427: This Old School Marketing Tactic Converts Like Crazy With Mike Epstein

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. And today I my friend Mike Epstein on the show and we’re going to talk about an old school way of marketing that’s making a huge comeback and converting like crazy for e-commerce stores. But before we begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I use for my e-commerce store and it depend on them for over 30 % of my revenue.

00:27
Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for ecommerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who’s shopping in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers to pay on what they bought piece of cake and there’s full revenue tracking on every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used.

00:54
and can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. If you’re in the e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I focus a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS, or text message marketing, is already a top five revenue source in my e-commerce store, and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider.

01:23
Now why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce and that’s their only focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows and abandon cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. And finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner Tony.

01:53
And unlike this one where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now on to the show.

02:17
Welcome to the My Wife, Quarter Job podcast. Today, I’m thrilled to have Michael Epstein on the show. Mike is actually someone I’ve known for years when he was introduced to me by Drew Sinaki. And what’s funny is that I always thought that Mike was Drew’s employee. And little did I know that the two have been partners in a variety of businesses, including Auto Anything, which was a nine figure business, and now Postpilot, which is a postcard marketing business. And in fact, Drew openly admitted

02:45
that Mike was the brains of the entire operation while he served as the face. So Mike, it is finally great to have the brains and the one who does all the work behind the scenes on the show. And today we’re gonna talk about an old school form of marketing that’s making a comeback and converting like crazy. What up, Mike? Hey Steve, finally I get to step out of the shadows and finally that freeloader Drew doesn’t get to take credit for everything.

03:12
I’m telling you, man, like, I know you’re doing all the work behind the scenes. So like, why should I invite Drew back on the pod when I can have like the person who does all the work? You know, it’s a great question. I asked myself that daily. I’m totally kidding. Drew is my my business partner and friend of 10 years and one of the the smartest, most talented guys that I’ve ever met in my life and fortunate to be working with them and just having a lot of fun along the way. Give them a ton of

03:41
ton of credit. So how did you get into e commerce? And actually, how did you guys meet and hook up? Yeah, so I’ve been in e commerce for over 20 years started a company retailer of of gaming like computer gaming and video gaming accessories back in 2000. sold that in 2013 to like a small private equity shop.

04:06
And Drew and I had kind of a similar trajectory. He started a company, furniture, online furniture retailer around that time, sold it around that time. And we connected online and started working on some projects together for typically for private equity funds. So we both kind of came from that world and had experience with that. And so started just collaborating together on projects like.

04:33
diligence projects or operational advisory work or even hands-on work for private equity portfolio companies. So private equity fund acquires online retailer. They’re looking to bring in some outside resources to kind of add, provide some added perspective, look at some deals for them, provide some ideas, opportunities for upside. Started collaborating on that together and ultimately started.

04:59
building an agency together to do that type of operating work. Oh, okay. So you’re not actually a part of the fund. You’re like a hired gun for funds. Yeah, typically. We’ll come in on the deal in some cases. In other cases, we’re kind of like their operating bench. They’ll call us in when they have, again, like a deal that they want us to look at or actually go hands on. In the case of Auto Anything, they actually needed to change out the leadership team and brought us in to run the company.

05:28
as CEO and CMO. You know, this whole time that I’ve known Drew, I didn’t know that he had an agency with you. What’s the agency called? Yeah, it’s Growth Engines. started it. Yeah, I think it was started in 2013. And yeah, we were we were working with a bunch of different private equity funds doing dozens of, you know, working on dozens of different portfolio companies, typically eight and nine figure retailers.

05:54
Typically ones that needed work and were in more of turnaround. Otherwise, I guess if everything was working fantastically, they wouldn’t have called us. But typically ones that didn’t have kind of direct to consumer DNA and needed, they wanted to bring in some folks that could help bring that sort of execution and expertise to those businesses. Yeah. And you guys have had tremendous success over the years. Why did you guys decide to acquire a postcard marketing or direct mail company out of all things?

06:24
Yeah, great question. So we had always had success with direct mail and in the past, either independently or when we started working on some of these portfolio companies, direct mail was just this untapped channel that we took advantage of and always kind of worked, but it was always difficult. It was just clunky. was

06:46
exporting a bunch of spreadsheets and finding a print house and then batch and blasting a bunch of cards to people and then doing a bunch of other matchback work using more spreadsheets to try and figure out what the performance was. So we kind of asked ourselves, why isn’t someone building Klaviyo for postcards essentially? And so we actually actively set out to acquire a company that was in that space and found one.

07:14
that was kind of still in its infancy, but the foundation was there, the vision kind of was there, they were building it in the way that we were aligned with. And so it was a founder led company, we acquired that company, kept the founder on as CTO, he’s still CTO today. And that was about four years ago, and it just continued to grow that business as an alternative to kind of traditional digital channels.

07:43
I mean, I’ll admit when Drew first pinged me about postcard marketing, I was pretty skeptical because back in the day and I don’t know if they’re still around actually, I used to get these Valpak coupons, you know what I’m talking about? Totally. In the mail and I would just throw them straight in the trash and so did my parents. So talk me through this. Do you have any stats on just direct mail marketing today? Yeah, so it is interesting because we would get

08:10
kind of quizzical look sometimes when we were saying direct mail and kind of a few years ago when we were first starting it, you got a little more of that. They’re kind of like, you guys know that there’s like Facebook, right? And we were still kind of, we still had kind of confidence and conviction in the thesis that we had, but I think over the last probably 12 to 18 months, there’s just been.

08:36
this real kind of tidal wave shift in mentality, particularly around Facebook and digital advertising. I think the iOS update triggered a lot of that where all of a sudden people’s ROAS was tanking. They were losing their ability to track and target their customers. And they started realizing that they were reliant upon, you know, these third parties like Facebook for all of their acquisition and retention and targeting. Meanwhile, email,

09:06
open rates and engagement continue to decline as just people get inundated with those messages and start ignoring or deleting them. And so now it’s actually kind of interesting because almost every conversation that I’m in, people are like, I am, I think it’s the greatest idea. I’ve been wanting to do something like this. I’m so sold on this channel as an alternative. We’re dying to get off.

09:35
our dependency on Facebook. We don’t want to interrupt people constantly with SMS. We know email is only reaching a fraction of our customers. So it’s been refreshing and fun to hear kind of that shift in mentality, particularly over the last year or so. So as someone who probably has not done direct mail marketing before, I think their first impression, maybe I’m just speaking for the audience here. So if anyone out there,

10:03
is listening to this and has additional questions, I’m happy to pass them along, but it sounds expensive and it sounds like it’s hard to track. So how do you address those issues? And how much does it cost? So real simple, it’s 49 cents a card. So essentially, and that’s all in including postage and everything. So again, today that’s like less than the cost of a click. So two years ago,

10:32
When you were still getting, there was this Facebook arbitrage play, you were still getting clicks really cheap. You knew you could get a high ROAS. There wasn’t a ton of competition. Yeah. I mean, that, made a ton of sense. Now 49 cents, you know, you’re, probably paying more than that per click anyway. So it’s become a lot more cost-effective, particularly on a relative basis to some other channels. And, know, you asked earlier about, you know, overall kind of, uh, direct mail metrics and,

11:01
Over 90 % of people at least skim direct mail. I think you talked about the Val pack where everything’s in an envelope. You have to choose to open the envelopes, flip through everything and then decide what to do with it. With a postcard, for example, most people don’t take their mail out of their mailbox blindly and throw it in the trash without even skimming through it, right? So at a minimum.

11:23
You’re flipping through it. You’re looking for things that are relevant. You see a card from a brand that you recognize that you’ve done business with or that’s relevant to you. You at least stop and look at it, which is more than you can say for a lot of email campaigns today where you’re just hitting delete or it’s going to your spam folder or promotions tab. You’re not even paying attention to it at all. a minimum, people are looking at it. They’re processing it and it has a longer lifespan than email. In a lot of cases.

11:49
like your Bed Bath & Beyond coupons or other catalogs or things you get from brands that you know, they’re sitting on your kitchen table, they’re sitting on your desk for days, they’re kind of staring you in the face, they’re reminding you every time you kind of walk by. So they have this longer lifespan. So it is effective. And then you asked about tracking. So because we’re natively integrated with Shopify, we know when that customer received the card,

12:15
We know if they go on to make a subsequent purchase and we can attribute that back to the card that they received. And we know if they use a coupon code that’s on the card, whether it’s a static code that was unique for that campaign or actual single use codes like individual different code per recipient, we can do that too. And we can attribute that right back to the card too. So it really is pretty clean attribution. And we do it in real time. Again, since we’re integrated with Shopify, you see it right on a dashboard in real time.

12:44
What’s funny is when I give out coupons, I know they got the coupon, they clicked on the email, but they don’t use the coupon. So can you just walk me through the attribution then? if someone, if Shopify knows that a postcard was sent out and they make a purchase, is that attributed to the postcard then? So we’ll show you. Yeah, it’s a, it’s a great point. Cause we’ll show you both options. We show you one, just we know that that customer received a card and went on to make a purchase. And then we’ll show you if they used a coupon code that was on the card.

13:13
And so that we think of those as kind of like bookends, like the more aggressive look is everyone, anyone that received the card that went on to make a purchase, will show you what that revenue looks like. And then we’ll also show you on the very conservative side, the folks that use the coupon code. And as you said, a lot of people either forget or they find a different code online and use that instead, or they pass it along or something like that. So that’s the most conservative look. And so for most of our customers, they’re thinking,

13:42
Well, if the coupon ROI looks strong, I know we’re getting actually better than that in reality. It’s somewhere in between kind of the total recipient ROI and the coupon ROI. So as long as that number looks good, I’m going to be really happy with my results. And you mentioned 49 cents. It’s actually gone down since the last time I checked by a lot, like 30 % cheaper. that has

14:07
Has it just gone down? I don’t even know what the economics is sending out of postcards. Yeah, no, that was just that was special pricing just for you, Steve. We jacked up the price. No, it’s yeah. So we’ve we’ve kind of refined the model a little bit so that you can pay a lot less per card. You can pay a small monthly subscription cost and that gets you one lowest lower pricing per card and also gets you our full service. So we actually have account strategists.

14:37
and complete in-house creative department on staff. And I think when you tried us out, we hadn’t rolled that out yet. That was probably one of the most pivotal kind of moments or changes in the company was when we realized that this is a new channel that people don’t have lot of experience with. They don’t know what the best practices are. They don’t have a ton of time to do it. They just know that they want to try it, but they know that they don’t want to fail either.

15:05
How do we take our expertise and direct to consumer marketing and in postcard marketing and set them up for success? Well, we provide now free, like complimentary fully managed service to where we will literally do the whole thing for you from setup, strategy, segmentation, full design using our professional designers and basically take it off your plate to the extent you want and you pay the lower price per card.

15:31
Can you give me an idea of some of your customers and their ROI, like kind of across the board on average? Yeah, I think our internal goal is typically to get a six to 10 X ROI on a campaign that we send out. Like when we go in and propose segments and propose campaign strategy, in the back of our mind, we’re thinking like, let’s set this up. We want to feel confident that we can get a six to 10 X ROI on this campaign. And that’s going to make

16:01
pretty much any brand really happy. We often see a lot more in some cases, what we start at that six to 10X and then they say, that’s great. We’ve demonstrated that we can hit that. Now let’s go more aggressive because we’re totally willing to accept the lower ROI if we can expand the total audience size and drive more revenue that way. But we’ve got like Ezra’s brand, boom, Ezra Firestone.

16:26
He got a 26 X ROI on his win back campaign and Eric Banholds from Beardbrand. He did an interesting campaign where he targeted folks that had purchased more than once, but not purchased in at least six months. So these are people that are pretty defective at that point and they are unsubscribed to Klaviyo and we can layer that in as well.

16:51
And got a 10X ROAS on that campaign targeting people that hadn’t bought in six months and were unsubscribed to Klaviyo. So basically unreachable using his regular digital channels and got a 10X. There was like Obvi, that big supplements brand. They were getting 24X on one of their win back campaigns, the 90 day plus win back on a 90 day plus win back. We just did a

17:20
a case study with Orbit Baby, a stroller company who’s using our Orbit Baby is my good friend. Are they still they sold and I thought the company was dissolved actually. Orbit Baby is still around. That’s amazing. The The stroller man. Yeah, they’re one of my good friends from Stanford who start Mike over there who runs marketing. Probably not the same guy that you know, but yeah, I was just talking to him the other day. They just did a case. That’s awesome. Okay. Yeah.

17:45
Yeah, I thought I’d share too that I use the service and I think I got a 16 X ROI. So what I want to talk about actually is if anyone listening wants to try this, like what is the absolute safest campaign that you can run that’s practically guaranteed to work? Yeah, good question. So we would say start with a win back. So you can, you can break that up in a number of ways based on kind of recency and frequency. We think about

18:13
recency, frequency, monetary value, RFM a lot and how we build out segments and cohorts. And so you could target, if you know that you sell a 60 day supply of supplements and you would set a trigger that’s basically like at day 65 or day 70, we know if they have not come back and purchased, we’ve already been hitting them with our regular email kind of win backs or

18:42
refill reminders. They haven’t responded to those. Set a trigger and say day 65. It says, hey, Steve, it’s time for a refill. Here’s a 10 % coupon to come back or scan this QR code and instantly apply a 10 % code and put it in your cart. That is a really safe, like low-hanging fruit, easy win. You’re going to see really good ROI on it consistently. And it’s incremental because you’re hitting folks that have not

19:10
hold the trigger based on your email or digital ads. To that point, you could theoretically exclude them if you want through our segments, but either way, good email open rates for econ these days is like 20, 25%. And that’s the people that are still subscribed to your list. That’s 70, 80 plus percent of folks that aren’t engaging with your email. And that’s just leaving incremental dollars on the table. The longer you wait to try and get them back, the more likely they are to

19:39
permanently defect. So if you get to them quickly or on time with a channel that they’ll engage with, there’s a lot of incremental ROI that you can get from those customers.

19:52
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20:22
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20:50
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21:02
All right, so let me just repeat what you just said. So you take your list of people who have bought before but haven’t bought in a while and who haven’t opened an email in a while either. And then you send postcards to them. Can this process be completely automated like Klaviyo also? Yeah, exactly. So think of it just like Klaviyo for direct mail where you can send one off campaigns like you would a newsletter type email, a sale announcement, a new product launch, something like that.

21:30
but the real power is in the triggered automation. So you set up just like an email flow, you say customer buys product A, does not make a purchase for 65 days. On day 65 trigger a card that says, Steve, it’s time to come back. Here’s a discount code or customer buys product A. On day 30, if they haven’t bought product B, you trigger that card that says, hey Steve,

21:59
I hope you’re enjoying your jeans. Here’s an offer on a new t-shirt. You can do all those things just like you would with an email flow or an email, an automated email campaign. Walk me through the design of the card. Can I just use the same design for everything? You can. Okay. What works? What are some best practices? Yeah. So best practices are one, make it familiar looking, use your brand colors, make your logo prominent. So again, as you’re flipping through the…

22:27
Think of that person flipping through their mail. You want them to recognize the card right away and recognize it’s a brand that they’ve done business with. You want to have succinct message. Think of it like a digital ad that you’d create for Facebook. You’re not going to put, you’re not going to make it super busy. You’re not going to put a ton of copy on it. You want to make it succinct and concise so that it pops and ease and you can skim it and read it quickly. You want to have some sort of incentive. Kind of, we recommend just having some incentive that creates more urgency.

22:56
You can set an expiration date. We can set expiration dates dynamically, meaning you don’t have to constantly worry about updating that expiration of a coupon code. We can just print on the card, like set expiration for seven days after receipt of the card or set expiration for 30 days after receipt. Again, create that urgency. And now best practices also include that QR code. So COVID brought QR back from the dead and now that’s become best practice. And you can do some really neat things with it.

23:26
You could send someone directly back to their cart. You could apply a discount automatically by appending that URL with, you know, the discount code parameters in your Shopify store. So some really neat things you can do with QR codes though. I can’t even get a restaurant anymore without having to scan a QR code actually. They’re like, don’t even give you the menu. Like the menu never came back. It’s like just scan the table. So this is actually pretty compelling because 49 cents a card. I know I’m paying more than that for a click.

23:56
For Google for sure I’m paying more than that for a click What’s funny? I just have a quick story to tell for people listening like when I launched my first postcard marketing campaign and I was working with you and I didn’t even realize it was it was sent already and then all of sudden people were trying these coupons and I didn’t set up the coupon code yet and people were just calling and calling and calling and I was like, okay Wow, I guess the postcard went out already and it works people people look at it. Can you talk about

24:25
demographics, because my demographic for my customers are like over the age of 45 or 50. And they’re probably all over direct mail. Do you have some companies that where this works better than others in terms of their customers? Yeah, another great question. We get that a lot. And people have this perception of like, oh, I need to be targeting old people with direct mail. And, you know, I’m selling like the I fall in and I can’t get up things. So that’s my target audience. But

24:54
No, it’s actually, there’ve been a lot of studies done on this too, where young people, millennials, one, they’re not, they’re engaging even less with email. Like email is not their preferred kind of channel of communication. They’re more SMS, they’re on social and things like that. So they’re not, they’re not engaging with email the same way. And it’s also more unique and surprising. And I think that’s one of the most kind of interesting and important elements of direct mail today is like,

25:24
We live in this world of digital overload and people are becoming like numb and blind to all the digital noise that’s around them. But when you get a tangible piece of mail from a brand that you’ve done business with, the studies show it’s perceived more like a gift, not an interruption. It’s more memorable. It stands out and it’s unique. And that applies equally well and in some cases better to like the younger millennial and other younger generations because

25:54
Again, it’s just surprising to them. And surprising is like such an important way to stand out today. You have to surprise people because everything else has just been kind of beaten to death. It’s so funny because back in the day, like we used to get all this junk mail. And now actually, I was just looking at my mailbox when we got back from vacation the other day, there actually wasn’t that much stuff. So I think you’re right. I mean, you want to do what other people aren’t doing. And I think these millennials don’t even know what mail is, right?

26:23
Cause they get all their bills and everything digitally and to get like a physical piece of something, I can see them looking at it. Totally. So we talked about winbacks. Would you recommend doing this with like abandoned cart and that sort of thing too? Yeah, absolutely. Winbacks are just one type of campaign that you can run. You can do the second purchase campaigns. We know customer, we just got a new customer who bought product A, how do we get them into product B?

26:50
You can do VIP campaigns. Those are really popular. just showing appreciation. Those whales, those VIP customers that you have make up usually a disproportionate amount of your total revenue of your business. So taking care of them, acknowledging them, and keeping them loyal is worth a ton. So again, just trigger a card after someone’s fourth purchase or after someone makes a total of $500 in orders from your store.

27:18
with a thank you acknowledgement, maybe a loyalty discount as well, just to keep them buying from you. We also have handwritten cards now, which I don’t think we had when you ran your first campaign. Yeah, those are sweet. I heard you guys acquired a company that has machines, right? Yes, we acquired a machine that has like this robotic technology and writes with all the nuance of a human hand, all like the letter variation. It’s all, it’s not even, it’s not like perfect because that’s a telltale sign of it not, but it will write.

27:47
personalized handwritten cards in a handwritten envelope with a real postage stamp. And you talked about like, do millennials even, are they used to even getting mail? mean, imagine when they get a handwritten card in the mail and a handwritten envelope, like anybody opens that because it’s so uncommon today. So great touch point for that, those really high value customers. So that’s a really good one. And then we’re

28:11
moving into acquisition campaigns too, because that’s the big question. was going to ask you about that next, but let’s, want to finish with the retention stuff first, sir. Okay. Oh, by the way, I wanted to share with the audience that my top 10 % of customers actually generate almost 50 % of my revenue. So you’re absolutely right. You got to focus on the whales. Um, how would abandon cart work? if someone, would you do it as like the last step after like email has failed essentially? Okay. Yeah. So typically they,

28:40
you have your abandoned card sequence and that might go a few days and then just trigger a card where they haven’t responded to it and say your your banded card sequence ends after three days trigger a card on day three or day four with that incentive to go out because you know you haven’t reached them through email that you haven’t gotten them to take the action that you want so just tack it on at the end there. Okay and then in terms of ROI you said you give two numbers and then usually just

29:09
people pick something in between, right? It’s probably highly unlikely that someone makes a purchase if they haven’t been open to any emails and then they got a postcard and then they made a purchase, chances are it’s attributed to the postcard, right? Yeah, so especially when you’re talking about these long kind of long wind backs, people that are way defected, especially when people are layering in those segments that are like unsubscribed to email or unengaged with email is a big segment that will layer in sometimes too.

29:38
doesn’t have to be that they’ve gone a long time. It could just be that they’re a recent subscriber, but they’ve never opened an email in the last 30 days. Like that’s a great person to target with direct mail. So in those cases, again, even I would lean way more towards that bigger number because how else were they really hearing from you at that point? so again, coupon is really the most conservative way to look at it. But again, that number looks good, you know that you’re doing a lot better than that in reality.

30:08
Okay. So all that retention stuff is interesting. My biggest question to you is does this work top of funnel and walk me through how that would work? Yeah. So biggest question that we get and you, get the exclusive because literally tomorrow is when we are releasing this to the world. Uh, and that’s actually one of the campaigns that orbit baby ran with us as one of our beta partners in this. So we are, it’s called mail match.

30:36
And what this does is it takes your email subscribers, your email leads, your email prospects in Klaviyo or in other platforms. And we scrub that list against a data set of physical addresses. And we use our AI and our algorithm to like determine accuracy, likelihood of accuracy, because we don’t want just a match. want a match that we have confidence is actually accurate and current.

31:04
And so that’s kind of our secret sauce. And then we typically get around a 60 % rate on that. And then we can target those customers with a physical card. And the key thing there is that they’ve at least demonstrated a level of intent. A lot of people think of direct mail and traditional direct mail as like, again, batch and blast to a bunch of people in a zip code, or I just got a list of everybody that has this attribute, this household income or whatever. That is tough.

31:33
That is tough to make work, it’s expensive, it adds up quickly and the ROI, you have to have a lot of commitment to see that through to get that dialed in. We want to pick up on indicators that customers or prospects have demonstrated some intent and some engagement with your brand. Then you’re going to get much higher ROI while still getting new customer acquisition.

31:56
We want to help you acquire these new customers that you’ve already worked so hard or paid so much to get to your website to convert when they haven’t converted off your digital ads, retargeting or email. Is this your partnership with GetEmails? No. Oh, it’s a different one. This is actually all proprietary, but GetEmails is a company that we have a great relationship with and they’re doing interesting tech with.

32:25
anonymous identification and that is TBD. Okay, so walk me through this then. How is this product different? Sorry. So people are visiting your site and you’re getting their addresses. Can you just walk me through the distinction here? Yeah, so they’ve opted into your list. So they’ve given you their email, you have a lead magnet on your site or however you got their email into your Klaviyo list.

32:55
we will sync that list with post-pilot and create a segment off that list. So you could say, yeah, I want every email subscriber that signed up in the last 30 days has not purchased anything. So we don’t have their physical address and I want to target them with an offer for a sale that we’re running or I want to target that. If they have opted in, gone through our welcome sequence and not purchased within 14 days, I want to hit

33:24
I want to trigger a card on day 14 that says, like, here’s an offer to come and buy from us. We can do that automatically and find that physical address and target them with the postcard. Nice. Okay. So technically this isn’t top of funnel, right? This is like middle, I guess. It’s not cold. It’s not cold. Right. So the conversion probably works pretty well. Incidentally, the guys from GetEmail’s, maybe I’ll make sure I publish this episode before this one, because it’s very interesting.

33:54
because I’ve been just kind of testing it also and it’s, the ROI is pretty good. So I would imagine when you guys partner with them, it’ll work just as well, if not better. Yeah. So that’s on like anonymous visitor retargeting. Absolutely. have great technology for that. And we’re working on some things together on that. I think the way we think about it is start lower in the funnel and work your way up.

34:22
Yeah, again, because it is a channel that obviously has a cost associated with with every card that you send. So we don’t want if you start very top of funnel, start really cold again. It’s really tough to make work and then you’re going to kind of get discouraged. Yeah. And so we really advocate for starting lower in the funnel and then working your way up, expanding, going higher and higher up in the funnel as you demonstrate that your customers are responding and that your ROI is there. Yeah. I mean, what you guys

34:51
just described was, I mean, that, yeah, that’s pretty, I bet the conversion rates on that will be pretty good. Do you have any customers? I’m anxious to try that too, actually. Yeah, so Orbit, I can share their example because we just did a case study on them. they did, they used our mail match tack. They sent a card to folks that had not had opted in, had not purchased, I think in 30 to.

35:18
started in 30 days and went to 60 or 90 days and they got a 16 X ROI on campaign and a really, and that was on the recipients. And then on the coupons, they also got a really strong campaign and they’re, they’re thrilled with it. So they just want same sort of thing. They want to keep expanding, keep expanding the different audiences that they can target with this.

35:45
I’m looking forward to your get emails integration too, because a lot of times people will abandon their carts without any email or anything. And then you can send postcards to those people and that’s probably a really high ROI also. Yep, exactly. that’s like the next, we talk about moving up the funnel, like that’s the next level up from email. That’s like giving you their email has a, demonstrates a certain level of intent, browsing your site, not giving your email is kind of the next level up before you go totally,

36:15
cold or which we’re still working on some stuff there too. But again, we like to demonstrate a good ROI on any campaign that we send. Yeah, I love it. I love it. Okay, so anyone listening out there who wants to try this, can we just go over some best practices? Because it still sounds probably intimidating. Yeah. So walk me through like, do I need to know how to design stuff? Like do I need to have a graphic designer design the postcard? Or do you have like templates I can just pop in my colors and logo? So we do have templates, but the easiest thing to do

36:45
Like the, the, the shortcut to all of this is let us do it all for you. So how much does that cost? Nothing. Nothing. Yeah. It’s all part of your, it’s all part of the plan. So you can, we will literally set the entire thing up for you. We’ll help get the segments built. We will design the campaign using our team of professional designers who are literally awesome. Like this isn’t like outsourced design stuff that you get back and it looks like garbage. This is like legit good stuff.

37:15
And we will even send your first campaign on our dime because we will prove to you that it works. So there’s literally no risk. We will do it for you. We will send it on our dime. You can get a free campaign. We’ll see the ROI. You’ll come back to us and say, let’s go. I want to do more. And we’re off to the races.

37:40
I just want to let you know that tickets for the 2023 Seller Summit are now on sale over at Sellersummit.com. Now, what is the Seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every single year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business

38:09
entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the seller summit will be small and intimate. Every year, we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets always sell out fast, and in fact, we sell out every single year many months in advance. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over $250,000 or $1 million per year, we are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers.

38:37
Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 23rd to May 25th. For more information, go to sellersummit.com. Once again, that’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T.com, or just Google it. Now back to the show.

38:54
Okay, that’s too good to be true almost. We call it the Godfather offer. Yeah. Because it’s an offer you can’t refuse. We’ve just done this enough time. We’ve seen thousands of campaigns. We know what works. We know we can demonstrate good ROI in this channel for you. We know that it’s kind of a new and can be intimidating because you haven’t done it before. That’s really where this came from.

39:22
You had the same kind of questions as so many of our customers. so that’s where this came from. you comment, since we’re talking about direct mail, can you comment on this versus catalogs or pamphlets? Yeah. So we don’t send catalogs today. It’s something that we’re looking into. But what we do have is something called cartologs, where

39:49
You can use one of our larger formats, like a six by nine, which is double the space of a four by six. And that gives you enough real estate to do a nice product grid if you have a larger assortment. It’s an easy format to get started with. It allows you to just to show and display a decent size assortment. And it’s inexpensive. So that’s 59 cents as opposed to 49 cents first.

40:16
to get the six by nine. That’s like Bed Bath and Beyond size, right? Yeah, exactly. Yep. Can you comment on the conversion difference between all these? Yeah. So it’s a great question to get one common question. don’t, we don’t typically see a big conversion. If you were going to send the same offer in a four by six and a six by nine, we recommend just going with the four by six. It’s going to be cheaper where we think because the conversion rate doesn’t change a whole lot where we see

40:45
the value in the six by nine is brands that just have a bigger assortment of product and they want more real estate to either tell their brand story or show a larger assortment of product in a campaign. So t-shirt brands or brands like Tipsy Elves or Busted Tees or those kinds of brands that want to show a bunch of their styles and products on the card. Six by nine is a great format to do that. Orbit Baby, another one that’s going to do a six by nine card now because

41:13
To them, it’s a premium product. They want to tell their brand story and they want more real estate to be able to do that. But they were about to send a brochure, like more of a catalog. And we said, why don’t we try the six by nine format where you don’t have to go through all the work and expense of creating a whole catalog and mailing it. We can position this and design it in such a way that we can convey that story that you want to tell and get it to you.

41:40
It’ll be easy, it’ll be less expensive. And they were really excited about that. Okay. Can you comment on like maybe the types of products that this would work better on or does it matter? Like if email is working for you, will postcard marketing work for you? Chances are. Yeah. So we, one with, with email, again, think if email is working great for you, great. We certainly don’t recommend.

42:07
stopping email campaigns or not doing email. It’s great. It’s more that look at your open rates and look at your engagement rates on email. I can say with a high level of confidence that the majority of folks are not opening or engaging with your email campaigns, no matter how good they are. So this is just a way to ensure that that message gets through to the folks that aren’t engaging. And if you have a great campaign that’s working great in email,

42:35
That’s even better than pivoted to postcard campaigns. And you should see great performance out of that too. Okay. It’s a great way of thinking about like how to, where to start, how to prioritize what, types of campaigns you run. All right. So my final question then is what is like the echelon in terms of what to try? So the wind back, you would try first. What comes next? Abandoned cart? Probably the VIPs is typically a second.

43:03
The amount of people that have been waiting for our mail match because they want that customer acquisition, it could not come fast enough because everyone’s been asking and we’re a little later delivering it as IT projects tend to be than we wanted. And people are knocking down our door trying to get into this product. So we’re excited about that. And the results that we’ve seen from brands who are in our beta program is really good.

43:33
That’s something that people really want because it’s acquisition. And then like those second purchase, the abandoned carts, layering those things in are all great campaigns that you can be running. But then you also want to think about supplementing those with these one-off type campaigns. So you have a big sale, you have a new product launch, you want to make sure that that message gets in front of as many people as possible. So Black Friday is like, it’s going to be completely bonkers because

44:03
That’s the period when one, CPCs are getting jacked up, know, like competitions driving CPCs up, whereas postage is fixed, you’re not gonna pay more to reach somebody just because it’s the week of Black Friday. And you know that email inboxes are getting completely inundated with a million emails from a million different brands. So how do you cut through the clutter? Like those are perfect times around these major holiday events to layer in a postcard campaign and make sure you’re getting in front of folks that

44:32
you wouldn’t otherwise get in front of. Nice. No, it totally makes sense. Actually, I think the biggest hurdle really for anyone is designing the car, getting everything set up. But it sounds like you guys do white glove service on that con concierge service. I don’t know how long you’re going to be able to keep that up. But if you guys are listening to this out there, I would take advantage of this now while it lasts, because I don’t see how that’s scalable. And maybe maybe you guys are just at this point now where

45:02
where you can do this. So take advantage of this while it lasts is what I’m thinking at least. Well, yeah. While we’re still here now, we continue to make the platform easier to use and technically it can be a fully self-serve platform. we, again, we want to set brands up for success because it’s their first experience using this channel in most cases. And we know best practices and we’d rather

45:30
earn that customer and their business and their loyalty over a long period of time. So it’s worth it to us to invest in that and getting them set up for success. Sweet. So Mike, tell everyone where they can find more about this and how to get ahold of you directly if they have any questions. Yeah, sure. So email me directly anytime. Michael at Postpilot.com. You can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter and you can go to Postpilot.com. Go to Postpilot.com slash GFO for Godfather offer.

46:00
And that’s where you can sign up for that offer that we were just talking about where we’ll literally design, set it up, design it, send your first batch on our dime and let you see for yourself. good. Well, thanks a lot for coming on the show and it’s finally good to talk to the brains of the operation. That’s right. Always a pleasure, Steve. Great to be with you.

46:26
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now I just find it really funny how marketing always goes in cycles and postcard marketing is extremely effective and I recommend that you go out and try it. For more information about this episode, go to mywebquitterjob.com slash episode 427. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve.

46:55
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash D. I also want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow and win back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifeclutterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again, that’s mywifeclutterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog. And if you are interested in starting your own ecommerce store,

47:25
Head on over to mywebcoderjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.