How to Personalize Direct Mail at Scale

You could make a strong case for direct mail being the most personalized form of marketing.

Beyond your products themselves, it’s the only way to get your message and style into customers’ (or potential customers’) hands, where they can physically interact with something that you designed for them.

We think that’s pretty cool.

But to ensure that your mail gets seen and actually resonates on a deeper level by your entire intended audience… That requires a bit more thought and tech than asking a printer to send some slapped-together postcard designs to a list of folks on a CSV.

We think of personalization in three ways:

• Personalization with recipients’ names: Not to be used on every mailer but effective for certain kinds of postcards with more 1:1 messaging. Plus, using handwritten mail to amplify the effect.
• Behavior-driven personalization: Via RFM (for retention marketing), meeting buyers where they are with direct mail and offers.
• AI behavioral-driven personalization: Using new technology to algorithmically target customers based on thousands of intent signals and billions of data points.

Really, we might want to call this article “How to Personalize Direct Mail at Scale (That Drives the Best Results).”

Personalizing Direct Mail with Recipients’ Names

Ultimately, this one’s fairly simple and comes down more to the style of the postcard. 

Most printers or direct mail platforms (those worth their salt, at any rate) should be able to handle either printing off a list of postcards based on a CSV or dynamically adding [first_name], as with an email or SMS.

HOWEVER… You shouldn’t always add a first name. To that end, we’ll explain with a few examples.

When you shouldn’t add a first name to a postcard

In acquisition and retargeting campaigns, you should generally be treating mailers as handheld ads. For instance, here’s a postcard that Liquid I.V. sent as part of a prospecting campaign.

The design is colorful, inviting, and looks like a digital ad or mini billboard. But there’s no message to the recipient—which makes sense, because you don’t actually know them. 

Of course, the back of the postcard will have the individual’s name and address, but in the same way you wouldn’t (hopefully) stalk a stranger, go up to them on the street, and greet them by their first name, you shouldn’t greet strangers in a cold (or even lukewarm) mail setting.

Lukewarm example: Caddis sends—likewise bright and colorful—postcards to retarget and convert anonymous site visitors who had never purchased before.

This design, too, is like a handheld digital ads, but it doesn’t include any copy that addresses the recipient by name.

When you should add a first name to a postcard

In situations where you “know” the recipient (i.e., they’re actually a customer rather than a prospect), you can add a personalized message.

Promix sends these automated VIP postcards to high-value customers (purchased 4+ times) who haven’t purchased in at least 60 days, and on each is a note directly addressing the recipient.

Similarly, Hat Heaven has sent postcards to their previous customers with a short message on the back of the postcard:

Adding the first name is a simple, but effective touch to add a little bit more 1:1 in your marketing.

But you can take it a step further when you bring in handwritten postcards.

Kicking it up a notch with handwritten postcards

Brands including Red Land Cotton and Country Life Natural Foods supplement their greater direct mail programs with automated handwritten direct mail.

Red Land Cotton sends automated handwritten birthday cards to customers every year—and because they use PostPilot (that’s us!), they don’t need to integrate any .csv or loyalty program data because we have a robust data set that includes most US customers’ birthdays.

And Country Life Natural Foods sends handwritten cards to all customers who spent more than a hundred dollars on their first purchases. 

By the way… The copy in this Country Life’s postcard is fantastic—it tells customers to “keep this card near your fridge.” Direct mail already has staying power and tends to hang around on desks, tables, and, indeed, fridges. But by putting the suggestion in customers’ heads, it’s more likely they’ll do it!

Personalizing Direct Mail Based on Customers’ Behavior (RFM, Categories & Offers)

To us, the next step of personalizing mail—and marketing in general—is actually meeting customers where they are and timing offers based on their buying behavior. 

For most brands, a retention program should be rooted in time between orders data, which should in turn inform RFM.

The reasoning here: all ecommerce brands have typical purchase intervals where customers can be “expected” to repurchase within a particular timeframe between their first and second, second and third, etc., orders. We recommend that any owned marketing, including direct mail, is triggered if a customer does not purchase within the expected timeframe.

If you do so, you’ll be meeting customers where they are—instead of sending offers too early or too late.

Starting with Time Between Orders

We offer free time between orders reports out-of-the-box for a reason: they’re vital for timing offers.

Based on this report we presented, you can see…

• More than half (55.59%) of customers purchase before the 30-day mark.
• Almost three-quarters (74.45%) of customers repurchase before the 60-day mark.
• Over 90% of customers have repurchased before the 150-day mark. 
• Fewer than 1% of customers are returning after the 270-day mark.

In terms of personalizing based on buying behavior, we’d probably see some great results by firing off a postcard after someone passes the 30-day mark—30 days is a fairly standard time period between first and second purchases, but it does vary based on the brand, generally depending on AOV.

Leveraging this data, we can start to layer out an overall retention strategy with direct mail using RFM segments.

Use RFM to Determine Timing

As a reminder, RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) is a segmentation method dating back decades, and it remains the most powerful framework for timing repeat purchases outside of cutting-edge AI segmentation. 

Let’s assume the brand above has an AOV of $100—an RFM segment targeting the one-time buyers might be:

• Recency: 30 days
• Frequency: 1
• Monetary: $100

This would likely be a great starting place to send a postcard, and beyond that, we could probably build a few other segments to target (variation is in the recency):

• Recency: 60, 90, 180, 365
• Frequency: 1
• Monetary: $100

By timing our direct mail offers to arrive at the initial lapsed interval and at a few other key dates, we’re ensuring that spend is optimized, and that a customer is going to continue to receive relevant offers. Only customers who still haven’t purchased will receive postcards, and the rest can be sent specific offers to drive additional purchases. 

For instance, a set of postcards to drive second purchases might have these parameters:

• Recency: 30, 60, 90, 180, 365
• Frequency: 2
• Monetary: $150+

By setting up automated postcards in PostPilot, you can set up these automations once and generally forget about them—although some optimization a few times a year works wonders, as does tailoring postcards to your seasonal offers/product drops.

High RFM Segments and VIP Winbacks

By “high RFM,” we effectively mean “VIP customers.” And again, this may vary heavily by brand. For some brands, this may be customers who purchased more than 10 times and spent 1200 dollars, and for others, it may be customers who purchased 3+ times and spent over $250. 

In the end, though, you can roll out a similar set of RFM segmentation principles based on your brand’s typical behavior, and you’ll have yourself a killer VIP retention strategy—with a few extra recency segments for good measure; you don’t want to lose these customers! For instance:

• Recency: 30, 60, 90, 120, 180, 240, 365+
• Frequency: 4+
• Monetary: $500

Quick Aside: Why We Recommend RFM

We highly recommend using RFM because, unlike simply LTV segmentation, RFM takes actual recent behavior into consideration. If you’re at a brand that has been around for a decade, you may have customers who purchased an extraordinary amount, but they may have made their last purchase 8 years ago. 

One Last Personalization Enhancement: Offers by Product 

There is plenty of opportunity to get granular and set up a couple dozen automated postcards with many designs based on previous product purchased. But to start out, there are a couple tactics (low-hanging fruit, really) that you can implement to drive reliable repeat revenue.

Hero Cross-Sell (Or Other Cross-Sell)

It’s a classic for a reason. If you have a hero product, you can offer the most common second product purchased after your hero.

Pipeliners Cloud, an industrial brand, sends one-time buyers who purchased one of their welding umbrellas an offer featuring a welding umbrella stand.

As another example, BlendJetⓇ has sent cross-sell accessory offers through the mail:

BlendJet’s JetPacks are a perfect complement to blender buyers—and they look pretty great on a postcard.

Subscription Churn-Fighting Postcards

Direct mail continues to be a super effective tactic to reactivate subscription customers, and there’s an incredible opportunity for personalization here that we’d love to see more of: sending anti-churn postcards based on the reason someone churned from the subscription program.

Here’s how a DTC legend did it:

Laird Superfood has a robust Recharge subscription program, and they’re using direct mail in a variety of ways to enhance and expand it.

The team automates postcards to customers who have unsubscribed from their subscription program, and they’ve added creative and copy relevant to the cancelation reason. For instance, the postcard below was sent to customers who unsubscribed because the subscription was too expensive:

And the postcard below here was sent cards to customers who churned because they had too much product and may have preferred other flavors. A more general offer was sent to customers who marked “other.”

AI & Predictive Personalization: Letting the Machines Do the Sorting

At PostPilot, we leverage RFM as a foundational automated retention strategy for our customers, but we are also pioneering AI in the direct mail space. 

The goal being to not only drive awesome, hyper-targeted, hyper-hyper personalized results elsewhere in the funnel: with prospecting and retargeting. 

Here’s an overview of a couple of our key products that use AI.

Lookalike Audiences & Prospecting

PostPilot's AcquisitionAI uses a proprietary algorithm trained on more than 200 million U.S. consumers to build direct mail lookalike audiences. 

And it works.

For example: The beloved nursing and maternity wear brand Kindred Bravely uses direct mail at every stage of the customer journey, and the team used AcquisitionAI to send mail to tens of thousands of new and expecting mothers.

And the results? Excellent. The campaign drove a 3.1x ROAS on that cold outreach.

Retargeting anonymous visitors with SiteMatch

(Actually, we snuck this in earlier in the piece.)

PostPilot’s SiteMatch^TM technology allows ecommerce brands to target and convert anonymous site visitors and is an intent-based personalization algorithm. It works with a proprietary pixel—it allows us to pool site visitors, score their likelihood to convert based on our dataset, and dynamically fire off mailers to those visitors based on scores. 

Brands like Gozney and Caddis have used SiteMatch to great effect, driving strong ROIs and converting traffic that they spent valuable prospecting dollars bringing to their sites.

Direct Your Direct Mail Questions to Us

Foundationally, personalizing direct mail comes down to thinking about your customers and meeting them where they are. 

If you’re looking to add personalization throughout the funnel—and add 10% to your annual revenue using direct mail—we’re here to help.

Read more about PostPilot, or contact us if you’re ready for a personalized demo of how direct mail could work for your brand.