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Measurable, tightly controlled, and producing results, direct mail proves its relevancy in a world gone digital

Direct MailRight On Target

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DIRECT MAIL

McCann CEO Harris Diamond told members of the mailing industry about a typical day for most Americans during the National Postal Forum in March.

“You come home from work, mail in one hand, cell- phone in your pocket, and you sit down to go through the mail. It’s an important moment in people’s lives and one that presents great marketing opportunities,” he explained. “McCann has identified a balance between high-tech and high-touch. Vinyl record sales are up, postcards are popular again, and companies are market-ing portable printers to hook to your cellphones. There’s hardly a trend that doesn’t work to mail’s advantage.”

Contrary to popular belief, direct mail is alive and kicking. And kicking some more.

Millennials may be attached to their smartphone, but they also love direct mail. Perhaps it’s digital overload, perhaps it’s seeing their name splattered all over the printed piece, or perhaps it’s the tactile sensation hold-

ing a physical object brings. Whatever the reason, direct mail resonates with the cohort. The Direct Marketing Association found that 22- to 24-year-olds are the most likely to respond to a direct mail campaign.

Marketers love direct mail as well. For one thing, it works. Direct mail is a tightly controlled message, de- livered right into the hands of a target market. It isn’t competing with website links or pop-up ads.

Meanwhile, 90% of emails you receive pretty much look the same, but not so with direct mail. Today’s crop of digital printers allows customized pieces to be pro- duced in a myriad of shapes and sizes, made relevant to the individual with variable images and text.

Direct mail is also highly measurable, touted as a driver that activates other elements of an omnichannel marketing campaign, such as email.

In this eBook, we explore how direct mail is being used to great effect by modern marketers willing to look outside the box — or perhaps by using that box.

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One key reason to consider direct mail: 69.8 million people in the U.S. will use an ad blocker in 2016

TABLE OF CONTENTSMcCann CEO: Direct Mail’s Moment Has Come Again

Long Term Care Associates Gives Its Direct Mail Program a Digital Boost

The Advancement of Ad Blockers

Anderson Canyon Hits 200-Time ROI Through Direct Mail Video

Will Programmatic Direct Mail Be the New Growth Channel?

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DIRECT MAIL

The opening of McCann CEO Harris Diamond’s remarks to members of the mailing industry in March at the Nation-

al Postal Forum seemed to presage a downer of a talk. He put up a slide of a quote that read, “It’s a regretta-ble fact there is today a great waste in this brand of advertising, which, when well done, is so effective.” The quote, referring to catalogs, was pulled from a McCann brochure — from 1915.

There exists an “expanded territo-ry” for direct mail, Diamond added, “something we haven’t seen in years.”

But the point he wanted to make was that demands for more effectiveness from direct mail — hardly the cheap-est way to engage with customers — was not something new, just something more complicated.

“Today’s media events are more complex than they were 100 years ago. There are many more hurdles due to fragmentation,” he told the Nashville gathering. “But in a world in which people are endlessly bombarded with electronic messages, direct mail is now the most welcomed houseguest.”

As head of the U.S. Postal Service’s AOR, Diamond gets paid to push the positives of mail. But he presented re-search from his firm to help illustrate direct mail’s enduring marketing value.

A McCann study, he noted, found the average American spends 25 min-utes a day with mail, something he has dubbed the mail moment.

“You come home from work, mail in one hand, cellphone in your pock-et, and you sit down to go through the mail. It’s an important moment in peo-ple’s lives and one that presents great

marketing opportunities,” Diamond said. “McCann has identified a balance between high-tech and high-touch. Vinyl record sales are up, postcards are popular again, and companies are marketing portable printers to hook to your cellphones. There’s hardly a trend that doesn’t work to mail’s advantage.”

The man who watches over a $7.5 billion a year agency then shared five creative principles McCann follows for effective marketing campaigns.

Go where customers areSee the world as customers see it. Don’t be bound by traditional approaches.

“Look at Pope Francis. He went out in street clothes at night to spend time with the homeless, took self-ies with young people in crowds,” Diamond explained. “Now he wasn’t marketing, but these acts served to make sure the changes he was mak- ing were understood.”

Maximize your opportunities to engage with consumersExplore the many ways mail can en-gage with consumers that digital can’t.

Diamond pointed to the Australian Air Force and a recruitment mailer it sent to engineering students. It was a box that consisted of the parts of a radio, but no assembly instructions.

Future engineers who put it together, turned it on, and tuned in to a dedicat-ed station were offered commissions in the Air Force.

Use new technology to enhance engagement and brand valueDiamond was bullish on the prospects for mail and augmented reality.

“It’s a case of digital and paper working together to enhance the expe-rience,” he noted.

Reinventing the medium“Technology gives us so many op-portunities to reach people, to require them to take action. The time people spend in the mail moment is an enor-mous opportunity to use technology creatively,” Diamond said.

Focus on your relationship with consumers in a digital ageThere are limits to how much informa-tion consumers want to give marketers.

“When we send material to people, we have to know they’re interested in it,” he explained. “What the U.S. Postal Service is doing (with data) is really go-ing to increase the ability to reach peo-ple in the ways they want to be reached.

“From what we’re seeing, marketers are recognizing and taking advantage of how multifaceted mail really is.” n

McCann CEO: Direct Mail’s Moment Has Come AgainHarris Diamond may be biased about the merits of direct mail, but he insists it’s approaching a renaissance

— Harris Diamond, McCann

In a world in which people are endlessly bombarded with electronic messages, direct mail is now the most welcome house guest

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DIRECT MAIL

Japs-Olson Company is your direct mail production solution provider. To receive our sample kit, text DM to 313131 or contact Debbie Roth at droth@japsolson.com or 952-912-1440.

WHAT WE DO BEST:

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DIRECT MAIL

Marketing shouldn’t be an either-or in-dustry. It’s not about deciding be-tween either direct

mail or digital, or either conventional or new-age methods. Marketers need to leverage each channel’s strengths and combine them to create a multi- channel mix that packs a powerful punch from every angle.

Long Term Care Associates (LTCA), a national marketing organization for extended-care insurance providers, learned the benefits of fusing tradi-tional tactics with modern technology when it implemented a new solution to make its direct mail lead distribution process more efficient.

■ Switching between old and newBefore the internet, LTCA relied on direct mail to promote its products. The company worked with affinity groups such as alumni associations or professional clubs to send their mem-bers information about extended care, as well as a quote and a reply card.

To turn these prospects into leads, LTCA’s employees would manually enter the data into the company’s data-base — a process Gary Forman, SVP and cofounder of the organization, de-scribes as time and labor intensive.

Then about 10 years ago, LTCA shift-ed much of its marketing efforts on- line and began targeting prospects via email and pay-per-click ads. The com-pany invested in technology, including web-to-lead forms and Salesforce’s CRM platform, and created a more in-tegrated lead distribution system.

But over time, Forman realized the digital space was becoming more

crowded, and he decided to revisit di-rect mail. Still, he wanted to find a way to bring the efficiency of online market-ing to the offline world. LTCA can re-ceive tens to hundreds of direct mail re-sponse cards a day, and he didn’t want to have to hire more people to manually enter the information into its database.

“As we saw things opening back up in direct mail, all of a sudden the light went on,” Forman explains. “We need to marry these two.”

So about a year-and-a-half ago, LTCA implemented cloud data man-agement platform Captricity to trans-form handwritten information into digital data and speed up the lead distribution process.

■ Combining the best of both worldsHere’s how Captricity works: Through the platform, LTCA can make an on-line template that matches the fields on its direct mail response cards.

Long Term Care Associates Gives Its Direct Mail Program a Digital BoostThe extended-care insurance marketer implemented a solution to turn handwritten information into digital data and speed up its lead-distribution process. By Elyse Dupré

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For example, if a response card asks customers for their name, phone number, email address, and ZIP Code, LTCA can create a template that contains these corresponding fields. Each of these digital fields then has a matching database field.

So when LTCA receives a reply card, it can scan the card into the Captricity platform, turn the hand-written data into digital data, and im-mediately transport the data into its Salesforce CRM system.

To ensure the data being uploaded is accurate, Captricity supplements its technology with human review. Once the data is in the CRM system, LTCA can use it to build mailing lists or share the information with its sales agents to have them follow up with a lead.

■ Reaching the right marketsStill, Forman recognizes that direct mail can be expensive.

So, he relies on segmentation to en-sure his campaigns reach the people who are most likely to buy extended- care insurance.

For example, the average age of a long-term care buyer is 58, he says. Therefore, the company primarily sends direct mail pieces to people who are close to that age.

However, when it comes to email marketing, the company can afford to send digital communications to people who fall within a much broad-er age range.

“I think that’s just being good stew-ards of the marketing budget, try-ing not to overextend ourselves, and sort of operate within the space that we know that we can be successful,” Forman explains.

Today, LTCA generates about 25% of its leads through direct mail, and the company has reduced the amount of time it spends on manu-al data entry for its direct mail pro-gram by 80%.

Forman believes the speed at which the company processes this information has helped it earn a re-turn on its investment.

“Anything that shortens that time frame for us is gold,” he notes. “It just gives the client less time to go some-where else to get the information or

inform themselves and become un-sold or just become uninterested.”

Still, he knows one channel cannot do it all and continues to rely on a combination of direct mail, email, and pay-per-click marketing to drive ROI.

“It’s always been a balance of try-ing to operate at the sweetest spot in each of those markets and keep the ROI good in all of them,” he explains. “You can’t just shift to only one market because, at some point, you lose the sweet spot and it becomes a little less receptive.” n

— Gary Forman, Long Term Care Associates

As we saw things opening back up in direct mail, all of a sudden the light went on. We need to marry these two (direct mail and digital)

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DIRECT MAIL

Sorry advertisers, but there’s no blocking this trend.

Recent data from research provider eMarketer shows that 69.8 million Americans will

use an ad blocker this year — a 34.4% increase over 2015. This figure is expect-ed to increase to 86.6 million in 2017.

So, what exactly is an ad blocker? Ad blockers, according to the research, are “software utilities installed on an in-ternet-connected device — including a mobile device — specifically for the

purpose of removing the advertising content of a web page or app, there-by restricting certain ads from being served or viewed.”

The population of ad block users is growing, too. Recent estimates project 26.3% of U.S. internet users will lever-age an ad blocker this year.

Consumers can block ads across their devices. For example, 63.2 million people will use an ad blocker on their desktop or laptop this year, according to a recent report, and 20.7 million will

use one on their smartphone. There is overlap between the groups.

To put it another way, 90.5% of us-ers block ads on their desktops and laptops, versus 29.7% who block ads on their smartphones.

But mobile is gaining traction. According to the recent data, the

number of people using ad blockers on their smartphone will increase 62.3% this year compared to a 30.1% increase in people using ad blockers on their desktop or laptop.

The Advancement of Ad BlockersAlmost 70 million Americans will use an ad blocker this year, according to recent data. By Elyse Dupré

eMarketer estimates that

26.3% of U.S. internet users will leverage an ad blocker this year

Ad blocking was estimated to cost publishers nearly

$22 billion in 2015

There are currently

198 million ad block users in the world

US Ad Blocking Users and Penetration, 2014-2017

61.5%

39.7

51.9

69.8

86.6

2014 2015 2016 2017

Ad blocking users (millions) % change % of internet users

Note: internet users of any age who access the internet at least once per month via any device (including a mobile device) with an ad blocker enabledSource: eMarketer, June 2016211609 www.eMarketer.com

30.7% 34.4%

15.7%20.0%

26.3% 24.0%

32.0%

Source: eMarketer, June 2016

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Marketing doesn’t have to be grand to be great. Architectural design firm Ander-son Canyon solid-

ified this notion when it generated a nearly 200-time ROI from a $1,300 direct mail campaign.

■ Designing a new strategyRenate Jones, marketing and of-fice manager for Anderson Canyon, wanted to run a campaign to attract the attention of C-suite executives at multi-family builder companies, but she didn’t want to rely on traditional cold-calling or email techniques and run the risk of having these executives’ “gatekeepers” disregard her outreach.

After researching her options, Jones decided to turn to direct mail to stand out. So, in August 2015, she reached out to UviaUs — a company that inte-grates video with direct mail — to cre-ate direct mail video players that would be sent to 14 prospects unfamiliar with Anderson Canyon’s services.

“It just made sense to hand-select these people than just blanket the city,” Jones explains, citing budget con-straints as one of the primary reasons for targeting a smaller group.

■ An effective direct mail pieceBy working with UviaUs and video content producer Shakr, Anderson Canyon was able to create customized direct mail pieces that featured video players inside of a branded package. Recipients could click a button on the player to watch a video showcasing the company’s portfolio.

In addition to the video, Anderson Canyon included a personalized letter

explaining why it was reaching out and what it could offer.

The letter also included a call-to- action inviting recipients to set up meetings with Anderson Canyon’s team or speak with someone at the upcoming Great Houston Builders Association Prism Awards — an event where Anderson Canyon would be recognized as a finalist for its work.

The letter further explained an An-derson Canyon representative would follow up with the recipient if the com-pany did not receive a response.

Finally, Anderson Canyon put a QR code on the video player to direct re-cipients to its website.

■ Building resultsThe campaign, which officially launched that September, delivered significant ROI. Out of the 14 peo-ple Anderson Canyon mailed, two responded to the piece. Of these two respondents, one signed a deal worth about $258,000. If the other deal, worth about $441,000, goes through, the campaign will have generated near-ly $700,000 in business opportunities.

As a result, Jones says that Anderson

Canyon intends to send more of these video mailers in the future.

As for those looking to replicate Anderson Canyon’s success, Jaycen Thorgeirson, founder and CEO of UviaUs, advises marketers to focus on developing content that’s tailored for the specific medium and to exper-iment with channels where few mar-keters are playing. Instead of sending this content to all of their prospects, he notes, marketers should focus on the ones most likely to convert to

reserve resources.“Instead of targeting about

100,000 people, why not identify your top 1,000?” he asks. “(They’re) the peo-ple that you know are your ideal customer, rather than hedging your bets on send-ing mass amounts of content and then looking at the leads and saying, ‘Is this really the best marketing-qualified lead or sales-qualified lead that I have delivered?’” n

Anderson Canyon Hits 200-Time ROI Through Direct Mail VideoThe architectural design firm generated a significant return on its investment by sending direct mail video players to a small pool of executives. By Elyse Dupré

— Jaycen Thorgeirson, UviaUs

Instead of targeting 100,000 people, identify your top 1,000

The company sent out a direct mail video player

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DIRECT MAIL

Lewis Gersh is well known on the marketing technol-ogy scene as an investor, and he’s placed several winning bets in that re-

gard: Madison Logic, Indiegogo, Sail-thru, and Tapad, just to name a few.

But the funder of startups in cross-channel marketing, personaliza-tion, and retargeting left his full-time VC gig to run his own company. What breakthrough digital technology would make the 48-year-old leave the strate-gy room? Programmatic direct mail.

■ Billion-dollar propositionPebblePost, for which Gersh serves as CEO, has secured a trademark on that term. He sees his digitally reactive version of direct mail as a billion-dollar proposition, a new channel that blends the scale of digital with the efficacy of direct to lift digital marketers to strato-spheric heights of engagement.

“Programmatic was sweeping through display, but it was getting overdone and efficacy was falling. PebblePost was born out of that,” Gersh explains. “Ev-erybody looked at anything but direct mail as a solution. But direct mail is sec-ond only to TV in marketing expendi-tures, and no new products have come out in direct mail for 25 years.”

PebblePost launched in June 2015 on a promise of 8% response rates and 15% conversion rates. After its first five customers posted rates closer to 20% and 40%, respectively, Gersh notes, he knew he was on to something.

PebblePost is run on an ad server that is activated by customer-deter-mined hierarchies such as product seg-ments. For example, should a custom-er go to a retailer website, look at some shirts and blazers, and then leave with-out purchasing, a 4-by-6-inch post-card with an offer on apparel could be sent out within 24 hours. Of course, the retailer must have the consumer’s physical address on file.

“We’ve built the first server connect-ing digital with direct mail,” Gersh maintains. “This was really enabled by the printing machine manufactur-ers. This is a cool extension of variable data printing.”

Gersh now states he has more than 100 brands engaged in real-time, reac-tive direct mail.

One of them is Boxed, an online re-tailer of consumer packaged goods in bulk sizes. It is a true multichannel marketer, using Facebook, Instagram, email, and desktop and mobile display ads, as well as direct mail, for customer activation. Boxed sees itself as “Costco

Will Programmatic Direct Mail Be the New Growth Channel?Martech impresario Lewis Gersh strikes out on his own with what he envisions as a multibillion-dollar business

Direct mail advertising in the U.S. draws revenue

of $12 billionSource: IBISWorld

Direct mail achieves a

3.7% response rate with a house list, and a

1.0% response rate with a prospect list. All digital channels

combined achieve a

.62% response rateSource: 2015 DMA Response Rate Project

Cost-per-acquisition for

direct mail stands at $19,

compared to $16-$18

for mobile and social

media, $21-$30 for

paid search, $41-$50

for internet display, and

$11-$15 for emailSource: 2015 DMA Response Rate Project

PebblePost launched on a promise of 8% response rates and 15% conversion rates. After its first five customers posted rates closer to 20% and 40%, respectively, CEO Lewis Gersh knew he was on to something

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Online,” and because it’s often easier for customers to just stop by the warehouse club on the way home from work, the e-commerce has been focusing on re- engagement strategies. A good number of its customers have lapsed and it’s dif-ficult to re-engage with them.

“We started testing PebblePost target-ing our unsubscribe list. Many of them have unsubscribed in the past 60 days and have come back to the website but not made a purchase,” explains Nita-sha Mehta, senior marketing manager at Boxed. “Prior to PebblePost, we didn’t have a way to engage with them. It’s been groundbreaking for us.”

■ Higher conversion ratesMehta says conversion rates via PebblePost have been running six times higher than those Boxed sees from emails. She adds the company is feel-ing its way around programmatic direct mail, but she thinks higher conversions might have something to do not only with the surprise factor of mail retarget-ing, but also with increased impressions for the postcards.

“One email sent is one impression, but one postcard sent is likely to receive several impressions among members of a household,” explains Mehta, who is currently preparing a March Madness- themed PebblePost campaign.

A big differentiator between program-matic direct mail and triggered direct mail, says Gersh, is real-time metrics and campaign management. PebblePost users get a dashboard they can check to see the volume of mail sent, response and con-version rates, and return on ad spend.

“You could never do this before on di-rect mail,” notes PebblePost CMO Da-vid Cooperstein.

Both Gersh and Cooperstein say pro-grammatic direct mail remains in its for-mative stages, and more can be expected of it in years ahead, such as third-party access to physical addresses. As more customers come on board, PebblePost will continue to add breadth to the ad-dress cloud it’s constructing and validate addresses as specific users of clients.

Then programmatic mail will shed its reliance on first-party access and users will be able to mail to unknown website users without taking ownership of their names and addresses. Of course, they’ll be able to capture them if they convert.

“We’ll have ownership of the address and won’t give it to the client. It’s like when someone does a search and clicks on a link for an item. The retailer doesn’t know who it is, though Google may know,” Cooperstein explains.

PebblePost’s reception in the marketing community far exceeded his expectations, Gersh notes. Brand marketers love it be-cause they can load it into their program-matic budgets, digital agencies see it as a natural extension of both programmat-ic and retargeting, and traditional direct mailers employ it as a way to eliminate some of the waste in an expensive channel.

“We have a product roadmap for PebblePost that goes out five years,” says Gersh, the digital era version of Victor Kiam, the former president of Remington Products, who proclaimed in ads he was so impressed by its razors he bought the company. “We’re looking at multibillions in revenue.” n

— Lewis Gersh, PebblePost

Programmatic was sweeping through display, but it was getting overdone and efficacy was falling. PebblePost was born out of that

According to the Direct Marketing Association, direct mail expenditures in the U.S. are expected to

rise to $196 billion by 2016, representing a

3.8% compound annual growth rate from 2011

More households read advertising mail now than they did 25 years ago

Despite the myth that direct mail is for an older audience, the DMA found 22- to 24-year-olds are the most likely to respond to a direct mail offer