PostPilot Fall Editions 2025

Welcome to Nerd Marketing, an original podcast for e-commerce operators and marketers looking to level up. 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, Drew Sinaki here from the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Today we're doing a special edition Nerd Marketing Podcast.

We are doing Postpilot's fall editions. It's all the cool stuff we launched in fall 2025, bundled into one, announced into one. This is going to include AI-driven benchmarks. You can be able to plug into the app.

We're going to tell you what's going to work and how well it's going to work. We are going to talk about Postpilot Halo, which is how we measure attribution, not just within the direct mail channel, but spillover attribution on Shopify and on Amazon. And we're going to talk about Acquisition AI, which is our fully automated acquisition tool. Plug it in and start driving new customers to your brand today.

So all that and more today, Mike and I are going to cover it on Fall Editions. Hey, Mike, how you doing? I'm excited, Drew, that we're like a month out from Black Friday, and we've just been cranking on getting a whole bunch of new capabilities out, especially over the last couple of months in anticipation of the huge Q4 for all of our thousands of brands. Yeah, I'm excited.

I just feel the energy. Maybe it is Black Friday. It's the fall. Leaves are changing even here in La Jolla, California.

There's the one tree with leaves is changing. But I love this time of year. It's such an exciting time in retail. You and I've been in retail for like 25 years each.

I don't think I had a Black Friday off in 25 years. Yeah, same. Which my family is always so, they hate it, but it's all they've known is that dad works on Black Friday. So, yeah, but at PostPod, it's really exciting.

We're doing something new where we're launching a lot of our features in sort of, I think we're following Shopify a bit here and what they've done and launching seasonal additions. And so what we want to talk about today is this bundle of new features that is launching in Q4. Really excited about the momentum. I'm really proud of our product and engineering and data teams.

that have done such hard work getting this stuff launched and out the door, all driven by customer needs. And we're really excited to talk about some of this stuff. Yeah, we've just been really cranking and accelerating a lot of the releases that both that customers do see and a lot that they don't even see that's going on behind the scenes as well. And I think it's good to wrap up a handful of the big ones that we want to make sure everybody's aware of since we're moving quickly on stuff.

Yeah, awesome. Let's start on some of the big ones first, Drew. I think The biggest ones start with our AI benchmark recommendations. And this is essentially our data science team, which is one of our biggest teams these days, which is awesome because we have so much data and we do so much with it to power your campaigns.

We've aggregated data across thousands of brands, tens of thousands of campaigns, hundreds of millions of cards. And we have grouped that all together and understand how different categories perform, how peer groups perform, people that look like your brand. And that can help show you that in our benchmarking capability A bunch of different core KPIs that you should be benchmarking your campaigns against understanding where there opportunity for improvement understand where you should be scaling more.

And this is the data that also powers a lot of the dynamic optimizations we're doing for your campaigns on a regular basis, which means you are getting the best possible performance out of the channel because we have the best and the most data. So that's number one. It's such a great use of AI. Forget about self-driving cars.

and robots and stuff. Knowing where the opportunities are as a marketer, especially in direct mail, because we've got so much data and AI, it's a no brainer to sort of layer machine learning and AI on top of all that data and say, okay, what are the trends? Where are the opportunities? Where can I expand my spend?

What are my competitors doing? Or what else is working in this category that I'm not doing? It's a great use of AI. And I think the team has done a really good job and pulling it together in a nice UI for our brands.

Yeah. And it's only the beginning. And it is again, exclusive to us in the sense that it only works when you have the most data possible for this channel. And we do because we work with thousands and thousands of brands.

And that just doesn't even come close to what all these sort of legacy direct mail providers do. So that's number one. Number two, post pilot Halo. Probably my favorite new feature.

And this is our ability to measure direct mail's impact on other channels, starting with Amazon. Yeah, this is another game changer that's an exclusive with Postpilot. We know, obviously, who of your recipients converts on Shopify, and you see that in your dashboard. Now, we can also show you how much revenue and conversions are being generated on Amazon from those same recipients.

And we add that to your dashboard so you can see the more complete picture of how much your campaigns are generating for you in terms of revenue and ROI. And we know that so much e-commerce volume naturally occurs on Amazon. So again, having that insight into how these campaigns are truly performing for you gives you much more confidence in how you can scale up a lot of these campaigns and how they're actually performing. Yeah, there's such a halo effect in all marketing, right?

And I wish every other platform did this, but they don't, you know, and it's sort of one of those things, you drop a catalog, you drop a postcard, some portion of the recipients are going to go order your product on Amazon or elsewhere, and you're not going to see it in Shopify. It doesn't mean the campaign didn't work. I'm really excited about it. Amazon is a great place to start.

What a win that we could build that integration. Again, as you mentioned, really the only MarTech platform I know of where you can measure Amazon attribution right in app. Let's go for number three, the third big launch in Q4, automated acquisition AI. So what's that?

So we've talked a lot about being meta for mail and how we've built this proprietary lookalike audience modeling. Again, leveraging that data that we have thousands of attributes on hundreds of millions of US consumers. And we do that to power your prospecting campaigns. Now we're further evolving that prospecting capability to be even more like Meta for Mail with automated acquisition campaigns.

Meaning you can set a daily budget just like you would with your Meta campaigns. And just like Meta campaigns, we are finding the best possible prospects for your brand as of that particular moment in time using all these real signals that we have as well as all the other attributes and data that we have on these US consumers and deciding who should get a card as of that moment in time and dripping it out just like you would with your meta budget. Yeah, this is like the holy grail for any growth marketers out there, any new customer acquisition people.

It's like meta for mail. It gets you closer to that ultimate goal of like set my ROI, set my budget and just let this thing rip. As long as you're hitting your goal, you're happy with it. You know, it's set it and forget it.

So that's acquisition AI. I think this is a game changer for next year. Get acquisition AI started. You're going to love the product.

And I think for any CMO, it's going to help you build a much more resilient business as you diversify your acquisition off of meta. Yeah. And just like meta, it's learning in real time too. So it's using all the signals and the feedback loop that it's getting from interactions and versions and feeding that right back into the model to continuously optimize it on an ongoing basis.

Again, just like Meta does. Well, those are the big three launches as part of fall additions, AI benchmarking recommendations, post-pilot halo, and automated acquisition AI for acquisition. But the fun doesn't stop there, Mike. We've got a bunch of smaller, more incremental changes and improvements that we're going to announce in fall additions.

The first one there is custom fields. Why would a brand want to use custom fields? This is one of our more highly requested features. We already allow you to customize fields like your name, include single use coupon codes and other custom info.

But we're adding the capability to take more custom fields from other third party apps. A great use case here would be a loyalty app where someone has a certain number of points waiting for them in their account or they've accumulated a certain amount of credit. We can then dynamically print that on the card and say, hey, Drew, you've got $7.37 just waiting for you over here at store XYZ.

Come and spend it. Things like that will be able to pipe in and create even more personalized, creative and more personalized cards for recipients. All right, Mike, the second improvement we want to announce, the graph and segmentation updates. What is the graph and what is our segmentation update?

Yeah, so we have this proprietary identity graph. Again, it has the most data that's ever been assembled for direct mail in particular, thousands of attributes, again, from hundreds of millions of consumers. And we're constantly connecting those dots together to create a richer profile of your customers. And that allows you to not only get better performance because we know more things about all those different recipients that we can use for targeting, but it allows you to do some other cool segmentation that you haven't been able to do before.

So for example, you could not only send a reactivation campaign to people who haven't bought in the last six months, but you could say, I only want to send this creative to females that haven't bought in the last six months and put different creative on that than the ones that go to males. You could do it based on all these other types of attributes that we have and things that we know about those individuals, not just their transactional history. So some really cool additional ways to drive personalization there as well.

That's awesome. I mean, just out of the box and most email service providers, you get RFM data on all your customers. This is also layering on top more of the traditional direct mail attributes demographic data purchase data and it really just ups the level of segmentation and targeting you can do Yeah More accurate targeting So less wasted spend where two people are actually the same person. You just don't know that.

Our graph does that. And again, this is something that just has not been done effectively before to be able to ensure that your spend is being optimized by not sending duplicative cards to the same household, things like that. Third minor update, API triggers in flow. So that's a feature that's really significant because you can essentially trigger direct mail campaigns and postcards and things like that off of an API now using just an email address.

Yes. So we've had an API. Historically, it's required you to be able to pass the full customer information, including their mailing address. But using our mail match technology, we know somebody's postal address by just their email address already.

And this update allows us to target prospects in many cases with just an email address through essentially any third-party app, which most third-party apps are capturing somebody's email address and using that to trigger events in their app, but they're not typically capturing their postal address, especially if they're not an actual customer yet. Now, any of these third-party apps that can send events to Postpilot and can say, this email address, this thing just happened. We want to send them a card.

Now we can take that, match it to a postal address and trigger it based on a lot of interesting events and new use cases. I can think of so many use cases, as long as you have an email address that you'd want to trigger a postcard for. I mean, thank you notes come to mind, but there's a zillion things you could do with this API. Really excited to announce the new launch of that.

Yeah, those are the three minor updates, custom fields, improvements to our household graph and segmentation engine, and then API in flows. And I would just add, again, there's a lot more stuff that we've rolled out over the last couple months that some of it, again, is behind the scenes, making sure that those suppressions are working really well. We've done a ton of UI and UX updates to make it even easier to understand and interpret the data that you're seeing. We've done some really cool things with respect to data maturity and understanding where in the lifespan of a postcard these campaigns are sitting at.

But we have to cut it off somewhere. These are sort of the top ones that we wanted to make sure people are aware of, but we're always releasing new stuff. Again, that's driving better performance and a better user experience for you and new use cases. Right.

So this is our fall Editions. We're really excited about these launches. Our goal at Postpilot is to make direct mail a viable channel that really works and helps grow our customers, our brands. I think Fall Editions is just a great example of how we're making this channel more modern, more responsive to customer needs and perform better overall.

Really excited about Fall Editions. Check it out at postpilot.com and reach out and we can give you a demo and show you all about how these things work. Thanks for listening to Nerd Marketing.

Don't forget 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.