Aaron Conant 0:18

Happy Wednesday, everybody. My name is Aaron Conant, I'm the co-founder, Managing Director of BWG Connect. We're massive networking and knowledge sharing group with 1000s of organizations who do exactly that we network and now chair to stay on top of the newest trends, strategies, pain points, whatever it might be, that's shaping the digital landscape as a whole, I connect with 30 Plus brands a week, just kind of an advisory role, also to stay on top of the trends that are out there. And it's through those conversations that we were able to knowledge share collectively as a group, but also when we get the topics for these calls in on those calls. I'm also asking everybody, Hey, who are the best people that you're working with today, and that's where we get the experts for our call. So if you ever have, you're looking for any help in the digital space, anything from Amazon to direct consumer performance, marketing, you know, email to, you know, direct mail, in this case, don't ever hesitate to shoot me an email Aaron aaron@bwgconnect.com we've got a short list of the top service providers that are out there. Now, pretty much every vertical right now. You know, a couple of housekeeping items, as we get started, we're kicking this off at three to four minutes after the hour, and just you know, we're gonna wrap this up with three to four minutes to go in it as well. So if you're looking at your watch, just know, you're gonna have plenty of time to get on to your next meeting without being late. And we want it to be as educational and informational as possible. So at any point in time, if you have a question drop into the chat drop into the question section or email it to me Aaron aaron@bwgconnect.com that includes an hour after the call tomorrow, next week, you have a question in the digital space, shoot it over to us we've got 1000s of brands on the network, and we can usually get you an answer and under in under a day. So that means said is it kind of kick off this conversation as a whole, I can tell you the trend that's out there. As we've gone through the pandemic as a whole, including looping in there, you know, the iOS updates that have come through Google talking about third party cookies going away. And I know there's kind of a stay on that for a year. But you know, a lot of focus is switch just from, you know, top of funnel to pay. How do we take care of the people that are already in the funnel that I've already converted that are already on our site, they're already customers already buying from us. And in how do we maximize that portion of it as a whole. And so that's kind of how we got to you know, the title of this secret ingredient to increasing revenue throughout the customer lifecycle. We got some great friends, great partner, supporters of the network and a ton of brands. And they come highly recommended for multiple brands in a very unique fashion of direct mail, and they're all around leaders in this space. And they agreed to kind of jump on the jump on the line today, kind of provide us some high level information across the board, you know, in a new way that people are handling the customer lifecycle and maximizing the potential that's in it. But also answer as many questions as we can throw at them. So drop them into you know, the questions section or the q&a and portion there and we'll get them answered. But, you know, if I kind of kick this off, Kim, I'll kick it over to you if you want to do a brief intro on yourself in Lob, and then we can kick it over to Mark and kind of then tackle some of this content. So I'm good.

Kim Courvoisier  3:31

Absolutely. Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining our webinar, the secret ingredient to increasing revenue throughout the customer lifecycle. We're joining you today to show you how you can drive conversion, customer lifetime value and ROI simply by integrating direct mail with your online channels. For true omnichannel customer experience. Like Aaron mentioned, we'll be happy to take questions throughout the presentation. And of course, we're recording this webinar. So if you have to run out and walk the dog, grab some water, no worries, we'll send you a copy after the webinar to sit back and enjoy this time already, Mark. Awesome. So

Mark Pinard 4:07

selfishly before we dive in, I want to kind of talk a little bit about Lob. And so Lob provides a complete end to end direct mail solution that integrates seamlessly into your digital marketing workflow. And we provide API's for print mail, as well as address verification, and then combine that with an extensive printing network template and other functionality to give your direct mail the flexibility and efficiency it needs to be more relevant than ever in the digital age. Kim and I will be your gracious host today. And I'm Mark Pinard. I'm the Director of Product Marketing. And Kim Courvoisier, who's our director of content here at Lob. As you can imagine, we geek out on all things direct mail, so let's let's kind of dive in.

Kim Courvoisier  4:47

Absolutely. So companies have used direct mail forever and ever simply because it works. Sometimes they've gone away from it and come back to it again, because it works. Direct mail has a response rate 13 times higher. than email. And direct mail works even better, when combined with other channels or other customer interactions based direct mail response hovers around 6%. When you communicate with customers who made a previous purchase, those rates jumped to 18%. And when you combine direct mail with email, you have response rates north of 27%. That's pretty compelling stuff. So

Mark Pinard 5:27

the problem though, is with legacy direct mail, it provides exceptional value on its own, but it's really hard to integrate as a channel with the rest of your digital campaigns. With direct mail, you get high response rates, good ROI that can make a big impact when included as part of your regular marketing campaign workflow. However, all of these drawbacks that make it really hard to integrate it more broadly. And it's typically resource heavy to execute compared to digital channels, and legacy workflows can take about eight to 12 weeks roughly to get a direct mail campaign up door. This makes using the offline and online marketing channels together probably are on nearly impossible. And there's minimal customization so many of the marketing teams can't even personalize beyond the customer's name and address. And then there's also the lack of the technical ability to a B or multivariate tests across multiple creatives, the same way that you would expect with your digital channels, you also might not have a ton of visibility into performance, and you can't do direct attribution or you might not even be able to verify the delivery of mail pieces, let alone that they went to the right address. The cost to execute a direct mail pack can can also be unpredictable. Given you have to renegotiate for each campaign in the relationship with a traditional print vendor is much different when it comes to comes to pricing. That processing also means that you really can't afford to send out smaller, more targeted direct mail campaigns because it increases your per piece costs and then limits your ROI at the end. Finally, you can't really time box direct mail campaigns to when they will reach your audience like you can with digital channels, and you have an unpredictable delivery window. With all of this, it's very hard to use direct mail marketing to support digital marketing and vice versa.

Kim Courvoisier 7:07

Wow. Not used to seeing a slide with so many drawbacks versus so many, especially when it's coming from a direct mail vendor. But that's your legacy direct mail. Right? When you automate direct mail, you have a tactic that integrates with the rest of your marketing stack. Automation remedies, the factors that prevent you from using direct mail more fully. It brings the speed, personalization, visibility, cost and delivery window to a point where you can integrate it seamlessly with your digital channels. And that's what we're really talking about today. How do you automate your direct mail and use it to increase revenue throughout the customer lifecycle by using digital channels and direct mail together? Think of direct mail as the BFF your digital channels.

Mark Pinard  7:51

So from a functional level, what this means to you is 100% 100% customizability. Every mail piece you send is completely customizable with images. Text Color offer layout on a variety of different form factors such as postcards, self mailers, letters, card affixation, and so on. That customization actually enables you to optimize for ROI conversions, or other performance metrics just by testing different variations for different audience segments of just about anything, you can send in exactly the same way that you would test with email. It's also much faster to execute. So once you finalize your design, you can have it in a customer's hands within a week or less. And that takes into account and printing addresses and USPS delivery. So like email, direct mail obviously needs to be trackable, and that means delivery confirmation and the ability to track ROI with direct attribution. For example, if a customer makes a purchase with a promo code you sent in the mail, you should be able to attribute that purchase directly back to that individual customer. Lastly, it also needs to be automated and trackable. So when you send a welcome post postcard a customer makes a first purchase or send out a promo code when an existing customer hasn't ordered in 30 day last or even the most more personal approach of sending a birthday card on their birthday. Anything you can trigger with email, you can do the exact same for direct mail. And then on top of that production is also easy and automated. You can just add the content you want, the images you want and then hit Set. After that you honestly don't have to worry about anything you will know when the campaign has been printed handed off to USPS and placed in the recipients mailbox. In fact, I'll even go one step further. You'll be able to create direct mail pin campaigns using the same exact workflow use for email. And then you'll be able to segment customers move contracts contacts to different cohorts, or nurture or upsell customers automatically. And then whether you're pulling that data from a CRM or marketing automation platform point of sale system or wherever you honestly have one workflow you can use across all of your different marketing channels. So next,

Aaron Conant 9:53

just really quick, just a question that comes in. And I think you just answered it, or you've seen people use this just You know, plugging it in, like, like an email campaign right now, is it? That clarification, I think would be great. And the other question that comes in, so I'll let you answer that within a throw one more issue is, where's the budget coming from? Is the other question that comes in? Yeah, I

Mark Pinard 10:15

saw that first one. 100%. Right. I think that because Lob is an API based product, what I like to call it is bringing direct mail to your data rather than your data to direct mail. But because we're an API based product, we can literally integrate with any of the systems that you're using to execute any of your digital campaigns. And every email said, what happens to that direct mail becomes a tile on the actual campaign workflow, right? So you're sending out an email followed by a direct mail piece, followed by a text message followed by whatever might be, it's now part of your campaign sequencing, which is huge, making it actual digital. So you have you're connecting both that offline and online world. And then the other question is that all what I I've actually dug into this pretty hard with gardeners that a lot of our enterprise marketing are looking for budget spend as far as where are they optimizing their campaigns, and because of like you mentioned at the top of the hour with Google cooking, and everything that's going on the digital side, as well as people just being home in front of the computers all day, digital channels have reached a saturation point where a lot of budget is shifting over to direct mail as part of that acquisition channel. Whether it's new budget, or a budget that they were previously spending on digital ads, they're now carving out a spot for it, because they they're seeing the acquisition and the ROI increase pretty rapidly.

Aaron Conant 11:31

Awesome low. And just a quick reminder, if others you have questions just drop in the question section or chatter he keeps emailing them to me, Aaron, aaron@bwgconnect.com. Awesome. Okay, back over to you that it's good stuff. Thank you.

Mark Pinard  11:43

Thank you. So all that sounds great, right. But like, how do we do that? Well, it's really simple because you know, selfishly again, we already built the system for you. Right. So Lob provides the complete automated direct mail platform that will replace your legacy manual processes. In a workflow, you design your direct mail creative in HTML. We've even got a built in HTML templating system that really streamlines process making it easy to design and then customize your mail piece as you see fit. We also have highly accurate address verification system, which enables you to reliably verify addresses and eliminates the cost of mail pieces going to the wrong recipient. So when Lob is directly integrated with your marketing automation, like like Aaron was was chatting about. This can be your CRM, your CDP your IPS systems, the creatives, and the addresses are automatically sent to law via the API and then sent to our vast printer delivery, network printing and mailing. The best part of this is that whether you're sending one letter, or 1 million, your per mail piece cost remains the same. And then on, as it starts to get fulfilled, you will receive that data at every step of the journey, you'll know when the letter has been received, when it's been printed, sorted, and then delivered for that last touch scan into the actual end recipients mailbox. Because it's integrated with your tech stack, you can send customers an email when a mail piece in their mailbox, let them know special offers waiting for them, or even send them a text message, letting them know to go check their mailbox that becomes part of that campaign workflow that I mentioned earlier. And of course, you can then plug the data back into all the tools you to track and reach customers, enabling you to create that true omnichannel profile. So it literally gives you the umbrella of the entire performance campaign, but the entire performance data of that campaign underneath one roof, rather than having direct mail, such as a child silo, and then your digital channels on the other side.

Kim Courvoisier 13:36

Okay, so none of you know me. But if you did, and Mark knows me, I live for workflows, efficiency, and getting things done. And so when I saw this slide that took, you know, the 492 disparate steps it took to get a direct mail campaign out with a legacy, and then what it takes with love with just a few simple steps, I was like, mind blown, and so I begged to present this section of the webinar, because it's all about that efficiency. So let's take a minute and just unpack the drag benefits of that automation. Simply put, automation makes direct mail way more efficient. Ding, ding, ding. Legacy direct mail campaigns often involve dozens of stakeholders doing an array of tasks that are often manual, time consuming, and not integrated with the other systems, platforms and technologies you're using. And that doesn't sound like a very fun way to work or get things done, does it not to me. When you modernize your direct mail automation, you can eliminate redundancies that leaves you with a much more agile direct mail process. And you can put new advertising campaigns out or change your messaging in near real time, just by using an HTML template. There's no complicated design process, no approving paper proofs. You write it, you send it your works done. So the more efficient workflow means faster male production and delivery speed. We found on average that project timelines are reduced by two thirds from six weeks to only to males produced about 150%, or two and a half times faster, that's a total game changer for most organizations. Once you hit send, your mail will be printed and mailed in 48 hours. These are big numbers and cool numbers because it's like you just think of that efficiency. Think of all the things you can be doing, when you're not spending your time just going through this arduous manual workflow. Because production is fast, and those turnaround times are consistent, you can get mail pieces delivered on a certain date, this is what Mark was talking about. That enables you to use your direct mail much more strategically with other channels, timing those mail deliveries, the same way you would time an email drop SMS text ad or other digital messages. You send a break like

Aaron Conant 15:47

a question comes in what where does the drop from six to two weeks come in from and what is entailed in that two week timeline?

Kim Courvoisier  15:57

Mark you want to grab that?

Mark Pinard  15:59

Yeah, no worries, um, in what it honestly is, is like it's the back and forth of like working with a third party creative team or building out the creatives internally, or sitla, sending that over the printer and like understanding the color and combination, everything that goes with it. And it's the file, the uploading and the downloading the files. And it's just like the back and forth that take internally. Because all this is directly connected within your actual marketing automation system, you can set up your HTML templates, and to actually add in all the different variables to that. And then most of that mail is then triggered and sent and then automatically sent to the printer and fulfillment, as well as all the File Specifications. So that removes all that back and forth and redundant processes that are typically with your typical direct mail workflow. And that's where a lot of that efficiency comes in. We've seen customers reduce their workflow process by like up to 60 70%. Sometimes, and that all depends, you know, who you're working with, and third party agencies. If you are working third party agencies, you can plug them into this workflow as well. It just all depends how your actual setup is done. Awesome. Love it, love it. And that actually rolls right into perfectly for this next slide on the production side. So eliminating your legacy workflow and speeding up the process obviously significantly reduces your production costs. Your dedicated direct mail marketing team is now almost part of your digital marketing team. And your internal workflow for direct mails is no more complex in the workflow for email, which means you can get done a lot more for a lot less. And then if you partner with Lob, you also get consistent pricing, which is huge. Like I previously mentioned, whether you're sending a single postcard, or 1 million, you pay a single per piece rate that's locked in. And that makes spending more predictable enables you to use direct mail more strategically. And then you're no longer forced to choose between big mailbox and then the higher person per piece pricing like you would in your legacy flow. With us, you get the better value with our address verification API, and you also cut failed deliveries to almost nothing. So you're no longer depending on internal or third party address list that may be outdated or inaccurate. And you can confirm that every delivery is an actual success. The other big portion is you can track conversions by embedding a custom URL or QR code, phone numbers, whatever it might be, which allows you to reduce the waste and track results more effectively. And then lastly, because you're able to send out more timely, relevant and targeted campaigns, and virtually eliminate delivery failures, you'll quickly find that you're getting better return on your marketing spend with higher response rates and ROI because these mail pieces are highly customizable. And part of the actual buying cycle in which the topic is relevant to the actual customer.

Aaron Conant 18:40

You're really quick, a question that comes in around responsibility? So who do you I mean, you guys are dealing with, you know, tons of brands in this space? Whose responsibility is this? You know, the integration and the execution? And then, you know, the follow up? Is it? Same thing as doing email? We'd love to hear your thoughts there.

Mark Pinard 18:57

Yeah, for sure. Um, so on the integration side, it's we can work with that, it all depends, like we'll get into in a couple slides around integrations, we have some out of the box integrations that are quickly plug and play, depending on the system you're using. And we do have a level of Solutions Engineering, professional services that can work with your internal teams on custom integrations that may need to be built as well. And then we are your direct mail kind of professionals, right. So it does rely on you making sense of your data and understanding where to plug in direct mail as part of your campaign sequencing. But we can take a step back and actually look at the data with you and help you make some key decisions depending on campaign timing, you know, seasonality, what you're seeing from end results, we are kind of your partners in crime when it comes to that.

Kim Courvoisier 19:45

Yeah, so jumping back and, you know, really, we've talked through a bunch of benefits here and one of the biggest again, is your ability to automate direct mail campaigns and integrate that in your Omnichannel marketing strategy no longer Does your direct mail need to be this standalone tactic disconnected, desperate over here on the side, you know, not being able to be looped into things. You know, this automated direct mail program serves as a multiplier for other direct mail benefit. It means those initial improvements you get like better targeting ROI and faster production will keep growing as you optimize your campaigns. Direct Mail automation, as you think of the next slide be great. It makes those same strategies use for digital channels available for direct mail through integrations is what Mark started to talk about. Instead of a clunky tool, pick limits, direct mail becomes something really dynamic that can integrate with your marketing program the same way your digital channels do. So I spent about a decade in email marketing, so I've done a few campaigns myself. So to illustrate what I mean, let's take a look back at email as an example, in the beginning, email was fairly limited, but over time, it matured, we've been able to expand its capabilities and functionality. The same goes for direct mail, the use of personalization, customization, prebuilt, HTML, templates, targeting and segmentation, all took email from that old basic pray and spray mentality of communication to one that's now highly targeted. Automated direct mails followed suit maturing from a method that used a lot of manual processes, one that's evolved to be effective at scale. And I think a big portion

Mark Pinard  21:30

of this is the actual campaign optimization, right? Like, how do you actually optimize for direct mail. So when you automate it, you gain dynamic, personalized content, including custom images, text and design. And then you can automate sends via integrations which I was kind of mentioning earlier. So for example, you can integrate it with your customer, your eCommerce platform, so that you send out a customized Thank you postcard when the customer places an order, you can use other kinds of behaviors to trigger sense such as sending an offer when a customer abandons a shopping cart. And then you can also send segment customers automatically and then move them around based on on the actions that they've taken. That lets you track behaviors among groups of customers, then fine tune your tactics to address the needs of a group, such as first time customers or repeated holiday shoppers, you can also optimize your testing like you would with email using either a B or multivariate testing processes. And then your campaigns get as sophisticated your marketing department is so basically literally have the flexibility and efficiency to utilize direct mail the same way you would with any of your actual digital channels. And then on the integration side, you can add direct mail to the tech stack you already depend on. So like I mentioned, Lob offers off the shelf integrations with you know, CRM and automation platforms like Marketo, Salesforce, Salesforce marketing cloud, and then we're fully native solution on the Salesforce AppExchange. So it really is a plug and play. We also integrate with a lot of other cutting edge tools like the drag and drop automation platform trade.io, or marketing and customer engagement platforms like braising interval. And because we're API base, you can work with custom in house solutions, or new solutions that your developers are creating.

Kim Courvoisier 23:09

So we all know what direct mail can do, but what can you do with it? Direct Mail is useful throughout the customer lifecycle. That's what we're all here to learn about today, right? From acquisition through cross sell, and upsell through retention and customer loyal. It's useful the dedicated channel and a way to provide lift to those other channels. Remember, this is the best way to all your other channels. So let's look at some real life examples. acquisition campaigns can receive a huge lift from direct mail automation, you get better visibility and improvements in your ability to test and target. So you can move from sending those big blasts of direct mail similar to what we talked about in old school email marketing, sending really finely tuned targeted mail that results in higher conversion rates. Let's chat for a minute about real flow. Bill flow was founded in 2007 as a tool to streamline the real estate investment process. Over time, it evolved into an integrated marketing platform for real estate investors to help them generate and engage with leads in local home markets. Because direct mail is a tangible form of communication, it has that unique ability to capture its audience's attention and it allows realtors to connect with motivated potential home sellers. However, manual direct mail campaigns lack insight, which means the investors had to run large scale acquisition campaigns yield any meaningful results. It was inefficient process for the real estate investors including real slow and their users. But then, real slow, integrated Lobs templating tracking and direct mail functionality. And boy, was it a game changer. Users now had the ability to send highly targeted personalized mailings, Lobs detailed tracking and analytics allowed real close customers better segment their audiences and measure campaign performance for each of their cohorts. Now real slow customers were able to send highly tailored targeted refine lists, and optimize hit rates without having to send as much mail by actively performing a B testing which earned II or higher callback rates. So look at this, this is great story, they were able to to do more with less. And that way they're not fatiguing their audience. We're going to talk a little bit about that. And another example I have coming up, and you can see the results for yourself right on this slide are impressive, right. The Mark, tell us about another one. So direct mail

Mark Pinard 25:31

can really help your use previous purchases drive new purchases, whether as part of an upsell cross sell or retention campaign, which is typically would not see direct mails part of one of those one company that really nailed this, though, is thrown up. So thread up is a rapidly growing online Nutella that sells a wide variety of secondhand clothing online. And because they had so many different styles of clothing, it was really important to personalize their marketing materials. But before they found Lob, they had tried to do direct mail, but we're not seeing a lot of lift executing it with their typical legacy workflow. With the automation of personalization that Lob unlock, they're able to do some really sophisticated thing with their direct mail campaigns. They profile customer style choices based on previous purchases, and then sent out customers mail pieces that featured items that align with sales they bought in the past. And that alone actually increased repeat repeat purchases by 20%, which is a huge uplift for any of the campaigns that they had run.

Kim Courvoisier  26:31

Awesome. So moving on to our next case, study or use case. So it's been top of mind for everyone. During the pandemic, we've acquired a lot of new customers due to the convenience of shopping online, and different things like that. But the concern what keeps a lot of us up at night is churn, right? We want to retain these customers that we've worked so hard to acquire, natural that we want them to stick around and pay off those customer acquisition costs. But also, we want to increase their lifetime value and increase our revenue. So third, love is a great story. And this strikes near and dear to my heart is someone who spent a decade in email marketing, they sell high quality Intimate Apparel, and they recently tested using direct mail and a retention campaign that was a little bit unusual. They tested taking a segment of their email subscribers that had unsubscribed and send them a direct mail campaign. The theory was that customers who had unsubscribed don't want to receive offers and promotions from the brand, just not in the form of yet another email and that retention campaign prove their theory, right. They found that direct mail achieve the best results and the highest response rates with those email unsubscribers. If they had relied on email alone, those customers would have been completely out of reach. Now that's the power of modern direct mail.

Mark Pinard  27:58

Now that we've gone through some examples of how other companies are using direct mail, effectively, I'm wanting to kind of like share some tips and tricks of like how you can optimize your own direct mail campaigns. As we mentioned earlier, one of the best things you can do to increase the effectiveness of your marketing is to integrate direct mail with the rest of your actual campaigns that you're running with the rest of your digital channels. And whatever metric you're combining digital and direct mail is going to deliver better results right it's just adding another marketing channel to the mix. And when direct mail and digital channels are used together, you see a 68% increase in website visits 63% more responses, a 60% higher ROI and 53% more leads and increases in asset downloads than foot traffic and physical store. So again, it's combining the online and offline worlds and then having an extra marketing channel that you may have previously not had seen success in or that you're trying out or something that you had seen success and that you just were not able to get market fast enough. Adding direct mail to your actual physical or your digital channels does pay off.

Kim Courvoisier  29:11

And because direct mail gives you another touch point and enables you to optimize your other channels to ensure you get the most bang for your buck. Remember that third love example from just a slide ago, companies usually experienced about a one to 3% unsubscribe rate per email. And that can add up to a lot over time. But with direct mail, you can send fewer emails, so you don't risk losing that audience due to email fatigue, especially during q4 When email volume rants ramps up significantly. We want to keep every one of those people in our audience so that we can reach them with our offers or promotions. Our cross sells our upsells let's go on to the next slide because it's one that's also near and dear to my heart as a marketer. Abt automated direct mail also gives you the opportunity to hone your skills By testing at Lob, we've called it abt always be testing. And the simplest kind of testing is a B testing, which most of you are many of you are very familiar with, you can split a portion of your audience into two groups. For this example, like the one maybe here is that we would send a group of postcard with a personalized image of products they've bought in the past, actually just got one of these from Wayfarer the other day, that maybe in the other group, you just send them a postcard with standard brand images. If you find the group with those personalized images of prior purchases, make more purchases in a month, then you can attribute that lift to the personalization of those images. The other option is multivariate testing, where you change multiple factors at the same time, the one hitch with multivariate testing is that because you're changing so many factors at once, it can be hard to pin down which factors are making the difference. But it's still a useful way to experiment with new ideas quickly and see what works.

Aaron Conant 30:56

Really quick question that comes in? Where are you pulling the images from? What are you What are you connecting into for this,

Mark Pinard  31:03

that actually can be any image that became fields

Kim Courvoisier 31:10

that actually pick a water,

Mark Pinard 31:12

it can be a range of areas, right? It's like, wherever you're storing your images now, or wherever you're building your image image library on on your own computer or your own systems, like internally, from a marketing perspective, you can utilize those images, and a lot of our clients have, you know, third party creative agencies that you know, create the images, one off, it all depends, right. And I think the other, the other benefit is that when you do have that variance of images, you can segment that on a per customer basis, and then test whatever's, you know, obviously working the best performance standpoint. And that's one of the huge benefits and like the optimization portion of it. Right. Um, and then the other. The other side is, you know, obviously, what I'm gonna jump into right now, which is the form factors.

Aaron Conant 31:53

We I mean, that was another question that came in, like, what are the most effective form factors, right? I mean, you get postcards and flyers, and just a reminder, it could be questions dropping in the question section, the chat or keep emailing them to me, Aaron aaron@bwgconnect.com you know, what are the the the form factors, which ones do you recommend? And then another question after that, but I want to since I mean, it leads right into this, this slide? Yeah.

Mark Pinard 32:17

For sure. In the anthem, high level answer, right was is it varies. I mean, the way that we like to look at this as like any email campaign, any digital campaign, any actual marketing campaign, in general, it's a lot of test learning iterate, right, you're going to try different things before you figure out what the secret sauce is performance. And it's the same thing with the actual form factors themselves. So you want to make use of a bunch of different form factors to optimize the performance of your direct mail campaign. So to jump back into, like, what Lob does is that we offer you know, different sizes of postcards, which is the six by 4696, by nine, six by 11. And depending on which one you use is all the real estate that you're going to have, as far as you know, getting your copy your imagery, your brand, whatever you feel like is like the best lay of the land to getting the word out is is you know, obviously the best one that you're going to use. Six by 11, we see use quite a bit because it's more real estate in the mailbox, which people are automatically going to, you know, go to when it's bigger card, it's going to stick out a little bit more on the other thing that we've actually seen, actually, before even switch their ups also has recently changed increase their maximum size limit for first class postcards to six by nines, which used to be previously six by fours. And what that means is that you can actually send postcards at really affordable price, which has been huge, and we've seen a huge uptake of our customers moving to that. The other form factor that we've seen a lot of success in is the self mailer. So self mailer is best described as the one that folds in half. So it's kind of like a sticky in the middle, you pop it open, and it opens up to larger real estate. And that can be the way we describe it is hot dog hamburger The Long Way or the short way, it can be folded. And we supply you know, different sizes of that the six by 12 by nine and recently releases the 11 by nine. And again, it all depends what are you trying to convey what is the campaign that you're getting out isn't a retention campaign, whatever that might be and how much real estate you need to deliver that message is dependent on the form factor that you're going to use. I would also like iterate on the testing portion of this and that's what using technology like Lob allows you to do. So you can a B test a six by 18 versus an 11 by nine or a self mailer versus a port postcard. Um, the other thing that we recently just released this week was Carnifex. So this is a big one. So Carnifex mailings are obviously allows you to have a physical card attached to the letter giving it more bulk and increasing the likelihood to get open. This is if you ever have gotten an envelope in the mailbox and you're not sure exactly what it's from or if there's not clear messaging on it, but then you feel it in this card in there. Automatically your brain is drawn towards I should open See what that card is, you know, obviously, we get licenses and new credit cards and stuff like that. So that that memory just draws your attention to opening that, whatever it might be, and it's a little bit bulkier. So again, it sticks out in your mailbox. So that that's one that we've seen some traction on is built specifically for, for our customers as well as prospects. Um, the other thing is that we have return envelopes. So people think of acquisition mail, or direct mail, mostly on the acquisition side. But there's also the operation side, right, with your invoicing, or you're sending out insurance statements or you know, financial statements, a lot of those tend to come with a return envelope that's included in there. And that is, you know, has the address and everything so that they can make a payment, you know, put it that check whatever might be, and then return that back. So that's something that also lot provides, and then we're out building out the tracking. So as that that return envelope gets put into the mail stream, the tracking for our customers to be able to track that as it comes back towards them with that payment, or whatever might be. On top of that, we're obviously delivering in 2020 to more form factors. So our job is to provide a breadth and depth of form factors for any marketers or operation people to be able to test so that they can optimize these campaigns as much as humanly possible. So 2022 is going to be a big year for us pumping out as many form factors as possible to to ensure that our customers have everything that they can optimize for campaigns.

Aaron Conant 36:27

So a quick question comes in around, you know, the the printing of it so that companies are not printing this. You have a network, I think you said at the beginning, can you clarify that just a little bit?

Mark Pinard 36:39

Yeah, absolutely. So what we've actually done is built out the technology to connect with printers that are located all over the entire US. And what that basically allows us to do is that you create the form factors, and everything via an API gets sent over to law, and law actually sends that directly the API to any of the printers to fulfill. Um, typically what we utilize is what we call intelligent routing base. So if your campaign is, is highly targeted to the East Coast, we like to do what we term as fastest live mailbox, the lowest costs will actually send it to a printer that's located on the east coast, so that you can print and get into the mailbox and the fastest. So all you have to do is to send it via an API, and we basically handle everything on on your behalf. The other thing is working with a larger print network allows us to do things like capacity planning. So think about if you're working with an individual printer, and that printer doesn't have the capacity to send out a million mail pieces, whatever it might be, you're kind of stuck, right? Like you're handcuffed, wherever that printer can actually get the job done. Whereas this for us, we can actually maximize capacity by looking across our entire network, and then figuring out who's best suited to be able to handle that campaign and get it executed for you. And that's nothing that our end user either arrest or worry about. The other thing that comes into play is disaster planning. So if anything that COVID has taught us is that you always have to plan ahead, right. So we've seen print facility shut down entirely, because you know, obviously, the COVID Scare. And then a lot of those customers have no backup plan to work with another printer to be able to get up and running and get their campaign out the door. Whereas for us, if one of our printers goes back goes down, we always have backup plans. So that your your campaign will be fulfilled no matter what time, we are also looking to expand that network as much as humanly possible. We're close to, you know, obviously getting up and running and building the technology to work with these guys who can add printers back into the network as quickly as you possibly can.

Aaron Conant 38:46

Awesome. No, I think that's the you want to make it easier, not not more complicated, right? And, you know, to install a printer and have their mail team, send it out. Love it.

Mark Pinard 38:57

Yeah, exactly. And that and that comes back down to that workflow efficiency, right. So rather than managing that back and forth relationship with a traditional print vendor, we do all that for you. And then you have complete access to the data to understand exactly when that Job's printed when it's been handed off to USPS. And then prior to us as the actual mail scans as that goes through the actual USPS system, a traditional print vendor and a one on one relationship just does not provide that.

Aaron Conant 39:23

It was a timeframe of integration look like. I mean, we're hitting keyword q4, right? I mean, everybody's gonna be ramping up in the next week, is kind of like the indication I'm getting just because supply chain shortages and everything. You know, I really like the, you know, the opportunity to you know, upsell for Winback. Like, what does integration look like? How long does that take before somebody pulls a trigger, you know, next Monday, how long before they're sending their first piece of direct mail?

Mark Pinard  39:57

I hate using the answer but all depends, but it all depends. Really, it all depends on the complexity of the actual integration itself, right? If it's just a data set, that's fine. If it's embedded in your actual campaign itself, it honestly really all depends. What we are doing is actually building out which, unfortunately, won't be available until next year, but we're building out functionality for people to upload batch lists as well. And to be able to kind of get up and running within a day to send out larger campaigns. But an integration itself, it really all depends, like if it's aligning with like, if you're using Salesforce enterprise for your CRM system, we have an out of box integration that can be up and running within weeks. Um, same things with Salesforce marketing cloud. Same thing with like arable or braise, like we have out of box integrations. But if you're using a homegrown system, and you don't have any developer support on your end, it can take longer, it just really all depends.

Aaron Conant 40:52

Oxen Love it. Love it. Thanks for the break there.

Kim Courvoisier 40:59

As I say, you're not a marketer until you use the word it depends. So let me bring us back. You know, we are humans we are communicating and you know, selling to other humans. And the beautiful thing about a direct mail piece is it begs to be interacted with. And we have conditioned our consumers and our audience to expect need and demand really highly personalized, high touch, customized experiences. And direct mail can do that in such a personal way. It gives you the power to respond your customer and consumer behaviors through significant dates and other factors that affect their purchasing. The more you integrate these kinds of triggers in your program, the more successful you can be some common use cases that we've already maybe chatted a bit about, especially this time of year, our abandoned shopping cart. To combat this, you might create a trigger that would send a customer a postcard with a 30% discount when they abandon a cart. When they get that postcard a few days after you know browsing on your site, it can be enough to bring them back. Date to milestones are also popular use cases you can use their birthdays, holidays, of course, q4, and even shop aversary Celebrating a year or period of time since they made that first purchase. Timing mailings around purchase intervals can also be useful, especially for retention. If your data is showing you that customers who go 30 days without a purchase are likely to churn, then you might want to send them a catalog or an offer 25 days, you know after they've made that last purchase in order to mitigate that churn. And finally time and coordinate your direct mail with other channels give it that turbo boost we've been talking about, don't just send an email and be done, send an email announcing the product followed by that direct mail piece for that one to conversion punch.

Mark Pinard  42:54

So something that is near and dear to my heart. From a Lob perspective, one of the real reasons that I had joined the company. If you partner with Lob, you can take advantage of our sustainability practices. And I know a lot of people think about direct mail as you know, just the amount of paper usage that goes into it. But through our sustainability organization la.org. We offset our paper consumption by planning significantly more trees than we use each month. We've actually planted more than 200,000 Trees since 2017, was actually more than twice what we've used for all the mail that we've sent. And then we also use paper certified by for Stewardship Council and they incorporate post consumer waste recycling into our paper whenever possible. On top of that, we work with our partners to reduce waste, there's more sustainable and strategic uses of direct mail. So like Lob top of mine is the environmental impact that we have, and then figuring out ways that we can actually improve that on our end to support all the organizations underneath our umbrella.

Kim Courvoisier  43:51

Yeah, so to wrap up, as we've talked about when you modernize your direct mail, because it can that excuse me, it becomes a channel that creates a ton of value and generates revenue throughout the customer lifecycle, and acquisition, an automated direct mail program can target customers extremely effectively. Think about that real flow using your own or third party data resulting in lower customer acquisition costs and more ROI in upselling. And cross selling it enables you to deliver well timed messages, using know it using what you know about your customers past preferences and getting them to convert to other products, increasing their lifetime value. And direct mail can also help you prevent churn and retain the customers you've worked so hard to acquire. didn't keep generating revenue from them again and again. And that's a wrap for our presentation. But I'd love to hand the virtual mic back over and jump into any q&a.

Aaron Conant 44:47

So when it comes in so others you have questions, you know, dropping the q&a, the questions section of the chat or just keep emailing them to me what is reporting look like? You know, so what's a big issue for I think marketers Right now, especially in 2021, compared to last year, and then even more, I think in 2022, is, you know, there's going to be KPIs associated it return on adspend is, is a massive focus, you know, 2020 there's almost like a path a hall pass given, right? It's everybody do anything digital drive sales, do conversions in the digital space? And then 2021, it's a different story, where are you spending money? How is it working? You know, how do we test and learn? So I mean, kind of the the thoughts there are, you know, as people look at, you know, what is reporting look like? You know, how can, how can they compare performance, among other, you know, channel campaigns as a whole?

Kim Courvoisier 45:41

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's really significant. Especially, I mean, I do content marketing, and I'm always tearing like, you can't, you can't measure them, I guess you can't. And that's why we always encourage, you know, the ability to be able to track so using, you know, those QR codes, or those personalized URLs or URLs, because then you can absolutely measure the traffic that's coming in, and the traffic that's converting on your offers, and then you can look at that and measure it alongside your spend, and you absolutely can see the ROI. Yeah,

Mark Pinard 46:11

and to add to that, like it when it's integrated directly with the rest of your campaign channels, you can literally blog Lob in and actually see how email is performing across direct mail or how email plus direct mail is performing across Justin emails, you know, setting so you can actually look at their campaign for performance across each one of those exact channels on top of that, so from a Lob perspective, like, well, a lot of what our customers do is because they have that last point scale, and the actual, you know, pieces handed into the mailbox, we'll do a 30 day look back period, and see exactly how that campaign is performed in that timeframe. And they will also we can do things like metadata and like other things that are provided in each mail piece, so that you can pull the data, export it. And then you know, because of our product, you have a deeper relationship with your data science team. And they can peel back the layers to understand the individual performance of the different campaigns that you've run, as well. As you know, we've talked about a B and multivariate testing, it's understanding the performance across the different, you know, form factors and images and everything else that you kind of get down to like the tip of the spear, if you will, of what's performing the best.

Aaron Conant 47:19

Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about, you know, integration, how the different things that you know, different technology platforms that you're integrating direct mail into? And then there's a follow up question, you know, outside of marketing, what are other use cases for direct mail that you see, so they kind of go hand in hand where all the different places you're plugging in? And then what are other uses for that? We covered a lot of marketing stuff today, but love to hear your thoughts on this.

Mark Pinard 47:49

I can let me jump in Kim.

Kim Courvoisier 47:51

Sure. Like, I'm like stealing. I'm taking a drink of water.

Mark Pinard  47:55

Oh, good. So like I, like I mentioned, like some of the main platforms that that comes top of mind right are your CRM system, so Salesforce, where honestly, whatever you can, whatever system you're using, because we're API based, we can integrate directly with it. The marketing automation systems that come to mind on Marketo, braze, Salesforce, marketing, cloud, HubSpot, again, like you name it, we can integrate it even like homegrown systems, if there's an opportunity for us, like we can actually get into. The other thing is, is your customer data platforms. We've had customers that have used third party agencies that are that are data driven that we can integrate with, we've had customers use third party agencies on the creative side that have systems we can integrate with, basically, anything that you could possibly imagine because we're API based, we can integrate. And that's like, the biggest value of of our products. Um, like I mentioned that the integration time is all going to depend on how much developer support you have on your end and the focus of them, you know, prior design, prioritizing the integration and getting it done. So it's, it varies all depends, but we are actually working pretty, pretty hard on getting more out of the box integrations up and running. And that will be a big focus of ours for 2022. What was the what was the other question that you had in there?

Kim Courvoisier  49:11

Other uses besides just marketing? So and I think you hit on this a little bit Mark when he talks about like transactional? mailings, things like statements and banking and insurance, a lot of that happening through more of the transactional direct mail. And you can if you want to expand more on that, but that's absolutely the case. We're seeing more and more.

Mark Pinard 49:31

Yeah, for sure. In a lot of companies, especially as we've started to see these kind of insurance tech enabled organizations start to kind of you know, come up, a lot of them they just realized their bread and butter is not printing and stuffing envelopes, right and because they have don't have a long standing cost center doing so they've just wanted to outsource it. But then they've gotten pretty creative on like how they integrate our technology directly back into their actual workflow itself. So if an insurance statement comes in fulfillment. And let's say that it was approved and they check needs to be sent out, that all can be automated. So a Lob also does check printing and sending as well. Or if it's end of the month, and a financial statement needs to be sent out, that can be automated to just based on a record change or a trigger, you know, however, you haven't set up integration with your platform. Um, that's, that's really I mean, the the really the use case is anything that's printed and being stuffed in an envelope, we can actually automate for you. The other thing is that with some of these integrations, for instance, on the check printing side, right, like, if you've had property damage, or whatever it might be, and you're waiting for that check in the mail, and you call customer support and say, Hey, what's the status of this check? Because law provides that actual USPS mail data from every step of the way, in every transaction scan, you can say, hey, that, that, you know, check is set to be in your mailbox within two days, or that check is actually sitting in your mailbox right now, you know, go and go and check it. So they have that data at their fingertips to provide that better customer service and brand awareness, which I think is awesome as well.

Kim Courvoisier 51:07

Yeah, that's huge. Versus just like, oh, it was mailed last Thursday. Good luck, is much better customer experience.

Mark Pinard 51:15

Exactly. For that audience that is waiting for that you don't mean to purchase a new car or whatever it might be that that's huge.

Aaron Conant 51:22

Awesome, I see that we're kind of getting right here. We got about a minute and a half left. You know, we'd love to hear like key thoughts, key takeaways, you know, quick thank you, to both of you for jumping on the line today. Thanks for being such great friends, partners, supporters of the network and a ton of brands in it. I mean, anybody on the line today wants a follow up conversation. This is one of those things that you know, has popped up, you know, regularly in my conversations, and it's it's worth that, you know, put 30 minutes on the, on the calendar to chat with them to see if it's the right fit for what you're doing. But you know, Mark, I'll kind of kick it over to you for like key takeaways, and we'll kick it to Kim. And then we'll wrap it up here right on time. Yeah, I

Mark Pinard  52:01

mean, I think I think for me, it's just to really for marketers are looking for ways to expand out their actual presence and looking for different channels to test out and get creative with direct mail is kind of one of the oldest newest channels, the way I like to describe it. The technology that we've built supports the ability to do the same thing that you would digital. And honestly, within the pandemic, it kind of gives that end user, the best of the way, the way you think about if you go to the mailbox, it's the one chance you get to have that undivided attention to that actual recipient itself, which you won't get across any other marketing channel. And through, you know, platform like Lob, you can automate all of this, so you don't have to worry about the headache of the heavy workflows to get it done.

Kim Courvoisier  52:43

Yeah, I'll jump in as well. And especially in the last almost two years here, while we've been in a pandemic, like just taking the trip down to my mailbox every day is a it's like a delight to them, like what came today. And it's your chance to have that undivided attention unlike anything else in any other interaction you have with consumers. So it's a pretty special thing. And I love that what's old is new, you know, direct mail, like I said, in my very first slide is it's used because it works. And it continues to work over and over again, it is the workhorse within your tech stack. So So tap it and get into it. And I did not want to leave without doing a little quick plug for our hot sauce and success event that's going to be happening on December 9. This is really fun. we've ever seen the show hot ones, we're going to be sending anyone who signs up a selection of handcrafted hot sauces. And we're going to be doing a vertical tasting of some mild to severe spicy sauces. While we dish out secrets with some more direct mail pros. Besides Mark and myself, we've got some some real heavy hitters who are going to help you heat up your direct mail results. So we hope you'll join us we'll send a link like that with the email follow up and we'll

Aaron Conant 53:58

watch you taste us.

Kim Courvoisier 53:59

Oh heck yeah.

Aaron Conant 54:00

I love it. I love it. It's a great show. Hey, Mark. Kim, thanks so much for your time today. Thanks for being great friends, partners, supporters, the network and a ton of brands and thanks to everybody who dialed in today and the great questions that came through. Look for a follow up email from us. We'd love to have a conversation with you. We don't sell anything here at BWG Connect. We're a giant networking group and more than happy to share strategize across newest developments in the digital landscape. You know, the partners like Lob as well as other strategies that are out there as well. So hope everybody has a fantastic Wednesday a great rest of the week everybody stay safe and look forward to having you at a future event. Take care not everybody will be in touch like Mark already was.