins into which households are getting cards and then which households are placing an order. But now we also extend that onto Amazon so that we can say of those 10,000 people that received a card as part of that campaign, 20 or 100 of them ordered on Amazon that represents this much revenue. And we show you both of those in your dashboard so you have that complete picture of the value of that campaign. And sometimes that might make the difference between a successful campaign and not especially on new customer acquisition campaigns, prospecting campaigns. Because we all know prospecting is not an easy nut to crack. You know, you're not expecting massively high roas on prospecting campaigns. You're trying to just ensure that you're profitable and that you're profitable and can scale. So by giving you that complete picture of saying, we acquired X number of customers that represent this much revenue on Shopify, but hey, a bunch of those people went straight to Amazon and placed their order on Amazon that represents this additional amount of revenue, the halo effect of that campaign, uh, that might show you that that campaign was actually significantly more profitable than you thought. And you should scale that because that's going to drive significant incremental growth for your business.

Speaker A: It's definitely an edge that you will get that your competitors won't. Just to have this knowledge. If you could figure out that an acquisition campaign is ROI positive because it's driving traffic to Amazon where your competitors might run a very similar campaign and it's break even at best if they're only measuring their Shopify impact. You now have a leg up, right? You can grow while they can't. So I think this feature is one. I haven't been as excited about this since we kind of started the company. It's huge. No one does Amazon attribution outside of direct mail. You know, you don't see this in email service providers. You certainly don't see it in meta. Uh, so I think for the first time we're able to measure that impact. It's really relevant to you listening to this if you sell on Amazon. So obviously not as relevant if you are only on Shopify. But 90% of brands probably sell on Amazon also, especially if Amazon's your core business.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: Like we've got a number of brands who are top 10, top 30 sellers on Amazon in their category who have like a really small Shopify Footprint. And they're leaning into this as the one acquisition channel that they now can tie some data around and see the true impact to step back a sec, get back to Black Friday. Like, how is this all relevant to Black Friday? As we alluded to earlier, Black Friday is a killer time for direct mail. So Mike and I always knew this. Running the brands, you know, intuitively it made a lot of sense because hey, you could send out a postcard for 50 some odd cents and that was going to be capped. The price is going to be the same that week after Black Friday as it is today, whereas every other channel is going through the roof and getting harder to reach the customer. Right. So we wanted to put some data behind that. One thing we have at Post Pilot is data, right? We've got tens of thousands of brands on the platform. I don't know how many thousands of campaigns we analyzed here, but it was like millions of postcards going out across thousands of campaigns. We went back the last couple Black Fridays and we asked the question, like, how does direct mail work? How did our acquisition campaigns work? Or how did the brand's acquisition campaigns work in aggregate? How did retention campaigns work in aggregate? How did retargeting campaigns. Those are the campaigns where you put a pixel on your site. We correlate 60, 70% of your cold traffic to a physical address and drop a card or a catalog. How did they work? Not only how did they work top line roas, but incrementality. Like, how did they. All these campaigns were running holdout groups and we were able to compare the performance of the campaign versus a holdout group. In other words, this is the gold standard in marketing attribution. This is how all channels should report. They don't. Direct mail does, at least on, um, postpilot. And what it means is, you know, you build out a campaign, 80% of your campaign receives your postcard or your catalog. The remaining 20% does not. Both groups see your meta ads. Both groups might see your emails, your TV commercials, whatever. The only thing you can attribute the lift to is the direct mail campaign. It's called a holdout group. You can do it right in the app. Ah, we recommend it for all large brands. And it's going to give you an incremental number, hopefully. I mean, not all campaigns are incremental, but the majority are if we target them correctly and the offer is good. So we wanted to know the incrementality and how that changes sort of over Black Friday. Go to this benchmark report, download it. It's free. It's just a great skim. It's really well written. So not only do we show, like in aggregate, the performance of direct mail over that holiday period, we break it down by category. So you can see like what is working in furniture companies, what's working for apparel brands, what's working for, like supplement brands. Right. You can see how direct mail did in each category. And then you can also see like, what campaigns work really well. Does acquisition work really well for my brand? Is it worth it? You know, what about retention for my brand? Am I able to increase the lifetime value? You know, what are my competitors doing? What kind of returns are they're getting? We put some highlight numbers here. We were curious, you know, is a 6 by 9 postcard, which is obviously bigger than a 4x6, is it worth the upgrade in postage? You know, whatever it cost a couple cents extra to upgrade the card, is it worth it? Well, you know, across thousands of campaigns, you get 67% higher ROAS. Okay, so is that good for you? You know, your margin structure, you got to back into that. But that's the data, Right. Do customers who receive direct mail like the direct mail version of my Black Friday offer, are they going to perform any differently? Well, the answer is yes. Customers who touch direct mail have a 7.5% higher AOVA. And you're going to see they buy more and they buy more often than the customers who just receive your emails. Right. Incremental roas. So I believe this was retention campaigns. Three and a half times median incremental roas. Over Black Friday. You're going to get strong incrementality during this period. We didn't include the acquisition number. I think it was like four and a half times incremental. So you want to be acquiring customers through direct mail. Great way to do that, by the way, is to put some of your top sellers on a six by nine. Right. Just quick and easy acquisition campaign order rate. Okay, so not only are people ordering more, they're ordering more often. It's eight and a half percent higher. And then there was a lot of demographic stuff in there. You know, the top performing segment was millennial women who converted a lot more. But hey, it's all in the report. It's a quick and easy read. I encourage you to download that now and see what works over Black Friday and then just reach out to us. Our team will set everything up for you in accordance with the best standards. We'll get into that later how we do that.

Speaker B: Yeah, and those numbers are without Amazon included. So those numbers would be higher when you are now able to start layering on that additional revenue that you're getting from Amazon, particularly over Black Friday. Because again, we know such a large percentage of that volume is occurring on Amazon. And you made one comment at the end there, Drew, that I just want to emphasize, which is this is like the secret sauce, the fact that we know what works across aggregate data from thousands and thousands of brands and hundreds of millions of cards. We know the strategies, the best practices, what to target, what not to target, how to get you to scale profitably. You can go to Kinko's and print out a bunch of postcards. That doesn't make them work. The key is knowing what works and having all the data. And this is the data that powers all of our best practices, all of our AI recommendations and AI targeting capabilities is built into this underlying data that drives exceptional performance and higher performance than you could get essentially any other way.

Speaker A: That's right. So to just think, you, uh, know we mentioned these different approaches and I think it's obvious to us Mike, because we've used direct mail so much ourselves. But I would say your typical Shopify CMO is less familiar with the platform because they are unfortunately younger than we are. So it's eye opening to them and maybe to you that on uh, the retention side, direct mail, think of it a lot more like email, right? Like you've got the customer data, you can send a postcard to them. You can do an upsell, a cross sell a post purchase. You know you bought this, you might also buy that. You can do abandoned carts. Everything you can do in email you can do in direct mail. You can automate it. You already have the customer data, but then you start going up funnel into retargeting and prospecting and there direct mail acts a lot more like meta. You don't need an opt in to send somebody a piece of direct mail in the United States. You got to honor the opt out, but you don't need the opt in which means you can do retargeting. So you put a uh, pixel on your site, we correlate your visitors who don't convert to a physical address. You can drop a card. It works. Where often retargeting from meta will not work. You can retarget email addresses. In other words, everybody here here has a massive list of emails in their klaviyo, in their omnisend who have never purchased before. You know, and that's uh, probably the majority of your subscriber base. You've hit them with every offer you have, they still haven't purchased. We can correlate those emails to a physical address, drop a piece of print, collateral, postcard, catalog, and they will convert where email has not been able to make them convert. That's retargeting. Prospecting is, you know, think metaphor mail. And this is where we look at your customer data. You can do a lookalike like you do in meta, show me an audience with high propensity to buy, and, um, I'm going to do prospecting to it. And. Or you can target off a more traditional demographic and direct mail attributes like gender, household income, buys at a Whole Foods, has diabetes, does CrossFit, you know, whatever. These are all in our data set and you can target off of them too, and do prospecting. So it's really direct mail, unlike all these other channels, is a full funnel channel. And now again, just to go back to the theme, you're able to measure the impact not just on your Shopify and on your D2C, but through Amazon as well.

Speaker B: The only thing I'd add there, Drew, is again, it's the underlying data that powers the performance for all of these types of campaign. So it's more than, you know, prospecting. The image that people have in their head of direct mail prospecting is like junk mail. Like I'm, um, batch and blasting to a zip code, or maybe I'm layering on a couple basic attributes like, you know, income or age. We have thousands of data points on hundreds of millions of consumers, including a tremendous amount of just proprietary data. And that is ultimately what drives the performance. It tells us who to send to. It also, perhaps even more importantly, tells us who not to send to, because we think it's not going to be a good use of your budget. And that's what drives the best possible performance you can get from all of these strategies, from retention to retargeting to prospecting.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I should say that these three buckets, prospecting, retargeting and retention. This is how you should think about Black Friday. You could and probably should be leaning into all three. It's a great time, for example, to prospect new buyers because we mentioned that they are more receptive to direct mail over the holidays. It's a great time to retarget. Everybody gets a surge in traffic over the next month. And if you don't believe me, look at your data from last year. You want to capture some of that traffic in a retargeting audience. Whether or not you send the postcard now, maybe you want to do it in January, but start capturing that audience. It's free to put the pixel on your site, start building a retargeting pool and then retention. I mean, this is a great time to go back in your customer file to people who last ordered two years, three years, four years, five years ago and try to win them back oftentimes, many times, most times it's cheaper to do that than to acquire a new customer. So, uh, we like that retention and reactivation angle too, especially over the holidays.

Speaker B: Yep. And as you jump to the next, I'll just answer one of the questions that popped, uh, up in chat from Michael, who asked about whether you can see revenue that's coming through authorized retailers for your brand that you can't. It has to be your Amazon account we're tracking based on recipients of your campaigns. That's what we're tracking against. So if you are sending a direct mail campaign, whether it's to existing customers or prospects, we are then looking at that to understand how many of those recipients ultimately went on to buy. And we look at your Amazon data to do that attribution. We're not able to tie into other parties Amazon accounts.

Speaker A: So that brings you through Black Friday and then I think you're going to learn if you do experiment with direct mail over Black Friday, over this, Black Friday is going to love the channel. It's going to give you that reassurance that, uh, you've diversified off of one or two marketing channels. You're not going to get burned when you get locked out of your meta account, for example. It's always good to have, uh, a little diversification and build a resilient business. So we see brands leaning in, just continuing really those two things in a combination of automated campaigns, always on campaigns across acquisition, new customer acquisition, retention and retargeting. And then the one off, uh, the big launches and promos, you know, Valentine's Day, New Year is a great time for supplement brands, things like that. You know, just like you do in email, you get that cadence going of, of the automated campaigns that are constantly driving returns and then the one off promo announcements. One of the big values that brands see, especially for the one off campaigns, is if you go into your klaviyo or your omnisend, um, your email service provider and you send one of these out, you know, you're going to send your Mother's Day offer out or your Black Friday offer out, look at the data afterwards and you're going to see that like you all have this giant swath of previous buyers. You know, you've got tons of people who have purchased from you before that are in Klaviyo. But the number that actually open the email and are subscribed and engaged and hear about this offer from you is often like a small sliver of all those previous buyers. You know, this very rich audience we've seen 10%, 20%. I encourage you to go into Klaviyo, create two audiences, one of all your buyers and one of the buyers who have opened an email in the past, you know, 60 or 90 days, you're going to see the difference. And what direct mail does is allow you to take that offer and flip it to the other 80% who have kind of gone dark, right? These are people who have unsubscribed, never subscribed, or not opening your emails. So I think that's a big value of direct mail. You know, you know, this offer works. You've seen it work in email. Just flip it to a wider audience that is not responding to your email offers. You can also, with our, uh, Halo product, improve your Amazon SEO. Many of you sell through brick and mortar stores. You know, it's a big key there, improving store velocity to increase placement and get rolled out to more stores. All the same thing happens on Amazon. You know, the more you use direct mail to increase your velocity of new product launches, of sales on Amazon, your SEO there is going to get better. It's just like a flywheel that you're going to start. You know, your costs will go down as you're higher up in Amazon.

Speaker B: Um, yeah, I think that's exactly right. And we hear that from brands a ton. For the examples that you said, Drew, it's primarily retail store velocity and Amazon velocity. We all know how valuable and important it is to drive increased velocity, because if it's in retail, your buyers will, you know, maybe give you an end cap or they're going to expand your distribution from regional to national. If you're selling through for Amazon, it's SEO juice. It's that velocity is what's powering your rankings. And so all brands are saying, it's worth so much to me to improve those, but it's hard because I can't measure it. As a digitally native marketer, I'm used to being able to track the performance of all of my marketing campaigns through to conversion. So I just don't know how to allocate my budget or what to spend on or whether to increase spend or decrease spend on a particular marketing campaign, even though it's so important, because as you said, it becomes that flywheel effect. Investing a bunch in juicing that initial velocity such that your rankings shoot up means that again, you're going to get found more often. And then velocity tends to stay up as a result of that. So now you can do that with a level of actual analytical rigor and actual attribution data to say, I know this is having a positive effect on my Amazon velocity, so I'm going to keep investing in it to keep further improving my position.

Speaker A: We've got a question, by the way.

Speaker B: Uh, what's the best time to launch a direct mail campaign? We recommend it goes out about 10 days to two weeks before black Friday. And the key is landing in that sweet spot of not so early that, you know, people have forgotten or you know, they get distracted by something else and not so late that they don't have time to take action, or maybe they don't check their mail every single day and didn't get it in time. You don't want to cut it too close. So we have it landing typically a little bit on the earlier side for Black Friday because a lot of people are thinking ahead about what they want to spend on over Black Friday. So those early access campaigns are super popular with our brand. So Amazon already landed theirs. I got Target's catalog the other day.

Speaker A: Amazon's not idiots. When you think about direct mail attribution, it is more of a lower, longer bell curve. You know, you don't want to do the offer where, you know it's valid between noon and 1pm on next Saturday. You want the offers that are a little bit more open ended, you know, over the Black Friday period because your catalog or your postcard is going to arrive, customer is going to throw it down, kids are going to circle things, whatever they want, you know, you're going to give it to your spouse. It's going to go on the fridge. This thing like has been worked over by my kids and placed right in front of me. We're open to the list page. So think about it like that. As Mike said, 10 days before is a great cutoff. Can we perform magic and do it later? We can. You know, one of the things that makes Post Pilot different is we have print facilities on the east coast and the west coast to reduce time to home and enable us to do quick turnarounds. But I would say, you know, don't test us on that. You know, you wanted to be there, you wanted to like do work for you. So like Now's a good time. Now, between now and the end of the month, you reach out, our account management team can do everything for you. We'll do the design, we'll do the strategy, we'll do the deployment, all complimentary. And we'll get you teed up to arrive in home with plenty of time.

Speaker B: Those early access campaigns are awesome because especially if it's reactivation of previous customers and even for prospects, making them feel special without doing anything different than what you were going to do already. From, uh, an offer discount perspective for Black Friday. Giving people early access to a Black Friday offer feels exclusive, feels really good personal and gets them to convert. And you also are capturing that wallet share earlier in the season. So that's always really important too because, you know, once it comes to Black Friday, people might have been thinking, uh, this is on my list. But maybe they ended up buying a few other things and they realized I don't have the budget to buy more stuff. So locking in that share of wallet earlier is really valuable in early access through a, uh, personalized postcard campaign. Can do a, uh, really good job there.

Speaker A: The big boys are all using direct mail. Your hexclads, you know, your Portland Leathers, your squatches. Right. It's not on here, but Ridge just had a podcast where they talked about using it. It's like trusted. I, I think it's something that I see brands use as they get bigger. Would I recommend direct mail to a brand, uh, doing 100k all in, across all channels, network. You know, I'd probably start with make sure you get product market fit. You know, figure out what kind of ad creative works, what kind of offers work iterate quickly using meta and email. But once you dial that in, direct mail is where you scale, right, and diversify your marketing. So we got a lot of case studies on the website. Check those out. Got some inspirational, uh, creative designs there too. As a next step, I would encourage you to go to postpilot.com GFO that stands for our go fast offer or godfather offer. The offer you can't refuse. We have tried to bundle together everything, like everything. I think I'd want to run campaigns over Black Friday. We put together the various campaigns that should work for you, done for you. We give you a bonus if you sign up in October. In other words, like a, uh, bonus on sends for Q1. We give you four months for the price of three on our subscription. And there are a lot of goodies in there. So if I were thinking about how to get started, go to postpilot.com GFO check out the offer, sign up this week and get the ball rolling, you know, and our team can turn things around really quickly. So with that, let's now answer a couple more of these questions. Luis asks, can I retarget Amazon customers and actually get the customer data from Amazon? Big surprise. No, you can't. Uh, Amazon is still Amazon and although they'll share some macro things, they will not share customer data. I wish everybody asks about that.

Speaker B: Uh, that is a hard no in terms of actually getting the data from the personal customer information from Amazon. No. The key is understanding the value of those campaigns that you sent and impact on your Amazon revenue. But not personal information, because that is not yours like it is when they buy from Shopify. Also a question of, uh, do I need an Amazon ads account to use Halo? No, you need Amazon Seller Central account.

Speaker A: How can I justify adding direct mail to my already packed BFCM budget?

Speaker B: Mike, if I said, for every dollar that you give me, I'm going to give you three or four back, would you add more budget?

Speaker A: I would start with the benchmark report. Like, download the benchmark report. You take that to the CFO and say, like, here's our category. Here's what direct mail has done across a few thousand brands. Can we find the budget?

Speaker B: Right. If nothing else, you know, look across your mix and see where you can take a portion of budget and just say, it's in our interest as a business to find additional growth levers and growth channels for our business. And, you know, if you're spending a million bucks that month on meta, presumably you could take a very small portion of that and at least use that to get some insight into the channel and start understanding how well it performs so that you can continue to scale that up into Q1. The other thing is, most of these channels have diminishing returns as you continue to scale. Right? So, okay, my, you know, my blended Meta roas is at a, uh, two and a half. But the bigger question is, what was that last incremental dollars performance? Because if, you know, if you're, again, if you're spending a million bucks a month on meta, maybe, you know, the first 500,000 was getting, uh, a 3x roas, and the next 200,000 was getting a 2x roas. But those last marginal or incremental dollars that you've been deploying, you might have expanded that audience or saturated that audience so much that those incremental dollars are actually not profitable for you anymore. So it's important to understand that as well and be diverting those into new channels that can drive not just additional incremental revenue and growth, but also work to diversify your mix and find new channels that you can actually start to, to get additional scale from.

Speaker A: You know, I was just a K boss in Boston. Klaviyo's conference, talking with a bunch of agency owners. Now, these are mostly email and meta agencies that deal with a lot of big brands. And they said they're talking to their clients about devoting 10% of their ad spend to direct mail. And I would say that's, you know, the bigger brands will do that, but start at 1%. You know, start at 1% of revenue, like as a good rule of thumb, and get comfortable with the channel, start believing in it, start realizing that it's driving incremental revenue, and then add on from there. Got, um, Michael's asking another question. How do you validate incrementality in the post pilot dashboard?

Speaker B: Yeah, we've got in app holdout functionality, you are dividing your audience into treatment and holdout groups. A randomized holdout, meaning some portion of that audience is gets cards. The other portion of that audience is exactly the same in every single way. They see the same emails, they see the same meta ads, they have the same transactional history. The only difference is that group didn't get a card. And we show you again in a live dashboard the lift of, uh, those people that got a card versus those people that did not get a card. And show you essentially the gold standard of attribution, which is incrementality using randomized holdouts. Drew referenced a podcast, the marketing operators podcast, that I think we just went live a couple weeks ago and talked a lot about this because those guys are super dialed when it comes to attribution and specifically incremental measurement. Talking about the gold standard of how to measure incrementality, that is it. There is no better way to do that.

Speaker A: And then you can audit the results yourself. I mean, we've had brands do that. Go line by line and look at recipients and confirm, okay, was this person in this audience? Was this person in that audience? Did he or she order through Shopify or not and confirm it? But yeah, it's all aggregated in the dashboard. Friend of Postpilot, Rick Binger. Rick, if you want to do a catalog and are looking for catalog design, you know, Rick Binger runs an agency called Binger this halo work only with

Speaker B: Shopify, not necessarily in that we can still see if you, if you have a list of recipients and you we send out to that list. Even if that list did not originate from Shopify, we can still give you the attribution data of how much revenue from that list was generated on Amazon. What you won't see then is how much of that revenue occurred on your e commerce website. We would have to do sort of a manual match back if you're not on Shopify to see how many of those orders occurred on Shopify. But if you're only looking to understand what portion of a particular campaign saw orders occurring on Amazon, that would be possible. Possible. Alina asked double checking can we target with direct mail all Amazon fulfilled by merchant customers? That is something that you need to have an understanding of the Amazon terms of service. I don't want to explicitly direct you to say you can market specifically to Amazon customers who came to you by fulfilled by merchant because Amazon does have restrictions on you directly targeting Amazon customers with marketing campaigns across every channel, not just direct mail. It doesn't mean that some brands don't do it, but you should understand the Amazon terms of service when it comes to sending any marketing campaigns for any channel to Amazon customers with Amazon customer data. Luis asked, one of the brands we work with collects emails from Amazon customers via QR code on the packages. Emails are performing great but we could use direct mail to re engage. Yes, we can do email append with our mail match tech. We can match those email addresses to a postal address and retarget them with direct mail. And if you are acquiring those email addresses through a legitimate means like a product registration or other method that's compliant with Amazon policies, then absolutely we can target those email subscribers with a direct mail offer. And it's actually a great example because historically we would have only seen if those customers come back and buy through Shopify. But knowing that those customers originally purchased on Amazon, they're probably significantly more likely to go back to Amazon to make that follow up purchase and previously and anywhere else you'd have no visibility into. If that is happening now, we can give you that level of insight to say okay, these customers that like to buy on Amazon are still buying on Amazon as a result of our marketing campaigns. Again I asterisk that by saying make sure that anything that you are doing is compliant with Amazon terms of service. But if you are acquiring those email addresses through a compliant means again product registration warranty, whatever it might be, then

Speaker A: it's game on my emails. Drew@postpilot.com Mike says Michael uh, postpilot.com we're going to send out the recording afterwards. I want to leave you with this, which, if you're watching, uh, is a photo of Michael Epstein riding a horse on his iPhone. And I remember this vacation, while you were going on vacation and everybody was encouraging you to unplug Mike and you didn't, you continued processing direct mail campaigns from horseback. And I just want to applaud that and just say, good job. You know, it's like not only get post pilot when you sign up, you get Michael Epstein, who will work on your account from horseback from the remote regions of I don't know where this was. Chile, Something like that. Hey, check out our gfo. We'd love to work with you this holiday. I think it'd be great for your business. Check out post pilot, check out the gfo, and try our new Halo offering to see how you impact Amazon. All right, thanks, everybody. Thanks for listening to nerd Marketing. Don't forget to to check out all of the other great episodes, some of which include interviews with e commerce marketing masters working with Mr. Beast and Joe Rogan, plus Drew and Michael's experiences in private equity, advice from VC firms on what they look for in investments, and so much more. Like share, subscribe and tune in every week for a new episode.