To Reverse Declines, Direct Mail Updates Old Methods With Digital Touches

Direct mail might seem like the marketing equivalent of the Stone Age, but after taking a hit during the pandemic, practitioners are infusing modern touches into the channel. Marketers don’t have a choice. The U.S. Postal Service reported “steep declines” in mail volume during the pandemic, and without last year’s election, marketing mail volume would have decreased for the nine months ended June 30, 2021. That’s because Covid-19 accelerated many businesses’ plans to move to digital and mobile marketing. But for the companies that grew during the past 18 months—retailers that sell loungewear and home decor, for example—Facebook and Google may have helped them acquire customers, but they’re now turning to direct mail as a way to retain and grow relationships with the most valuable ones. There are roadblocks, however. The nearly 8% increase in postal costs and severe supply chain issues that created shortages of paper, ink and resin for printers is forcing marketers to get creative with the channel. Mobile Ad Dollars Will Top Direct Mail Spending in Local Media for the First Time The brands actively using direct mail Marketers at Lunya and Lahgo, women’s and men’s luxury lounge and sleepwear brands, have found a way to deal with that challenge. Demand has been high throughout the pandemic, as people working from home tend to wear comfortable attire. The brand ramped up direct mail offerings this year. But rather than simply tweaking its delivery strategy, it completely revamped its approach by tying mailings to ROI models. In particular, Lunya and Lago used direct mail to drill down on personalization to engender more loyalty from existing customers. The brand sends small batches to the printer as customers trigger an action on their websites. One example: When a customer shares their email or home address, they are asked for their birthday. The customer then receives an offer postcard on their special day. “When you're paying 50 cents per message on mail, compared to 50 cents for 1,000 messages via digital, you have to make sure it's going to somebody that wants to receive it,” Liz Dolinski, Lunya and Lago’s chief growth officer, told Adweek. It’s another reason digital and direct marketing go hand-in-hand. Together, they enable marketers to be more selective in targeting who they send mail to. Direct mail reaches households, compared to an Instagram ad or email that only reaches individuals.Rose Crosby, director of retention marketing, Thinx “That's very different from what people were doing 20 years ago, blasting mail,” Dolinksi said. “Using first party data means you're putting a relevant message in front of a relevant person.” Splitting jobs up At Postie, a mostly self-service platform that guides clients through the entire direct mail process and uses digitization to modernize the channel, the pandemic essentially shuttered business March through May of 2020. Business returned in June, and its CEO and co-founder, Dave Fink, attributes Postie's ability to weather the downturn in part to its business model: Jobs are broken into smaller batches and sent digitally to its network of printers throughout the country. For a several million-batch job, they might use up to 15 printing facilities to do a million to a few million pieces of mail. Personalizing the mail For those that can get printer time, digitization increases the ability to personalize the channel, maximizing efficiency. By leveraging that first party data and combining machine learning with data science, audiences can be segmented into micro buckets and targeted based on certain qualifiers. Thinx Imagines a World Where Men Get Periods and How It Would Change Our Culture “A simple campaign in the past might have had two or three different creatives that now might have 50 different creatives that they're designing for the same campaign,” Fink said. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Thinx, a brand that makes products for menstruators and the incontinent, which accelerated its direct mail campaigns because marketers noticed that the pandemic increased multi-generational living. “Direct mail reaches households, compared to an Instagram ad or email that only reaches individuals,” Rose Crosby, Thinx director of retention marketing, told Adweek. “We have the opportunity to think about how to market our products to an entire household from first periods through menopause, all in one piece of collateral.” The ‘red-headed stepchild’ grows up And while digital marketing has been long dominant over legacy communications methods, Fink knows it’s a very different type of customer that’s acquired through direct mail. “Since digital came about, direct mail has been the red-headed stepchild sitting in the corner,” Fink said. “But think about how breezy the experience is of someone scrolling through their Instagram feed, clicking on a product and buying it. Compare that to someone who's gone to their mailbox, sifted through a couple bills, saw something that caught their attention, and then goes to their device to end up on that same product page. The engagement level is very different from the Instagram ad.” Added to that experience is the significantly higher printing quality today versus 20 years ago when, as Fink said, direct mail tended to look “cheap and junky.” In fact, flipping through a catalogue has practically become a hallmark pandemic activity. “In the period of lockdowns, the catalog is retail therapy that we can't get anywhere else,” Hamilton Davison, president and executive director of the American Catalog Mailers Association, told Adweek. “It's become a recreational shopping experience. “The internet is great if you know what you're looking for, but it's lousy for browsing.” Away’s New Catalog Shows a Bunch of Very Relatable Would-Be Vacationers—All Stuck at Home