Drew Sanocki’s Post

I've written about how brands discount themselves to death. That goes quadruple over BFCM. You know how much Jones Road Beauty discounted last BFCM? Not at all. They launched new products. They built excitement. They sold at full margin. While you may not be able to pull off a new product launch at this point. . . Reconsider how heavily you're discounting, especially to drive acquisition. What good are those new customers if you're mostly acquiring bargain hunters? If you're already in the red on first purchases, you're just going to be driving yourself further into the red over the holiday season.

Mark wrote a case study here on how to use direct mail with email to get better results . . .

Every year, around the beginning of July, a hooded, shadowy figure appears at my window. The sky darkens. Sound is muted around me, like in the quiet of snowfall at night. The figure manifests behind me. It is kinda a Grim Reaper but with the face of Michael Epstein. Somehow, its voice is a blend of my morning alarm and my PostPilot co-founder. Well. . . I guess it’s time to start. Have you thought about your offers this year? Questions for you: -Do you think about maximizing LTV when you plan your Black Friday promotions? -Or are you just there to get the win for the day and move on? BFCM represents a GREAT opportunity to maximize your LTV. (One of the biggest mistakes I see brands make over the holiday is taking their foot off the gas post-BFCM. Drive more LTV from your customers!) You need to take your past customer behavior into account in order to do this and launch a second-purchase campaign. Given the importance of BFCM, you should do some basic foundational work TODAY to set the stage: 1️⃣ Determine what product(s) customers are likely to buy AFTER they purchase your hero product. 2️⃣ Figure out the typical time between customers’ first and second purchases (your time between orders). 3️⃣Put the two together + automate them in your marketing stack. When BFCM rolls around, you therefore will not just optimize for that one day--you'll optimize for a repeat purchase. At one of my turnarounds, oVertone, of the customers who bought a second time, 45% come back within 30 days and 85% within 90 days (the data above is not oVertone's). After that, the customer is much less likely to return. But how do you market to that customer? Well, during the first 30 days or so, show your 1x buyers FULL-MARGIN, related products to buy. Only after day 60, start going promotional *IF that customer has not bought a second time.* Do not discount before you need to—but discount to keep them from defecting. The timing, obviously, varies from brand to brand. Don’t make BFCM the time when you light a pile of money on fire to expensively acquire a bunch of one-time customers. Use a second-purchase campaign. Start with email. Then, layer in direct mail to tap the audience that isn't subscribed and opening. I highly recommend sketching this out NOW. Future-you will be grateful beyond words. My team at PostPilot will make this easy for you. We'll build you a second-purchase campaign with direct mail (whether it's for BFCM or just your next summertime promo. . . or both). Plus, our team is also more than happy to advise on how to integrate direct mail + email + SMS and bask in the glory of the halo effect.

"Demand can drop by 70-75% in a search channel without direct mail." The direct mail halo effect is real, and I've seen it ALL my brands, too. Steen and I chatted with Tim, CEO of CohereOne, arguably the leading catalog agency, about direct mail on the latest Nerd Marketing Podcast. Tim shared some incredible data around the power of direct mail, and it further confirms everything we see at PostPilot. Direct mail doesn't just crush it by itself, it makes everything else crushier. Check out the latest NerdPod to learn more from Tim and watch 3 direct mail nerds nerd out, link in the comments👇

Michael Epstein's Claw Machine will be at our booth at The Lead Summit. Along with the PostPilot team. Important backstory to this one: Mike let us use his Claw Machine for our Shoptalk Vegas Suite back in March, and we wanted to use it for this event, but he didn't let us. Something about "way too many great prizes in there now." So, naturally, we had to hire someone to smuggle it out of his house and to New York. (The smuggler seemed like a nice enough guy, but he asked to be paid in Bitcoin. That's fine, right?) Now, Mike's on a mission to get it back. Which means he'll be in New York. You'll be able to hang out with Mike in between rounds of his fight with Jeff. (Jeff's the smuggler. They set up a gentleman's bout. It'll be fine in the end. It's for charity. And honor.) Oh, and try to get some prizes from The Claw before Mike takes it back. Catch us there July 10 + 11. We have a couple other surprises at our booth, too. (P.S. Don't tell Mike it was my idea to smuggle The Claw.)

I post a lot about Turnarounds. The Toys R Us one an exciting one to watch. They've basically gone all in on AI. TRU is owned by WHP Global, the private equity firm behind Express, Bonobos, and Rag & Bone. With new flagship stores in Minnesota and New Jersey, Toys 'R' Us now boasts over 1,400 stores and e-commerce sites, generating an impressive $2 billion in annual retail sales. But OPEX is in the crosshairs for WHP. Looking ahead, the focus is on leveraging the AI-generated promo to enhance advertising efforts, particularly highlighting their presence within Macy's stores. 🚀 #ToysRUs #RetailRevival

GOOD AMERICAN is seeing an 8x+ ROI on #directmail winbacks. And $1.40 in >incremental< revenue per postcard. "After running a direct mail initiative through another direct mail vendor, we searched for other options to help us retarget, prospect, and hit our VIPs." (-Caitlin McKenna, Performance Mktg Mgr) That's exactly what they've done with PostPilot. After A/B testing and a winning winback postcard emerged, we created a programmatic winback program, and it's delivered. We launched a cold prospecting campaign for GOOD AMERICAN recently, too. Because if you're not expanding your wins into a full-funnel program, why bother? Stay tuned on that front. In the meantime, check out our full case study in the comments. 👇

Hey, NYC: We'll be at GROW (July 9) and The Lead (July 10+11). Nik Sharma's modding our panel + THE CLAW MACHINE returns. At GROW. . . Check out this panel: Steen (Michael Epstein) John Hickey Jordan Sack David Baker (+ Nik) Plus, we'll be front and center, at Kiosk 5. At The Lead. . . We'll have a killer booth. THE CLAAAAAAW returns (see picture in comments), stuffed with prizes from our brands. Some other surprises too, but you'll have to come check it out to see what's up.

Devising + implementing marketing strategies burns up time + money. I come to you with a faster, cheaper solution: Border Collie Marketing. (Yes, I came up with the name. It’s definitely going to stick.) Border Collie Marketing is: 1️⃣IDs standard customer behavior, then.. 2️⃣Recommends action when you see deviations Imagine the border collie rounding up cattle on the open plains. She lets the cows press forward, but if some stray, she drives them back to the herd. (At least that's how I imagine it works.) The approach is based on little nudges—nudging customers to purchase, nudging them to come back—that produce big results. Border Collie Marketing is based on the principle that customers exhibit standard behavior. And the most profitable time to market to these customers is when they deviate from this norm. When they stray. Example: When in NY, I frequented Irving Farm Coffee for my cortado daily. It wouldn’t make sense for Irving Farm to spend retention dollars on me while I was there. It'd be low ROI. I’d probably be back the next day. They didn't need to incentivize the behavior. But life happens. Maybe my kid gets sick, or I sign up for an early fitness class. It’s easy to fall into a new pattern. Then I end up hitting About Coffee instead, which is a few blocks over. What happens when I stray? 🚩 A day or so after my defection, a red flag should go up at Irving Farm. 🚩 They should send out the border collie to nudge me back “Let’s send Drew an email / text / postcard to see what’s up.” This marketing effort is now worth the time and money, 100 times over. The change in behavior—not the behavior itself—triggers the response. 💡 Conserve your resources so you can spend them at the point of greatest impact. It's some of the highest ROI marketing you will ever do. You could spend your retention budget on the customers you acquire each month, trying to get them to reorder... But if 30% reorder without any encouragement from you, you’ve wasted thousands of dollars. If you focus only on the 70% who aren't likely to buy again, you’re optimizing your spend and saving money. But how do you know who your defectors are? They alert you by deviating from their standard behavior 1️⃣If your average repeat customer reorders within 30 days, and.. 2️⃣If you have a group of 7k customers who hasn't reordered by day 45, then.. 3️⃣They're alerting you by deviating from the average Focus retention dollars here. You'll have: - Your full budget for killer retention promotions. - Higher retention - Higher ROI - Money left over for acquisition This reorder time period has a name. It's called the intra-purchase latency or time between purchases, and it’s one of my favorite things to measure. It's why we offer it as a free, out-of-the-box report in the PostPilot app. Once you know your time between purchases, you can get going with Border Collie Marketing and optimize your retention spend. BTW. Postcards work great as border collies.

"The value of buyers that come through print is demonstrably higher." I wrote about this last week, too. Customers acq'd via direct mail are more valuable. Everyone who uses direct mail KNOWS this. On this week's Nerd Marketing pod, Mike and I talked to another direct mail vet: Brad Darooge, CEO of Baudville Brands, a company that leans >hard< on direct mail. How hard? About 90% of their marketing dollars are spent on direct mail. That's right. No Meta-and-Google-first strategy. Just good new-fashioned, high-LTV, high-ROI direct mail. #postpilot #directmail