Dual Product Announcement: Direct Mail Benchmarking + AI Recommendations

You shouldn’t have to ask “How’s my direct mail program doing?” And ideally, you should have as much guidance as possible to level it up—whether that’s from good to great or great to legendary.

Right? Right.

So, we asked our data science team to tackle both of those challenges, and they returned with innovation. 

They built killer in-app direct mail benchmarking and gave PostPilot AI some super-soldier serum in order to provide actionable recommendations to improve your relative performance.

Well, they actually said they did something involving machine learning and algorithms. Same idea, right?

Bottom line: Now, Shopify brands can get a statistically sound comparison of their direct mail performance relative to a specific peer group and get personalized recommendations to improve all elements of their programs. 

Here’s a quick look at the functionality and what it means for brands using PostPilot.

How These Features Work

Benchmarking

We analyze your DTC performance and match you to a relevant peer group of similar Shopify brands based on size, category, and AOV. 

By using peer groups, we’re ensuring that you’re not just being compared by vertical, as there is a ton of variability within verticals. A four-year-old home goods brand doing $5m/yr with a $200 AOV shouldn’t be compared to a twenty-three-year-old home goods brand doing $500m/yr with a $450 AOV. 

After all, each brand’s direct mail programs would be quite different—based on variables like timing, offers, scale, format, segmentation, and discounting. Comparisons and recommendations wouldn’t make a ton of sense. So, creating apples-to-apples comparisons roots our benchmarking in a super strong foundation.

Enough preamble. Check it out: 

We’re surfacing directional ranges for core metrics and showing how you score. This analysis refreshes on a monthly basis so you aren’t working off stale snapshots.

These will appear for your overall direct mail program as well as your retention and retargeting programs.

Goal: A super quick read on your performance to show what’s working and what could be improved.

AI Recommendations

Here’s where it gets even more interesting.

PostPilot AI analyzes your benchmark scores along with dozens of other data points, including automation vs. one-off campaign performance, postcard size, top-performing peer strategies, and peer group spending levels.

And, as you can see, it provides:

• Overall rating
• Quick explanation of the rating
• Evaluation of your KPI performance relative to your peer group
• Specific areas of opportunity to take your program to the next level

We said this at the top—you shouldn’t have to guess at any part of your performance, and ideally, you get explicit ideas about how to improve that performance. 

This personalized AI recommendation section does just that, and it even does so by funnel stage (specifically, retention and retargeting—reflecting your performance driving repeat and net-new customer revenue with direct mail).

Goals: 

• A highly relevant, highly actionable summary of your performance and exact moves you can make to improve your program today. 
• Help you and your account manager take faster next steps to improve and optimize your program.

By the way, this report is fantastic for monthly performance readout meetings.

Something we want to emphasize (and why this all really matters)

This functionality is exclusive to PostPilot, and the insights PostPilot AI surfaces are what we use to optimize your strategies and campaigns to deliver the best possible performance—by far—in the direct mail space. 

And, as we say…

We’ve barely started.

PostPilot AI’s recommendations will improve over time, both in terms of quality and scope, as it will be trained on a greater breadth of data to improve even more elements of your direct mail program.

So, as a team, we’re incredibly excited.

We hope you are, too.

Launch a program, get recommendations, and scale it to the moon 

To learn more about the nitty-gritty details, including all the data points that PostPilot AI is trained on, you can read our knowledge base article.

If you’re not already a PostPilot customer, and you’re so excited that you’re yelling at your screen (and maybe your neighbors or co-workers are wondering what’s going on), you can come yell at a direct mail expert here who can get you set up in <1wk.