- Speaker #0
There's a lot of people in design who want to design really seamless, aesthetically uniform branding, right? This makes sense for websites. This makes sense for marketing across the board. But with postcards, often you have that split second where you're going to capture someone's eyes. You want to actually direct them in the right way. And so you want your call to action to be non-matching. Your watch. Marketing Misfits, Norm Farrar and Kevin King.
- Speaker #1
So, Norm, you were just telling me that you're having hot flashes.
- Speaker #2
No, I was asking you, actually.
- Speaker #1
You're saying that you're checking here on my screen, and it was flashing a little bit. But that's not what you said. You said you're having hot flashes. I was like, Norm, I thought you already passed this. I thought you were an old enough guy. No, you're... Of that age where you're already past the hot flashes.
- Speaker #2
No, Kev. I was warning you about menopause That's what I was asking you if you had hot flashes. Oh
- Speaker #1
Misunderstood you I misunderstood. Oh No, I haven't I haven't had that happen yet, thank God I hear it's not pleasant
- Speaker #2
I really couldn't tell you but it's only Unpleasant if you start to see my screen start blow up in the background with these hot flashes.
- Speaker #1
I thought you might just be having hot flashes because, you know, I'm down here in Texas where it's 82 degrees right now, and you're up there in the great white north. What's the temperature outside in the north of Toronto?
- Speaker #0
It's probably,
- Speaker #2
it's below zero anyway, below zero Celsius. I'll put it that way. We've got snow. We had freezing rain yesterday. Beautiful conditions.
- Speaker #1
We don't have that here in Austin. When it snows in Austin, it's a big deal. I mean... We had a bad storm about three years ago that put everybody out for about four days. That's rare. I've been in Austin 30-something years. I think I've seen snow three times. And I remember one year it was like all in the news. They're like, it's going to, snow is coming. It's going to, about 2.26 in the morning, and we're going to have some flurries. People are setting their alarms to wake up at 2.26 in the morning to go out. They had never seen snow before, to go out on their balconies or to go out on their porch or in their yard. and see snow because by morning when the sun comes up it's going to be gone uh that that's that's the extent of snow here and if we get snow once every five years in austin uh that's that's a pretty rare occurrence now dallas three hours north of us they get a little bit more but we do get ice we get the black ice yeah we'll get where it'll rain and it'll freeze and on the black they call black ice because the road's black and you can't really tell that it's icy and then your car slipping and sliding. That's what we had yesterday. When I was a teenager, we had that in Dallas where I grew up and I was delivering pizzas for a place called Jimmy John's. I was one of the ones that went in on an ice day because everybody's stuck at home. I'll never forget, I got the biggest tip of my life. I got a $200 tip for delivering some pizzas to a hotel because I drank the ice. They weren't. They were stuck. They were stranded out by DFW Airport. And I was like the only stupid guy, like slipping and sliding down the road, delivering pizza so I could make some money. But I made like six, seven hundred bucks that day for an 18, 19 year old. That's back in the 80s. That's serious cash. It was my dad. And when I came home, he's like, where were you? I was like, I was doing work. And he's like... Give me your car keys. You're not supposed to be driving on this stuff. But those were the days. And, you know, speaking of the days back then, I got my a lot of people may not know this about me, but I cut my teeth in direct marketing and actually doing physical mail. So my background is back in the 1980s, early 80s, before I was even when I was in high school, I was doing mail order. I was doing putting ads in the back of stamp magazines and coin collector magazines and baseball card magazines. And then that evolved into, I remember around 1986, 87, I heard about this thing called direct mail and target marketing magazine and a couple other things like that. And I was like, what is this direct mail? There was no internet back then. I was like, oh, wow, I can sell something to anyone anywhere in the United States if I send them something in the mail. And like, this is pretty cool. I don't have to run an ad, a classified ad in the back of a newspaper or a magazine. I can just get lists and you can buy lists and you can actually send stuff to them in the mail. So I started an entire business. I started a mail order catalog where we send out the sharper image. It was for college kids. And then I was doing postcard marketing where I would send out postcards to actually people to buy stuff. And that continued, and it continues to this day. And to this day, everybody's always, all the young generation, all the young marketers are all talking about social media and Facebook and advertising and UGC and all this. And they're like, nobody pays attention to the mail. And that's so like. Old school. That's what the old people do. And there could be nothing further than the truth. Direct marketing right now is the golden opportunity, I believe, that nobody is paying attention to except the smart people. And that's who we have a guest on today. That's what he does. That's what they do is they help people when it comes to direct marketing and direct mail. And I think this is going to be an eye-opening discussion for a lot of people on some of what you can do in the past. power of using physical mail. I know Canada Post is on strike at the time of this recording, so you're not probably getting any mail right now, Norm. But mail is a powerful thing. So I'm excited to have our guest on today because we're going to geek out on some really cool stuff. I think that's going to open some eyes for all you misfits out there on ways that you can market totally differently.
- Speaker #2
All right. Well, why don't you introduce our guest?
- Speaker #1
Yeah. So... He's from PCM, Postcard Marketing. They got a whole bunch of different companies he'll tell you all about. But if you will, please welcome Maximilian Sejos, I think it is.
- Speaker #2
All right. Let's bring him on.
- Speaker #1
Bring him on, Norm. There he is. How you doing, Maximilian? Hey, guys. How you doing?
- Speaker #0
Good. Good to be here.
- Speaker #1
I said Sejos. It's Sejo. Sorry about that. It's Sejo.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, you almost got it.
- Speaker #1
I almost got it. I got to put an S on the end of it. I'm so excited.
- Speaker #2
So before we get started, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, absolutely. So I work for Postcard Mania, as Kevin mentioned. I work specifically as a product owner for our integrations division. So Postcard Mania has been around for 25 years in the direct mail space. And, you know, we have a lot of different divisions that focus on different things. And in integrations, we focus mostly on integrating. the possibility, the capacity to use direct mail into different pieces of technology like CRMs or other kind of platform-based direct mail triggered kind of applications.
- Speaker #1
So is this any kind of printed direct mail? Is this brochures or is it postcards or is it catalogs or is it what kind of, what does it encompass? What does direct mail encompass?
- Speaker #0
We cut our teeth on postcards for sure. It's in the name, right? Postcard mania. But yeah. Absolutely. We send pretty much anything you can think of, right? If it can be printed, we've got the machine, we do it all in house in Clearwater, Florida. So anything from brochures to letters to all different types of sizes of postcards to, you know, we could nerd out on different types of envelopes and things if you're interested. But you know, if you can think of it, we can do it.
- Speaker #1
Can you do all the rub off stuff too? Where like you guys scratch a coin or take do the sticker where you got to, you know, in the old days to get engagement? Now engagement is post a like or post a comment, but in the old days on direct marketing, engagement was like, subscribe to my magazine, take the sticker that says yes, peel it off, and put it over here in this little circle to get the engagement and then send it in. Can you do that kind of stuff as well?
- Speaker #0
So we have some snap-a-parts, but I think nowadays it's mostly QR code based.
- Speaker #1
That's true. That's true. Norm, have you done any kind of direct marketing? I used to.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, back in the day, back in the 80s and 90s, we did a lot of direct marketing. But nowadays, you know, it's funny. Kevin, you're the one that kind of turned me on to this, but I really thought that it was dead. And then you kind of showed me the ropes and it's not dead. It just might smell funny to a lot of people. And you're right. It is a very, very good way of marketing right now that other people aren't doing. So why not take advantage of it? And that's why I'm really excited to get into this. But yeah, thanks for getting me back on track with this because I don't know where we're going to go ourselves, like you and me with our new business. But it seems why not take advantage of something that nobody else is doing.
- Speaker #1
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- Speaker #2
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- Speaker #1
That's right, Dorm. Sign up today at stackinfluence.com or click the link in the video below and mention Misfits. That's right, Misfits, M-I-S-F-I-T-S, to get 10% off your first campaign. Head over to stackinfluence.com. Now, you see, the way I got Norm to actually pay attention is one time we were on a Zoom call and I was like, oh, actually, I just come back from a trip that Norm and I were in. I think we're in Montreal brainstorming on a money business. I come back on a call. I was like, Norm's like, Kevin, have you done these things that we talked about? I said, no, man, I've been busy. He's like, what have you been doing? So, man, I went to the post office box and I put the key in. and open it up and shit was falling out all over the floor. Like all these envelopes, like were falling out all over the floor. And I was like, hold on a second, Norm, hold on. Let me go grab it. I'll show you this. I go back to my other office. I'm in my studio right now. I bring back a stack of envelopes. You can't, if you're listening to this, you can't see it. But imagine like two feet tall. If you're holding a stack of envelopes, two feet tall, like Norm, every one of these envelopes, look, they're handwritten. And inside each one of them is an order form that someone took some scissors because I put a little dotted line with a pair of scissors emoji. Okay. and said, cut this, and there's a check or money order or a credit card number in every one of these envelopes. And he's like, get the hell out of here. No, who does that? I'm like, no. And I ended up opening those envelopes, and a couple days later, because I had to catch up on everything, there's $19,000 in that stack of envelopes that I showed you. Literally $19,000, $3,800 of credit cards that people wrote their credit card number and I had to manually charge them, and the rest were checks and money orders. A few people actually sent $10 bills and stuff in there too. So this is not dead. That's for my business I have that's my calendar business. And so we also have you can go to the website. So when I send something out in direct mail, it actually has a URL in there, a QR code, and you can actually go to the website as well. And when you go to the website, people will order. Now The sales on that same timeframe, this is like a week timeframe, was about $70,000 or $80,000 on the website. So from that direct mail piece that I sent in the mail, and I sent one email to my list, to that direct mail email piece, I did $100,000 in a week. About 70%, 70, 75% of it was on... line. The rest was through direct mail. Direct mail is still powerful, not only for people to actually pay you, but also to actually market to people and they see it. And here's the thing that I always tell people when it comes to direct marketing is that when you send out an email, the email lasts a split second. Maybe you read it and then you put it into your to-do list or it's just in your inbox and you might get back to it. You don't take action on it right away. If you... Download a PDF or something or download coupon code sits on your computer gets lost if you send something in the mail Especially if it's a coupon 20% off your next order, you know from a front gate or something like that Well, he's big catalog companies. What do you do with that? You don't like you might throw in the desk drawer most people take it sits on their desk with their to build stack or it goes up on a magnet on the Refrigerator or you can get creative by putting a calendar on there and you know Christmas counter advent counter That has a coupon on the site It's a constant billboard in somebody's house. And people now, because direct marketing used to be such a big deal, and they called it junk mail, and you would get so much stuff. Well, that's cut down because of people like you, Norm, who thought it was dead. And so now when you get your mail, there's not nearly as much stuff. If you do it right, with the right message and the right graphics and the right offer, it can crush, and it can be way, way cheaper than doing Facebook advertising. That's what
- Speaker #2
I want to know about. Max right now with his strategies. Is it any different than what it was before? Or are you doing something new?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, so I kind of want to pick up a little bit where Kevin left off there, right? Describing this kind of deliverability crisis in digital advertising that we see, particularly with email in some ways, how it's kind of reversed over the years, right? We used to think of junk mail, but now junk mail, when you say that, that's spam, right? That's your inbox being filled up with all these emails that you can't parse through. Sometimes people just mass delete them. I think we're all kind of aware of what that experience is, just constantly being kind of berated with all these emails that are important, right? Like, you know, digital advertising is an important tool, right? But it's, but also, you're leaving a lot on the table, if you're just relying on that form of a touchpoint to reach your potential customers. So it's precisely in that kind of deliverability crisis that direct mail really cuts through. all that noise and can really offer the tangible, right? Everything in our life, it feels abstract. It's there's, you know, new technologies all the time. There's something to be said for something tangible in your hand that you can hold, that you can feel, that you can relate to in a way that will have lasting staying power, whether it's for brands or particularly in other ways for local businesses too. to reach into their communities literally with something tangible. And so, with that said, that kind of general framework for thinking about direct mail, the technology has also come to the space as well. And there's a lot of automation, personalization, I mentioned QR codes that could take you to personalized landing pages that bring the information on who the particular recipient was who scanned that QR code. to your front doorstep as a business that you can then capitalize on that lead. Everything from that to variable imagery on the postcards and letters. So we see that a lot with people in real estate who are wanting to buy, whether they're investors or they're real estate agents, they want to buy particular homes, literally putting images from Google Maps or from somewhere of particular things that's targeted to the recipient of that piece of direct mail with... very custom, a kind of custom strategic sense of marketing.
- Speaker #1
What would you say to someone that's like, well, yeah, that's great. You can do all this customizing, but I can do that on email too. I can have someone click a link and they can go to a webpage and I got the same data and I can change the pictures and I can customize it to them. Why is direct mail more powerful combination or maybe even more powerful than sending an email with the same data and the same customization ability?
- Speaker #0
What we'll say is always you should be doing both, right? You don't leave any channel untouched. But the reason why we then will emphasize direct mail is because if you think about it, right, sometimes people don't open emails, right? They don't click on the link. They don't even see it. They don't see your marketing. They don't see your brand. It just goes either straight into junk or they delete it. But with a piece of direct mail, at baseline, your customer has to look at it. right when you're going through your mail you look at just sporting it even over the trash you're like everyone's done it right you're looking at it yes second at least with it you put your your eyes on it it says you know for me it'll say you know dear maximilian and then i'll go okay well i don't need this but interesting throw it away right let's say i do that though okay i do that once one of the things that we emphasize is repeated touch right not giving up on a list not giving up on leads um and okay, I get another postcard. Now I know them, right. Okay. Again, maybe it changes up. There's a different image this time. Dear Maximilian. You know what? I've actually done this as a consumer, not even before I was in the direct mail space, where on the third, fourth time I get the postcard, that's when I put it on the fridge, right? It kind of breaks through at that point. And it's repeated touch, both visually, right? And in your hand, right? This product, this brand is becoming real to you over time as you handle the piece of marketing in your hand, and even if you throw it away or put it on the fridge. And then another aspect of that, too, that I think I'll say is there are particular design practices that we emphasize at Postcard Mania that make... the can make the marketing more effective. And there's some things that are really counter intuitive. And one that I really like is, you know, there's a lot of people in design who want to design really seamless, aesthetically uniform branding, right? This is this makes sense for websites, this makes sense for, for marketing across the board. But with postcards, often you have that split second. where you're going to capture someone's eyes, you want to actually direct them in the right way. And so you want your call to action to be non-matching to the rest of the postcard so that it actually jumps out, right? They see it almost as like an out point on the postcard that then it directs their eyes to it. And then, right, they're calling the number, they're looking at that particular part of the postcard. So these are just some little things that... Being, you know, in the industry that you learn over, you know, decades.
- Speaker #2
You were talking about receiving these postcards multiple times. I'm wondering if, is this similar to social media? Do you try to come up with different messages, different sizes, different, just a whole different look? So it's not just a six by four postcard. It might be something else that's completely different. So that person gets a touch point. It is a really separate. touch point that they're looking at. And it's almost like split testing the message.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, that's a great, it's a great way of putting it. And it actually kind of brings me to one of the things that the integrations team, I think we we offer that that really does the best for people is you can set out a strategy for managing and following up with leads ahead of time, right? You automate that strategy, whether it's in your CRM, in our platform, however you want to connect up to. these direct mail services. And then you kind of you let it run as a strategy, right, as you would a kind of email funnel, or a social media strategy where you're targeting particular demographics, you're targeting particular leads in different ways, whether they're warm, cold or hot leads, you kind of set it to send a postcard, and then you delay for, let's say, seven days, 14 days, maybe even a month. And if this lead reaches in or changes status and in kind of your lead management. stages, you alter the postcard slightly, right? You alter the offer, you can tailor it, maybe it's a bigger postcard to make more of a splash, right? Instead of the four and a quarter by six, it's a six by eight and a half or the jumbo, the six by 11. You come up with a cohesive strategy that covers every aspect of your sales process, right? And your lead management process that then can run in an automated way integrated with the rest of your customer relationship management that then can you can kind of almost like heard these leads in particular ways with particular touch points um so that's something that really bringing a kind of strategic uh perspective to direct mail marketing as you would social media marketing where you're trying to kind of touch them at multiple points in in a lead's life cycle can really uh generate generate the goods what's it cost i mean
- Speaker #1
For like a four and a quarter by six, which is a smaller size postcard, what are we looking at on an actual cost? I know with a bulk mail, you have to send 200 pieces at a time. But because of your relationships and your systems, you're able to commingle. So I can send one-offs basically and get a discounted rates under your system. So I don't have to do all these big mass mailings. So I can do them daily or as people come in or as a CRM says, what am I looking at to send like a single? four and a quarter by six postcard that's four color printed on both sides?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, so it's a great question. Absolutely. So with higher volume, as you said, in bulk, like, you know, our pricing does vary according to volume, if you're going to come spend, you know, send 10,000 postcards, we'll give you a slightly better rate on the per piece. But with our integrations team, as you said, we have the technology and the printing infrastructure to commingle different, different sends. And you're going to be able to send a one-off postcard completely personalized for under a dollar with no monthly fees, no startup fees, no nothing. And so what that can do is really allow you, you know, let's say you're a small business or you're even a one-person shop trying to kind of market and start up and dabble in direct mail to see how you want to scale it. You can set up your integration and go and send... two pieces, three pieces, five pieces, right? And, you know, spend less than $10 and see how that kind of personalized touch affects some of the process of managing and trying to convert these leads and also generate new ones, right? If you want to buy a list and target a particular area, right? Some people want to target the closest 50 homes to a job they did, for example, right? And you wouldn't necessarily have the... intelligence at your disposal that like a big corporation would have um kind of traditionally to target specific customers, right? You don't, if you don't have their information, they didn't fill out a form if you're a small business, but with our technology, you can, you know, spend 40 something dollars and target the, you know, you do a job. You're like, I want to get, I want to get access to this neighborhood and just, and just do it. Right. And though, you know, you can know that those leads are going to be they're going to be hot because they're right in the demographic that you're already servicing.
- Speaker #1
So I can do stuff like if I'm opening a new gym, I can target. I mean, you can do some of this on Facebook, but you're at the whim of Facebook's algorithm. And I always say that, you know, email, cold email gets a 10 to 30 percent open rate. Postcards get a 99 percent open rate. So which one do you want? Yeah, you're paying that dollar or a little bit less than a dollar. And you can get that down to 50, 60 cents or even, you know, in bulk. But. You're paying that, but you're getting these much higher open rates and much like you said earlier, people, even if they skimming it over the trash, they at least have a split second with it and you do your job. So I can actually get lists of people that are surrounding three miles around my gym and I can overlay that to people that I know also are into fitness. And I can send them a postcard that says, hey, new gym opening, come in for a free yoga class or whatever it may be. And I know that that's going to actually reach those people. And if those people moved, a lot of people don't realize this, in the U.S., you can get 48 months of NCOA, National Change of Address, information. So for 48 months, you can follow people where they go, and you can also do it for Canada as well. I think it's 24 months for Canada. So you keep up to date, and you keep current with everything. So that's some of the power here that you can do. Can you do that on digital marketing too? Yes, you can do targeting like that, but you don't control it. With mail, I know that if I mail this to them, the post office is going to deliver it to that house. It's going to get there. But I don't know if I have a list of a thousand potential exercise people around my gym. I run a Facebook ad. Facebook's going to show that to 20 or 30 of them. See what the engagement is. See what the reach is. If they're just not paying much attention or it happens to be at the wrong time of day, the rest of them aren't going to see it. But if I send 1,000 postcards, I know that 99% of those people at some point during the week when they check their mail, they're going to see it. That's the beauty of it.
- Speaker #2
This is a question about engagement. Is there an industry standard on how many people will click through, scan? the QR code? I mean, you get 99% deliverability, but how many people take action?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, so I guess what I would say is, there isn't an industry standard, it actually depends on the industry that you are marketing from often. And some, you know, there are some particular industries that are, you're always going to kind of guarantee a boatload of engagement, particularly like some of the local based. postcard sending, right? That really works because you know that who you're sending to is already interested by nature of where they live in what you're trying to sell or what you're trying to provide as a service. So it really depends on how personalized you're getting, what you're trying to sell, and what your strategy is, right? If you're trying to build a brand, right, with bulk sending, you're going to get less of a click through, but you'll maybe get, like over time, more of a critical mass of engagement. um, by, by doing it that way. Um, and then there's some, for some types of industries, like for example, I mentioned real estate investment. That's a great example where all they need is one person, right? They send thousands and thousands and thousands. All they need is one person to make it worth it because their margins are so high. Um, so it really depends. And what, what we emphasize is making sure that the design practices meet suit the industry that you are in. And we have consultants and coordinators who will really walk you through any step of the process if you're interested in getting involved in this. And we kind of know what we're doing. And we have different levels of hands-on versus hands-off approaches to facilitating your direct mail campaign needs. And we also have a number, if you're interested in checking particular industries, a number of case studies on our website, postcardmania.com. where you can just actually click through and see, you know, what's your industry? What are some examples of some engagement rates in the past?
- Speaker #1
All right. I know that the response rates typically, I don't have the status. I wish I had this. I did it in a presentation a while back. I did a presentation on postcards. And...
- Speaker #0
it was like 15 to 1 over direct engagement. So it depends, like you said, on industry, but it's like a 15 to 1 ratio, 15 times higher ratio. So if you got a 1% response on an email, you should get about a 15% response on a direct marketing piece or something like that. That's certainly that number, but it's a much, much higher engagement thing.
- Speaker #1
Certainly when compared to digital, absolutely. I mean, that's been consistent for years.
- Speaker #0
But see, people would say, how do you counter the people say, well, this is all great, Maximilian, but I can send 100 emails for less than I can send one postcard. If it's just a numbers game, like you said, for this real estate person, I just have to hope they open one of those 100 emails versus sending them 100 postcards. How do you respond to someone like that? I'm not going to mess with this. This is so old school.
- Speaker #1
Well, I mean, I think the great thing is about being in direct mail marketing is I don't have to say that emails don't work, right? All I'll say is, is if you want to make sure you're leveraging all of your marketing, you know, possibility, right? And trying to maximize what you can, what you can bring to the table to your customers, you're going to want to touch. Touch, you know, touch their life in every single way that you can. And direct mail is a way that is proven. So, you know, you're relying on the infrastructure of the post office, which is proven and almost guarantees deliverability. And you're not, that is a subsidized form of deliverable infrastructure that, you know, you're taking advantage of as a business. That, you know, for with email, you, of course. of course, will have success if you play the volume game, but direct mail has been around for years for a reason, right? And it never went away, right? I think there's people think that, oh, that's old school. There was a point in time where it stopped working and it never, it just, that's just not true. It never went away, right? It's just that we're confronted by the kind of flashiness of digital advertising. Everywhere we look and in ways that are kind of, I would say, working less on net by every single by volume that we see this resurgence of in the effectiveness that was already always there in direct mail advertising.
- Speaker #2
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- Speaker #3
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- Speaker #0
Do you see a difference in what you're doing? There's a lot of little hacks and tricks when it comes to doing stuff by mail, like handwritten, making it look like the address is handwritten or the postcard's handwritten, or it looks like you just sent it from a vacation in the Bahamas or something, or putting a real stamp, you know, having a real glued or stick-on stamp on the outside instead of an indicia. that says a permanent number, whatever. And all these little minute things, like we talked about earlier, the sticker, peel off the yes and stick it over here and mail the postcard back. What are you seeing? What are some of the cool engagements or little tricks that you're seeing that you guys can do that are helping with response rates or engagement?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, so you mentioned a few of them. I mean, the live stamp is great. It's a really powerful means of, you know, particularly with letters of upping the open rates of those.
- Speaker #0
Letters in an envelope. So something in an envelope.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, particularly envelopes, right? Because with postcards, you have the benefit that the images are already there, right? But with letters, you know, you want to get people to open the envelopes. And things like handwritten fonts, changing the color of the fonts on the outside of the letter, the live stamp is great. And then playing around with different windows, right? So whether it's double windows, full windows. Or regular envelopes like... It would be, you know, if I sat down with the letter and wrote it out and then actually, you know, wrote the address on the outside, handwritten and applied the stamp. Right. We can we can facilitate making bulk mailing look exactly like it would look if I just sat down and wrote it out. And and from, as you mentioned, you know, handwritten fonts, yellow paper. Right. The whole thing that everything that you can kind of think of for for these little. Yeah,
- Speaker #0
yellow paper was always one that was a trick that those stand out in the mailbox. Yellow, I remember that. What about, I mean, when you're talking about letters, I mean, you have the same thing applies in direct marketing and online, subject lines. I mean, you have open hooks. So if you're doing an envelope or even a postcard, you want to have open creative hooks or open loops that draw people in. So a lot of the marketing principles and the psychology are very similar, right?
- Speaker #1
Yes, absolutely. And I'd recommend for anyone interested, Postcard Mania has 12 elements of successful postcard design that talk through the particulars from the clear headline, relevant images, color. There's even, you know, components of like eye trail of particular images, right? So where the actors and the images are looking, right? There's a little trick that can marginally increase the engagement rate.
- Speaker #0
What about the size? What do you see the difference in size makes? I mean, a four and a quarter by six to a five by eight to a six by 11. What do you see? Each one of those increases the printing costs, increases the deliverability cost. And what do you see the engagement differences or the response differences? How do you decide which one of those do I go with? Do I stand out so they just can't miss it with a... six, six by 11? Or do I go with a small size just and be efficient? Or do you combine those?
- Speaker #1
You kind of want to balance, you know, questions of costs for, you know, obviously, the larger jumbo size is going to reach more people, right? It's going to be bigger, it's going to stand out when it's on the fridge, more people are going to see it. But sometimes the four and a quarter by six, and you can afford to send to a few 1000 more will just work better because you'll reach more people. So it really you want to make sure you're thinking with both of those sides of the coin and trying to balance your strategy, right? Coming up with a cohesive strategy that then you can implement. And maybe you send the jumbo to hot leads and to cold leads, you send the four and a quarter by six.
- Speaker #2
You know, the one that always gets me, and I know it's coming, like I'll take a look at the envelopes that come in and those kind of just get tossed. I don't even give it a second look. If they have a window there, I know it's kind of... the old junk mail. So I toss it. But if it comes in a regular envelope, like you guys were just talking about with that bloody stamp and it looks like, and I know that, oh, this is just another marketing campaign, but it intrigues me enough that I'm going to open it up and go, okay, yeah, another marketing campaign. But it's very interesting about just by putting that bloody stamp on or making it look like a human wrote it, you know. had written it, just that engagement. So again, going back to that split testing. But the other thing I just want to bring out here is that when I went through school, the touch points for me, and I think it was a standard for many years after I graduated, was seven point touch. And then we've learned nowadays. There's no longer that seven point touch. It's much, much higher. And 20? Yeah. Okay. So Kevin says 20. So it has to be right. I was going to say 21, but.
- Speaker #0
But it might be 21. It's around that.
- Speaker #2
Yeah. It's much higher, right? Yeah. And this is just that element. And if you're blasting out multiple campaigns, different sizes, different shapes, split testing. I mean, that's just like we were talking about doing some. digital marketing, like I'm talking about on a truck, you know, there's all these new ways of doing it yet. You can't forget about the old school ways and those seven touch points, they don't work anymore. You have to get way past that double, triple that. And this is just one element to it. So I really like that. Can we talk about some of the best practices that are happening right now?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I'd say one of the things with regards to best practices is the way I think of it is I kind of break down this question of automation versus a kind of discretionary sense of marketing, right? So discretionary meaning like, okay, I'm a marketer, and I have the discretion to buy a billboard, or, okay, we're gonna, we're making the choice to target this group with social media advertising, right? And here's, we want to target x, y, and z, versus an automated approach that says, okay, We want to build a kind of cohesive strategy for our marketing that will run on its own. And you can kind of architect it, let it run, optimize it, and then just kind of split test and tweak it. And one of the things that we see really works in particularly then the direct mail side of that is having QR codes on your mailers, right? Because what that does is it allows you... to capture, right, the lead coming back in as a hot lead that was maybe a cold lead that you sent to on the way out. So there's this full circle kind of structure and system for managing the benefits and the engagement on the direct mail side that then, you know, maybe will, when they scan that, it comes back in and then you send an email or a text message, right? So there's this full structure of kind of encircling these leads until you can kind of you know convert them after getting those multiple you know maybe those 20 touches or however however you know you want to you want 21 touches 21 yeah there you go um so i mentioned personalization a lot um right design practices which i also talked about um and and i think with with all of those things kind of if you if you're accounting for all of those things you can start to maybe see you what it would look like for the life cycle of your leads, depending on, you know, how hot or warm they are, when they're being hit from multiple angles. And having that, you know, that direct mail piece be a kind of anchor for kind of going and getting them in the real world and bringing them to your digital presence. It really does work. And it can be a kind of missing link for a lot of people in... In their marketing and so that that's that's what I would say. Yeah,
- Speaker #0
how do you do attribution? I mean if so if I'm doing a multi Multi approach I'm doing email. I'm doing Facebook Ads. I'm doing Advertisers in a magazine. I'm doing postcards. How do I do the attribution? To know is my postcard marketing working because maybe They end up making this they end up making the buy off the fourth email that I got them, but the postcard The second postcard I sent them kind of pushed them over the edge, but not quite. But that follow-up email, that fourth email is what they actually clicked to actually buy. So I'm giving all the attribution to that. So how do you do attribution and decide like, oh, well, we should just cut out the postcard market because nobody's scanned the QR code and buying. They're all buying off the fourth email. How do you account for that kind of stuff?
- Speaker #1
This is a great way, I think, of, it's a great question because what it captures is the kind of limits of. of the one-to-one attribution in all of our marketing, right? Because we can't always know what was the touch that put them over the edge, right? We can't always know, okay, was it actually the email that they clicked on? Or has our brand been churning in their head for months, right? Because of, you know, a video ad or a postcard that we sent. So it's one of those things that... Obviously, we have to balance marketing budgets and costs, and there's all sorts of decisions to be made from a business sense. But in our eyes, you really have to think of marketing in a holistic way, right? Not try to cut corners, not try to shave off small percentages here and there, because you don't actually know if that's going to cost you money in the long run, unless you do some pretty complex reporting on touch points. and do some quantitative analysis that can at least give you a window into, you know, maybe how many touches a lead received before it converted and certain things like that. What combinations of touches? So that's kind of where I would go with that.
- Speaker #0
Can you talk a little bit about lists? A lot of people don't understand or realize how many lists are out there that you can rent and that you can get access to. Whether that's people who have bought from a catalog or subscribers to, I mean, I used to make. tens of thousands of dollars per month renting my list of catalog buyers. So I had people that bought collectibles from me and I would turn around. I had an agency that would represent me. And, you know, you'll like this one, Norm. One of the cigar collector catalog, cigar catalogs would actually rent my list. They'd come to me and they'd do a test. They'd say, we want 5,000 names. I would send them 5,000 names. And I would see that there's mailboxes places that will see that with like fake names or their seed names so that I know that if they're misusing this, because they have the rights to use it one time to send out to all 5,000 people one time. And then I get samples of what they mail. So if they're not mailing what they told me to do, if they're misusing the list or sending to it multiple times, I know. But there's so many lists that you can get out there and people don't understand. They're like, I don't have a list. I People just started signing up on my website. So can you talk about Maximilian a little bit about what you guys can do to help people actually find these leads and find this stuff?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, absolutely. So we have a full list team that, you know, basically any need you can think of and probably ones you can't even think of, you can help facilitate. There's a bunch of different types of lists that you can purchase from, you know, radius lists around zip codes, carrier route lists. You can look at consumers, resident occupants, business types of lists. For those who are kind of in the weeds about this stuff, there's even more you can kind of dive into.
- Speaker #0
But the key is You can do what you used to be able to do on Facebook. You can still do direct mail. But Facebook used to be able to do you could do all these overlays where you could say, I want someone that's bought from Amazon. They also own a dog, and they also drive a Cadillac. And Facebook took a lot out of the way because the Cambridge analytics and all this privacy bullsh** that happened. You could still do all this stuff in direct mail. And there's big data out there that will do all these overlays and all this kind of stuff,
- Speaker #1
right? Yeah. I mean, you could do income. You could do multi-family versus single-family home, apartments. You could target. I mean, the amount of demographics you have at your disposal, it's pretty much anything you could think of targeting. There's a way to do it. And one thing that I'll say too is with our lists, you're purchasing those records so you can reuse them after the fact. So that's a nice plus that we offer as well with regards to the lists. And then on the technology side for the integrations team, we have the ability where you can actually integrate list purchasing in your platform. So let's say you run a CRM for X, Y, or Z. If you wanted to allow your customers to purchase lists through you, that's technologically possible by using our integration.
- Speaker #0
So like with GoHighLevel or something, you could set up a deal where people can...
- Speaker #1
Can white label all of our direct mail services directly into their platform in different CRMs, not just high level, though that's one of the big ones we're focusing on at the moment.
- Speaker #2
So a lot of the times when we're talking about e-commerce sellers, they're using post-purchase campaigns through email. Now... They can add up, the average is around 40% additional revenue by doing a direct mail campaign post-purchase. Same amount roughly, or what does that do to affect the revenue that you can additionally bring?
- Speaker #1
Yeah. So can you say the numbers on that again? Yeah,
- Speaker #2
there's 40%, roughly 40% based on the information that I have that an Amazon seller can get. if they do a post-purchase or an e-com seller does a post-purchase email campaign continually that they can add roughly around 40, 44% additional revenue. I was wondering if you do that with mail.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. I mean, I certainly one of, one of a key use case that we service is that post-purchase that post-purchase outreach with, with direct mail. And, you know, what, what's great about that too, is with the variable data option, you could actually send a, send images of the products that the person bought specifically to, you know, whether it's on the postcard or, you know, or even send an accessory to that product by targeting their particular order in that direct mail. So it can even, you can go up.
- Speaker #0
You can send them a custom, you're saying, your service can send a custom postcard or letter or whatever, where it's like, we know they bought these four dog products from us and they're missing this fifth one. And we can actually show them. Here's the four you're missing. The missing link is this one. Here's how it fits together. You can customize it to that level so that they feel like they're missing something.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, I mean, it would require a little bit of strategic thinking on the on behalf of the e commerce seller, but absolutely. Yeah, technologically, that's something we can facilitate. And we have clients who do that all the time. And that really can, because you're bringing the personalization to the real world that really, as a consumer, it feels targeted in a way that like, it's wow, this is about me, right? They're paying attention to me, and what I'm buying and what I potentially need. from them and and we find that that really gets a lot of engagement um when you can kind of personalize it in that way uh and then it's like you know scan a qr code to add it to your cart and because they're logged in it's already done well i think that was a five cigar uh nugget there and
- Speaker #0
we were going to rate that i didn't know you could do that you know you could do that no really yeah no yeah you can do all kinds of uh cool stuff you can do Very personalized with everything on postcards. Or direct mail. It doesn't have to be postcards. It can be any kind of letter, direct mail. That's pretty cool. It's basically the same as mail merge. But yeah, you can even do can you guys do sampling as well? Like if I've got dog treats, can you do like I want to send a sample pack out, or are you just doing physical printed products, or can you actually send or like in the old days, Norm was talking about that engagement where The pen companies, you know, the promotional companies, they'll stick a pen in the envelope. So when you get the envelope, there's a bulge in there. Or they put a penny in there or put a dollar in there or something, you know, to get engagements. Can you do any of that kind of stuff as well?
- Speaker #1
We stick to printed only. There are some accessories like you're describing that we do, but we don't do samples because we don't house our clients'products. But I wanted to mention another. particular e-commerce use case that's really powerful, which is in a similar vein, which is abandoned carts. So let's say I'm on Shopify, right? I have a Shopify e-commerce site and a customer of mine put some things in the cart and then abandoned that cart. You can have that trigger a postcard with the images of the products in the cart that were abandoned and send that directly to that customer.
- Speaker #0
Which you can do that without them having logged in too. So if they have not gone ahead and filled out their billing address and their shipping address, they just added it to the cart and actually never, they went to the sign-in page. It says sign up or log in. They didn't ask, screw it. And they went away. You can actually, with science, you can actually pick up about 50 to 70% of those people's real address. And then three days later, they get something in the physical mail. You can see. do this by email too but the email address is the the disadvantage is the email address might not be as targeted as the direct mail piece because the email address might be their yahoo i mean like norm i've got a he sends me something to a yahoo account so i check that once a year that might be the email address that gets picked up but my address is my address and i'm going to check my check my mail so your response rates and your your conversion should in theory be dramatically higher by triggering a postcard And this can be automatic by your system into your CRM and it just sends it out. And three days later, like, oh, by the way, you left blah,
- Speaker #1
blah,
- Speaker #0
blah in your cart.
- Speaker #1
It's called direct mail retargeting. And so, yeah, that's something that we see a lot of uptake in. And this is kind of an example of one of the things that, like, you know, the olden days of direct mail, right? Things have changed, right? We've brought technology into the direct mail space as well. So it's not just that direct mail cuts through technology or digital. marketing, but it also integrates it and we've integrated it into direct mail marketing in ways that we couldn't have dreamed of, you know, 15, 20 years ago.
- Speaker #3
Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite. podcast player, or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of the Marketing Misfits.
- Speaker #0
Have you subscribed yet, Norm?
- Speaker #2
Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast?
- Speaker #3
Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time and it's just me on here? You're not going to know what I say.
- Speaker #2
I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. You can go back and forth with one another. That being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of the Marketing Misfits.
- Speaker #3
Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm.
- Speaker #1
All right.
- Speaker #2
We are coming up to the top of the hour. Mr. King, do you have any other questions that you'd like to ask Maximilian?
- Speaker #0
I could geek out on this for a long time, but I just want to emphasize the importance that my background is in direct marketing. I still do it to this day, and I get poo-pooed all the time. People are just like, yeah, whatever. It doesn't work. I'm like, no, it absolutely works. If you do it right, it's a very powerful thing. And with Dragonfish that Norm and I are doing, we're going to be doing this for a lot of our clients. So if this is something you're like, yeah, that sounds cool, but I don't want to mess with that. I don't want to learn. Dragonfish will be able to help you do a lot of this kind of stuff. Right, Norm?
- Speaker #2
That's correct. And you can reach Dragonfish at?
- Speaker #0
But no, Maximilian, is there something that, what do you think is the biggest hurdle that you have to overcome when you're talking to a new potential direct marketing client and they're just like, ah, I just don't know? What is that one thing that's always the barrier that you have to break down?
- Speaker #1
So, you know, funny enough, I think what people expect from direct mail services and things like that is, you know, everyone's like, oh, but I have to send 20,000, I have to send 50,000 to make it worth it for starters, right? But really, that no minimums feature and use case that we offer is really something that just allowing people to try it, right? Because it's a new avenue for marketing. And sometimes you have to learn, there's a lot to learn, and you don't want to like dive into the deep end. But Sometimes, you know, it just takes, okay, I'll just do 10, 100. Before you know it, you're buying 5,000 recipient lists twice a month and, you know, and really investing a lot in this marketing channel. So that's what I would say is the first thing. And then also, you know, there's that response that you get that you're describing, which is like, oh, direct mail, like snail mail, like real mail. And you go, yeah, no, this is both the past and it's the future. And you know, you gotta, you gotta get on board with it because it's something that funny enough, like everyone in tech, um, I'm in California right now. Everyone in tech is always looking for the new great thing to make marketing better, to make it more intelligent, right. To do X, Y, or Z that we've lost sight that the most like counterintuitive and sometimes the most interesting things, um, are actually things that have worked for a long time. Right. Um, So that's what I would say. It's both that mental block and then the learning block of wanting to try it, but not wanting to, you know, start with tens of thousands of cents and what people would perceive as, you know, kind of spend money on a prayer and really just kind of start small and build up to something that can be cohesive, sustainable, and really generate engagement for the long term for your business.
- Speaker #2
All right.
- Speaker #0
How do people find out about, is it postcardmania.com or where do they go if they want to learn more about this?
- Speaker #1
So yeah, two great places would be postcardmania.com and then pcminnegrations.com, which is the particular division of Postcard Mania, the integrations team that I work for. And that's where I'd start and, you know, reach out to us. We have a robust team that will kind of help you get started.
- Speaker #2
Okay, now there is one last question. So we always ask at the end of every podcast, if our misfit knows a misfit.
- Speaker #1
So I'm going to keep it direct mail theme because I know at least Kevin that, you know, gets him talking. So the misfit I'm going to nominate is Brad Hoogler, who is the CEO of the company Direct Mail 2.0. And I think you could continue this conversation and also... maybe move into some other directions with him and he would fit right in with you guys.
- Speaker #2
All right. Fantastic. Well, we'll reach out for Brad's info, but Maximilian, thank you so much for being a misfit. And thanks a lot for being on the podcast today.
- Speaker #1
Thanks Norm. Thanks Kevin. It's a pleasure.
- Speaker #0
All right. Appreciate it, man. Hang on. We'll, we'll be back with you in just a second. All right, Mr. King.
- Speaker #1
That's good. I love geeking out on this because it's in my blood. It's where I cut my teeth and this whole direct marketing thing. And he said it there at the end. Maximilian said, you know, everybody's always looking for the next great thing. What's the next hot thing? And what's old is new. And psychology doesn't change. The way people behave doesn't change. The technology changes. And when you overlay. current technologies like we just talked about and some of the things that you can do and implement that with old school stuff that still works and is highly effective the the possibilities are endless uh i mean my mind is spinning right now with just a hundred different ideas we can do for dragonfish and some some of our clients at dragonfish around this and but the the trick is just going to be convincing them like they see their eyes roll when we say yeah we're going to add a direct marketing snail mail to to to the campaign and they're going, nah, I don't know. I just want to do Facebook ads. That's the problem. And the beauty of something like postcard mania is you're going to look, okay, you don't got to go spend 20 grand. Let's just try it with a hundred, 200, 500. There's no setup costs. We can get into it for 500 bucks. What's 500 bucks to do a test? And then prove it to them that this works.
- Speaker #0
Perfect. I know I'm like you, probably worse because I'm just getting back into the cycle of this. I have left direct mail behind for many, many years. And now just hearing all these ideas and what's old is new again. So it's fantastic. I'm looking forward to it.
- Speaker #1
It's going to be good. And so speaking of what's old and what's new again, we'll be back again next week with another episode of the Marketing Misfits. And. What was that website? It's marketingmisfits.com.
- Speaker #0
It's CO. It's CO. And by the way, Dragonfish, by the way, is dfci.co. That's right,
- Speaker #1
dfci.co.
- Speaker #0
Had to get that in there.
- Speaker #1
That's right. Well, Norm, I guess I'll be talking to you again next week, right? Fantastic. We'll have another awesome guest on.
- Speaker #0
I'm looking forward to it. All right, Kev, we'll see you later. See you, everybody.
- Speaker #2
Thank
