Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  0:18

Happy Thursday, everyone. I'm Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson, digital strategist here at BWG Connect. And we are a network and knowledge sharing group. It's what we do, we stay on top of the newest trends, strategies, challenges, whatever it is that is shaping that ever changing digital landscape that we all know and love. We are on track to do at least 500 of these virtual events this year due to the increase in demand to better understand everything digital, and we will be doing at least 100 in person small format dinners this year. So if you are in a tier one city, feel free to shoot us an email, this format is usually 15 to 20 people having a conversation about a specific digital topic. So we'd be happy to send you an invite, and was very timely, is actually the Lob team will be hosting a dinner in San Francisco on March 16. So if you are going to be in town, definitely send me an email at Tiffany tiffany@bwgconnect.com. And we will get you set up for that dinner should be an awesome time. So if you don't want to connect, we spend the majority of our time talking to brands to stay on top of the different trends that are out there. So I'd love to have a conversation with you know, it's top of mind what your challenges are, because it's how we get the topics for future conversations. And it's also how we get to meet our resident experts, such as the team here today from Lob. Anyone that we asked to teach the collective has come highly recommended for multiple brands across the network. So if you're ever in need of any recommendations and any services within the industry, please reach out as we do have a short list of the best of the best that we'd be happy to share with you. And also know that we do have a talent agency, BWG Talent. We know a lot of people are hiring right now. So if you are in need, definitely feel to reach out to me and I'll put you in contact with the team. A few housekeeping items. We started about three minutes after the hour, we're gonna wrap up at least three to four minutes before the end of the hours and no need to rush you'll have time to get to your next meeting, no problem. And we want this to be as educational and conversational as possible. So definitely feel free to put into the chat and questions you have. If you feel more comfortable, you can email me at Tiffany@bwgconnect.com I'll make sure that we get them answered. So with that, let's roll and start to learn about the state of direct mail in 2022. The team at Lob has been great friends, partners, supporters of the network. I will kick it off to Hannah and Summer, do you want to give a brief introduction on yourself? That would be great and we can jump into the data. Perfect.

Summer Hahnlen  2:50

Thank you, Tiffany. Hi. As Tiffany said, I'm Summer Hahnlen. I am a senior director here at Lob and the lead of the customer success team. But I wear a dual hat and that I'm also the expert in residents. So always a lot going on. So for those of you who don't know about Lob Lob is the only automation platform for marketers who rely on direct mail. We leverage SaaS software to enable marketers and mail operations to drive efficiency and increase ROI. And I am really excited to say that we have over 10,000 customers and have to date sent over 700 million pieces of mail through our platform

Hannah Pucci  3:31

Hi everyone. Looking forward to our discussion today. I am Hannah Pucci director of consulting for our primary research team here at Comperemedia. Comperemedia is a Mintel company Mintel being a global market research firm income for media provides solutions for marketers through omni channel intelligence tools, expert insights and custom consultant services.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  3:50

Awesome. Thank you so much. So Hannah, I'm gonna kick it over to you. If you want to give an overview about the data that we'll be reviewing today. That'd be great.

Hannah Pucci  4:03

Yeah, absolutely. We were so excited to partner with Lob for the 2020 to stand up direct mail. For this study, we interviewed 170 business professionals who worked at companies across the US with 1000 or more employees. Each respondent works within one of these specific industries that you see listed here. of all respondents 74% report that their business targets both business and consumer audiences. And the majority of respondents state that their company is mail volume ranges from 100,000 to 100 million mail pieces per year.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  4:36

Thank you. So the live team took all the insights and boil them down into four key learnings that we're going to see reflected on the slides. These learnings will serve as topic for the discussion site. So let's dive right in. Companies are integrating direct mail into their existing omni channel strategy with email marketing automation and data from their CRMs. So, Hannah, this is a question that be directed towards you. How did marketers report integrating direct mail into their company's existing omni channel marketing strategy?

Hannah Pucci  5:16

Great question. Just 5% of respondents state that their company is using direct mail as a standalone tactic. So it is often integrated into a broader strategy. We see the largest overlap with email with 71% of respondents from our studies stating that it is integrated there. And over half report that is integrated with marketing automation and CRM data. When we look at who handles responsibility of direct mail campaigns, we see where that integration with email comes in 29% state that it is owned by their company's email or digital marketing teams.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  5:46

Interesting. And Summer, could you tell us how does direct mail response change when combined with other digital tactics like, let's say email?

Summer Hahnlen  6:02

Sure. ROI is always going to increase when you leverage an omni channel approach. Because when you pair two or more tactics together, you're strengthening your brand recognition to keeping your product top of mind. And that specifically when you pair email and direct mail, it's even more powerful because you're bringing together that tangible world and then your digital world. And while an email really only has a consideration period of about one to three days, a direct mail piece stays in our homes in the United States for approximately 17 days, which means you have a much longer consideration period and a reconsideration period.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  6:36

17 days that's incredible. Wonder if it's on people's fridges, like my home,

Summer Hahnlen  6:45

or counter. I don't know what it really says about us that we keep.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  6:49

I'll go but Yeah, beautiful. We love it. Awesome. Well, let's look at some of the use cases. That report provided. We are using direct mail for a variety of use cases from generating demand, mitigating churn to winning back dharmic customers with CAC, which is customer acquisition costs. on the rise, direct mail is being used to strategically keep existing customers engaged, which is so important to encourage advocacy, and to grow their customer base and offset churn. So Hannah, how have direct mail use cases changed, especially due to the pandemic?

Hannah Pucci  7:34

Well, a lot of company media actually did conduct a similar study in 2019. And while we did have some slight changes in audience between these two studies, we did see a similar breakdown of campaign type in 2019, which tells us this has remained fairly consistent. Even in the midst of a pandemic, it's no surprise that acquisition is still focus companies did report high response rates associated with this campaign type, with two thirds reporting new customer acquisition results in a 5% or more response rate on average.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  8:04

So interesting, it's remained consistent. Very cool. So let's move into the challenges. And let's start with talking about the workflow complexities. So we know that campaigns often involve dozens of stakeholders that are doing an array of tasks that are often manual, time consuming, and not integrated in other technologies that are being used. So this is probably a question for Summer. What are some of the ways organizations can solve workflow complexities with automation?

Summer Hahnlen  8:43

Well, I think it's very fair to say that the job of a marketer is becoming more complex by the day. I've seen many marketing teams actually be trimmed down over the last year, year and a half. And so you are in a day to day scramble of trying to make your meetings trying to take care of competing to do items. And it just can be quite overwhelming then to think about how do I develop you know, an automated triggered omni channel campaign, that's just a huge thing to be considering. So when you can partner with an organization like Lob and leverage your technological advancements to automate file transfers to personalize your creative based on known data elements, and even deploy timely triggered campaigns, you know, right after a customer makes a certain type of behavior, you're literally reducing your mind share that's required to get these campaigns out the door, and you're creating smarter campaigns that are going to work harder for you, without you necessarily having to continually work harder.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  9:47

To show that need of why they're moving to more technology based solutions. It's a must have. So let's move on to personalization. personalization and customization Must Haves, though many organizations can't or don't include any personalization, beyond the name and the address. Summer, can you tell us how can marketers make use of data to personalize and customize direct mail?

Summer Hahnlen  10:20

First, I would say that a successful campaign begins and ends with great data. It's important to set up your campaign as we know with a very clear objective in mind, knowing what types of KPIs you need to measure at the end of your effort. These days, as you said, personalization is generally first name, maybe last name, address, but it should not stop there. There are so many things that we can do with personalization, such as changing out your lifestyle imagery based on the demographic that you're contacting, adding a QR code, and the adding a vanity URL, incorporating a store locator map to bring people back into stores in a safe and healthy way. There's so many things that you can play with now, you just want to make sure that you always have clean and reliable data to feed this information through. And you have organizations like Lob that can help you do this so quickly.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  11:11

Very cool. And the second question for you is what are the most common fields that marketers are actually personalizing?

Summer Hahnlen  11:21

Well, unfortunately, right now, the most common field is name. But I think that the more that people understand that it does not need to be difficult to personalize, the more we're going to see a pretty big expansion of that. Some other things that we see come through our different offer codes, different percentages off or dollars off, we are starting to see a lot of people use store locator maps QR codes are becoming huge. So I think we're going to continue to see this trend shift to a personalized direct mail piece per person.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  11:48

And personalization is really tough to do when you're doing that all manually, which brings us against that need for technology. So, as direct mail is integrated into omni channel marketing campaigns, we need the speed, flexibility and measurability that technology brings. We are seeing the shift away from agencies to a shift to more in house teams, and technology platforms to create, send and track direct mail. So question for you, Summer, is in this audience question. Oh, do you have any data on how long the typical direct mail campaign takes to execute in the larger corporations or organizations,

Summer Hahnlen  12:41

I like that qualifier of the larger organization, because I have found that the larger the organization, the longer it takes, because you do have so many different teams that you need to route with your writing with brand and legal and PR and no one has the same feedback for you. And then generally, it's pretty contradictory. So we can see timelines of up to like two to three months from setting up your strategy, setting your clear campaign objective, and then arriving in the customers mailbox, which is an incredibly long lead time considering that people need their KPI reporting back instantly.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  13:19

So that brings us to effectiveness. Let's look at measuring direct mail effectiveness because effectiveness matters. And it is going up percentage wise because there's better tracking because we're using technology. So campaign effectiveness is measured by using a variety of metrics, like revenue and ROI leading the pack. As more companies have moved to technology platforms to power automated direct mail. At scale, measuring conversion is critical to ensure effectiveness and ROI. And it's critical to get those annual budgets approved. The SaaS from the report back out this clearly on this side with marketers feeling very good about how they can measure direct mail effectiveness. Now we're going to this slide that really kind of took my breath away when I saw the number because I was not expecting this high of a number is 67%. This is very fascinating, big while 67% agree that direct mail shows the best ROI of all all the channels their company is using today. So we talked about the why, like why does direct mail responses increase year over year for that to Summer?

Summer Hahnlen  14:40

Sure. I love this question. I feel like I asked this question quite a lot. And I'm also very passionate about this question. So I think it it continues to improve year over year for a number of reasons. One is marketers and technology companies are finding one another and they're helping one another and it is becoming easier to contact that perfect prospect or to reach out to your customers for like a retention campaign with something that is personalized just for them, that makes them feel like you really know them, and you care about them. And they want to actually take the action because they feel enticed to. But I also think that there's a shift that has happened in the last couple of years. And it can be potentially due to COVID. I would say, just from my perspective, going out to the mailbox, beginning in March 2020, for you know, the next nine months after that was pretty much an event that felt like I was finally getting out of the house, I was doing something for me. And getting mail in the home just became something that was a little bit more fun. And I think that what we're seeing from the data is that millennials are attending to agree. There was a stat I saw, maybe a month or so ago that said that millennials and Gen Z are finding that direct mail, they're 25% more likely to trust direct mail, than, say, an email or an SMS message that comes through. So I think there's that. And potentially it's a novelty for some of the younger generation because they did not grow up with a lot of mail. But I also think that we live in a world that we need to acknowledge, where we receive over 100 emails a day, probably across multiple inboxes, some of which we really don't check, we see over 60 display ads a day. And we are really good at turning our brains off, to try not to really engage with too many of those. Otherwise, we wouldn't have like the mental capacity to go through our day. But yet, then we only receive two to four direct mail pieces per day for the people in your household. So you are holding something in your hand, you're giving it a consideration period. And it is literally taking less mental load to process what you're looking at, than everything in the digital space. So I feel like all of those things combined is why direct bail stands out more than really ever before.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  16:55

makes so much sense. But I never would have thought about it that way. But and it shows in the percentage. That's amazing. So thank you, let's talk about how the measurement is happening. This is equally interesting. So as we've heard, there are much more advanced ways of measuring direct mail effectiveness. And you can see a variety of tactics to employ to get that data. So I believe this is another question we have for you Summer is personalized URLs or pearls. QR codes are a way to measure direct mail conversion, are there scenarios where you would use one over the other?

Summer Hahnlen  17:37

I think it's really a matter of preference. We have seen that testing done with one versus the other where older generations are more comfortable taking that direct mail piece maybe to their laptop or desktop computer and typing in a vanity URL. And then we've seen the younger generations. And this was not shocking, who are much more likely to scan a QR code because of the world that we've been living in over the last couple of years. We are very familiar with QR codes. So I think it can it's really something people should test. And I also think that there's a world where the two live together. So having a vanity URL built into your QR code so that then you can also track the customer action and intent through the stream. So a bit of a long winded answer to say it's all a matter of preference and testing. But that’s what I personally think.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  18:25

Yeah, testing is key. And then a follow up question is, can you speak a bit about the importance of reporting to prove direct mail return on investment?

Summer Hahnlen  18:37

Well, as we know, direct mail has high out of pocket cost. So we need to make sure that we are leveraging reporting to its fullest extent. And a campaign that doesn't include reporting, I don't believe really teaches us much of anything. And so advances in technology allow us to track that direct mail engagement in a way that we have historically thought about with email. So you can track someone's purchase intent as they go through what you would call like your buy flow. You can also create more one to one personalized experiences, and the savvier that we become the more use cases I think we're going to see where you really should be leveraging direct mail across many of your lines of business.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  19:16

Thank you. This has definitely been a very action packed discussion. Let's recap what we've learned so far. Direct Mail is a crucial part of any marketers omni channel strategy, and acquisition and automated direct mail program can effectively target customers using your own or third party data resulting in lower CAC and more ROI. Direct Mail enables you to deliver real time messages using what you know about the customer's past preferences to get them to convert to other products, which increases their lifetime value. And finally, direct mail is a way to engage with your customers efficiently and effectively reduces churn and increases retention rates, which we all know is priceless and absolutely love. A lot of really great takeaways here, this is awesome. Some fun stats, I definitely suggest, we will be sending this out at the end to share with your team. But just looking at three of these key sets of the wow factor 68% measurable return on campaign investment, but hyper personalization, continuous optimization, and multiple form factors. There's an 85% cost savings by increasing operational efficiency and removing that waste in the process, which is absolutely incredible. And your reduction in time to get to the campaigns and get them out the door is no longer taking months is actually taking days. When you modernize your direct mail, you make it infinitely more efficient. You can integrate it with your digital channels to make your existing campaign more effective. It's a true win win for all. So I think it's safe to say if we sum up this presentation that the future is never looked brighter for marketers and for direct mail. It's super exciting time to be in this industry, that's for sure. We're gonna move on to the q&a, because we have a lot of questions to get through before the end of the hour. Again, the sets are great to share with your team helps everybody level up and just promote those meaningful conversations in your organization when you're talking about direct mail, and the power it can be in conjunction with your technology solutions. So I have a question for Hannah. What did the survey show was the average percent of overall channel budget that larger organizations are spending on direct mail.

Hannah Pucci  22:02

Great question and the bulk. So about three fourths of companies surveyed report, five to 50% of the marketing budget is allocated to direct mail. I know that's quite a wide range. We can dig in a little further, more specifically, we found that 1/3 report there right in the middle of that. So about 20 to 25% of their budget is allocated for direct mail

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  22:22

25% with a huge ROI, showing worth investment. So that's awesome. Here we have one from Dave. So what industries see the best results with direct mail, retail food, home improvements, any others.

Summer Hahnlen  22:42

I wouldn't say that there's necessarily one industry that is killing it with direct mail. I think that more industries are finding ways to leverage direct mail and a very smart way. I've worked with clients across the auto industry, telecom, hospitality. And I think it's all about how you set up your campaign, how you target how you think about the process, who you partner with, and I can think it can be incredibly successful. And it would be industry agnostic, just in my personal opinion.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  23:07

Great question. Definitely keep them coming. Here we have one of boats. Summer, this is probably geared towards you. What is the best type of direct mail letter or postcard? Is there a rule on how to determine what's best? For your communication objective?

Summer Hahnlen  23:30

I figured this question might come up. So my answer is kind of like short and sweet. There's no golden ticket, if there was a golden ticket, I would have my own business. And I would be you know, sitting in the Bahamas, basically. The only way that you can figure out which format works for your business is by testing formats against one another, and then testing different creatives within that format. And I know that there's that phrase, like always be testing. But basically, when you set up your campaign, you should be setting up a test within the campaign and having that mentality anytime you're setting up a campaign. So it's like an always on sort of approach. And there's so many things now that you can do with data where you can do multivariate testing. So it's compounding and you have many different iterations and you have this incredible outcome at the end, that is likely going to surprise you. So I would say there are times where I have been incredibly surprised that a long form letter ended up working really well with the younger generation, or a postcard worked well with an older generation, but you just have to test and figure it out for your business.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  24:35

Awesome. Oh, here is a very hot topic that's becoming more top of mind for everybody is sustainability. And as it is more top of mind, personally and in organizations, how can you be sure that direct mail isn't contributing to waste you're not sending the wrong message to the consumer.

Summer Hahnlen  24:55

I can take this one with Lob our customers can reduce waste by ensuring that they're sending strategic mail that is working well, for the customer base. So it's basically removing waste. And then on the sustainability side, we use FSC certified paper. And we also partner with the Eden reforestation project that plants two trees for every one tree that we use. So it's a bit of like a multi prong approach.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  25:24

Very cool. That's awesome. So here is a question about the best type. And Summer this is probably geared towards you, again, you have all the answers, you have the golden ticket of all the information we need for direct mail here, the best type of direct mail letter or postcard, is there a rule on what is the best,

Summer Hahnlen  25:48

My only rule is test and find out. So I would not say that there is one format that always works. But I will say that your tests, if you set them up correctly, might surprise you.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  26:02

And testing to be industries are different. Maybe seasonality is different.

Summer Hahnlen  26:09

But it can be that it can also be just staying top of mind by maybe changing out your formats as you're continually reaching out to customers so that you do stay top of mind. So I think that there are many organizations out there that have very comprehensive direct mail programs where they are touching customers a couple times a month. And they will play with different formats so that they stay relevant. And they don't, it doesn't start to feel stale. So there's just so many different things you can do.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  26:35

Everybody who's listening, definitely bring the questions on through the q&a chat or email me at Tiffany@bwgconnect, but we do have a few more that are funneling in. And there's one that's always been a question for me is like how do you acquire the physical addresses? From an email address? Can you even do that?

Summer Hahnlen  26:59

It's not something that's incredibly easy to do. I it's something that Lob is investigating as potentially an opportunity. But I do not have a great answer to that particular question.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  27:09

That is very interesting. You had talked about the Gen Z. And I thought that was fascinating, is it's become like a novelty, which made me feel really old. Yeah.But let's ask about the services of Lob. So how does the customer use Lob services to get mail campaigns out in less than a week.

Summer Hahnlen  27:43

Because of our automated triggering program, you can actually send a dynamic customized piece through our system view a real time proof and get it out the second that your dad data feeds through. You combine that with our print delivery network of printers all over the US that have availability and are ready to go the second that the the API call funnels through. And all of that combined is what gets you that speed to market.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  28:10

So you really like comment from the audience. And they're seeing hearing the opposite. They're in Pennsylvania, it seems to be less less direct mail in our mailbox, local and regional retailers doing much less than ever before. And hearing that other forms of advertising media are improving, especially among younger consumers. That direct mail doesn't feel like the answer. It probably does get down to the geo location of where the if that is, I guess it goes back to that specific for the audience for the industry. And again, going to that point of just testing and seeing what sticks. And it doesn't all stick with everybody based on a variety of different reasons. But it is a very interesting call out.

Hannah Pucci  29:02

And to say I can mention something on this as well, definitely. Here at Comperemedia, we're constantly digging into our head of omni channel intelligence and understanding what's going on in this space and how it compares to digital. And so we're constantly measuring kind of the effectiveness of digital versus direct mail and really understanding what's happening in the atmosphere. And I know that technology, of course, is increasing, and we're seeing a lot more in the digital space. But one of our recent findings in our report is speaks to kind of how direct mail plays into that technology. And that technology is not killing direct mail, but it's actually enhancing it. And I think that just speaks to kind of how they played together and measuring that for your company and understanding kind of what works for your demographic and how important that is.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  29:48

That's great. Very helpful. We have another question about the personalized URLs. So is there any suggestion on how to use pearls In direct mail campaigns.

Summer Hahnlen  30:03

How to use? I think, well, I don't know if that's necessarily that might be like an execution question. But let me think through this for a second. So you want to use them regardless, you want to make sure that you have personalized URLs so that you can track that engagement on your direct mail piece, and how to use them or how maybe to show them in a creative light, and make sure that they are being noticed, is making sure that you have some space around them, making sure that they're large enough that you as you're scanning the piece, understand that this call to action is tied to like this very personalized experience. And I think as you're creating your mail piece, you always want to keep in mind, what is your objective? What are you trying to get the customer to do? And if you step out of yourself for a minute and just look at the piece, does that piece tell the customer very quickly, why they're reaching out to them and what they want them to do?

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  30:55

Call to Action? Do you think companies will move more to in house mail houses than using third parties?

Summer Hahnlen  31:06

Hannah, I think you had a stat around that, that you're you're seeing that more organizations are pulling some portions of their business in house, correct?

Hannah Pucci  31:15

Yes, we did see that within our recent study. And so there is still a mix. But we are seeing, I believe it's roughly half if I'm not remembering correctly, that are pulling it in house. But there's still a large group that also partners as well.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  31:28

And we didn't talk much about the b2b sector. But how could the solution tie into the b2b side.

Summer Hahnlen  31:42

I don't have as much experience personally and b2b. Most of my experience is in b2c. But I think that the same methodology and the same technology resource really holds true, you're, you're thinking about contacting a business versus a customer, and you would speak to them in a very similar way, especially if they're an existing customer, you want to acknowledge that they're an existing customer, or maybe you want to win back the customer. So I don't necessarily have a response that's specific to b2b. But I would say you want to make sure that you're partnering with the smart people, and you're all learning from one another. And you're making sure that you're being as efficient and strategic with your contact as possible.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  32:22

Another thing about the timeline. So since it's more traditional, channel, long lead times between the planning the data pass off and the in home dates, how do you ensure the personalized content is so relevant to the client by the time it's received, versus other channels that are using digital,

Summer Hahnlen  32:46

that is one of the biggest challenges for especially larger organizations that do have that two to three month lead time. We at Lob partner with some of these very large mailers, and they are shocked to see how quickly we can get things out the door. And so it is about decreasing that length of time from the planning and implementation and execution. And then partnering with the technology first company to make sure that once it leaves the the organization's hand when everything is you know, approved and ready to go, that you have the quickest way possible to your print to your print process. And then making sure also that it's being tracked and it's reliably being tracked, and you're staying engaged with it the whole time.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  33:26

Great. Well, this was very informative, wonderful data. I definitely have anybody who's listening, follow up conversation with the Lob team would definitely be worth your time we'll be reaching out and connecting everybody. And also don't fail to reach out to me, Tiffany@bwgconnect. I'm happy to have a conversation with any needs. You may have have a good chat about digital. That's what we're here for. So with that, we're going to wrap it up. Thank you Summer. Thank you, Hannah. Great information. fantastic presentation. I hope everybody has a wonderful week of coming weekend. And we look forward to seeing you on our next event. Thank you so much, guys. Bye.