Is Direct Mail Effective? 7 Success Stories Through the Funnel

Is direct mail effective? The short answer: yes. 

The longer answer: (the rest of this article).

Direct mail has proven to be crazy effective for eCommerce brands—for years and across every vertical.

With the average open rate for direct mail at 80-90%, it’s hard to deny the power of marketing that gets you directly into the hands of your customers. 

Need some more convincing? 

No problem. Here, we’ll dig into seven direct mail success stories to inspire you. 

First, who is direct mail for? 

Direct mail works wonders for eCommerce brands in any vertical. 

You name it—home goods, fashion and apparel, CPGs—it benefits brands in any specialized niche. Heck, even a brand that sells katanas is crushing it with direct mail.

On the consumer side, everyone likes it. The truth is that direct mail works for any generation. 

• Gen Z is constantly fed digital marketing, so 72% of its customers are excited to discover what tangible direct mail offers. 
• Millennials have experienced traditional and digital marketing forms—they enjoy the hands-on nature of direct mail while getting digital exposure, too. 
• And Gen X? This generation values direct mail because it often offers practical value, such as sales coupons and educational content. 
• Last but certainly not least, Boomers. This generation loves receiving easy-to-read, relevant direct mail with promotional deals, with 96% of Boomers saying they value coupons. 

So, it works for all ages… And it works across the funnel.

Direct Mail for Customer Acquisition

Direct mail can be your go-to strategy for customer acquisition. Take a look at how Caden Lane and &Collar do it.

Caden Lane sees a 3.8x ROAS on cold prospecting

Caden Lane is no stranger to cold prospecting using direct mail. 

The baby clothes brand was researching ways to acquire customers by going directly into their mailboxes but couldn’t find DTC thought leaders who could nail a postcard. This led them to work with PostPilot. 

PostPilot built a mailing list of 60,000 expecting moms based on our massive dataset, and we designed a postcard (below) to send to them.

Results went way above and beyond the brand’s initial hopes of breaking even. With a whopping 3.8x ROAS, it’s safe to say that direct mail for net-new customer acquisition works. 

The postcard marketing campaign confirmed that many expecting parents want to buy from Caden Lane—they just needed a little reminder to prompt them. 

Happy baby, happy CMO. 

&Collar saw a 4.9x+ ROI on their cold prospecting postcards

&Collar is beloved for its cheeky messaging, genuine connections with customers, and (of course) incredible products. 

& although the team uses direct mail across the funnel, plus handwritten cards, they’ve had astonishingly strong results on cold prospecting—really, all their results have been fantastic, but we gotta call this out in particular.

The move: they sent postcards to cold audiences (both male and female) that we built.

The results: Respectively, a 4.9x ROI and 5.8x ROI. The other results: tons of new customers with stain-proof shirts!

Direct Mail for Customer Retargeting

Retargeting is easy with direct mail. 

Just ask internationally loved brands like HexClad and Gozney. 

HexClad cooked up 7 figures in revenue with their retargeting campaign 

HexClad, a cookware company, saw its email list growing fast. Riding this wave, the HexClad team worked with PostPilot to send targeted postcards to their entire funnel just in time for BFCM ‘23 using MailMatch. 

After seeing major success over BFCM ‘23, the HexClad team has launched seven direct mail automations to retarget dormant customers and drive hands-off, high-ROI results.

These automations targeted:  

• Abandoned carts: HexClad dynamically sends cart abandoners a postcard.
• Winbacks: HexClad sent campaigns to several customer cohorts based on recency and frequency. 

Through direct mail, the cookware brand acquired new customers they weren't reaching on digital and reactivated long-lapsed, unengaged customers.

Over roughly four months, direct mail generated $3.2m in revenue and a 12x+ ROAS. 

How Gozney sparked a 16x ROAS through retargeting

Gozney’s high-ticket pizza ovens are made to last, and the brand sought an effective way to have an equal impact on their customers by sending them a message that would keep their products top-of-mind.

Partnering with PostPilot, Gozney launched a SiteMatch™ campaign to see how direct mail could help with customer retargeting. The mechanics are simple: PostPilot’s SiteMatch feature tracks approximately 20-40% of anonymous site traffic and matches it to a physical address. 

Existing customers and visitors who don’t demonstrate valid intent signals are filtered out automatically, giving you an accurate list of valid anonymous site traffic addresses. 

From there, Gozney sent Cardalogs™ featuring a few of their products, showing those previous visitors what the brand has in store.

The result? Gozney saw $116k in revenue on 151 orders and a 16x ROAS.

They're cooking.

Direct Mail for Customer Retention

Acquisition is one thing—but every good business has a healthy balance of acquisition and retention. Thankfully, we’re here to show you the full-funnel approach: direct mail helps with retention too.

GOOD AMERICAN’s winback campaign that won an 8x ROAS

GOOD AMERICAN wanted a robust and affordable solution that could reliably drive repeat purchases among one-time buyers and better target customers in cold prospecting campaigns.

…And that’s PostPilot’s cue. 

Using PostPilot, GOOD AMERICAN sought to launch a winback campaign. We gave the team our recommendations on A/B tests for segments based on RFM parameters. This way, they could find which direct mail design resonated the most with customers and drove the most incremental revenue.

Seeing the test’s success, the GOOD AMERICAN team expanded the campaign to keep the postcard automatically sent once a customer hits particular RFM parameters. 

We call that automated revenue. The brand saw an 8x ROI on the winback campaign, driving roughly $1.40 in incremental revenue per postcard sent. 

GOOD stuff. 

Portland Leather Goods does birthdays well with a 15x ROI

Portland Leather Goods is no stranger to programmatic direct mail. The brand previously tested direct mail with another vendor, but the process and feedback loops were slow—taking over six weeks post-launch for data to come in.  

The team turned to PostPilot for mail options beyond catalogs, faster performance tracking, and quicker processes, especially for customer retention.

Portland Leather Goods launched two dozen retention campaigns with PostPilot, including:

• Automated campaigns to drive second purchases
• Automated winback campaigns
• Holiday offers 

And notably, automated birthday flows.

During loyalty customers’ birthday weeks, PostPilot automatically fires a postcard to let recipients know that loyalty points have been added to their accounts. 

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Portland Leather Goods generated eight figures in revenue with PostPilot's help. Their birthday flow alone generated seven figures at a 15x+ ROI in less than six months.

This shows how direct mail works even after acquiring and retargeting customers—at every step of the funnel.

How Taylor Stitch sealed 15x+ ROAS on an automated winback campaign

Men’s apparel brand Taylor Stitch brings in revenue throughout the year by keeping its retention campaign “switched on.” 

Partnering with PostPilot, Taylor Stitch wanted to use direct mail for customer lifecycle retention to reengage folks who have shopped with them.

Their retention tactic included sending out a BFCM postcard to email subscribers who hadn’t actually received emails (due to bouncing or low engagement parameters).

Plus, it was a programmatic campaign. In other words, PostPilot would dynamically fire off a postcard to every customer who meets those parameters in real time.

The brand's overall direct mail campaign average was 10x+ ROI. The automated winbacks saw an even higher ROI: 15x+ ROI per campaign. 

TLDR: Hands-off, automated revenue.

Bonus: Direct Mail + Email = a Higher ROI? 1 + 1 = 3

Yes, direct mail is strong on its own. 

But it’s significantly stronger when working with the rest of your marketing stack. 

A full-funnel approach calls for hitting customers across various digital and direct touchpoints at every stage of the buying journey. And when it comes to direct mail and email in this mix, the ROI is multiplied when the channels are combined. 

Our methodology

We looked at campaigns with holdouts to show whether somebody received an email or an email with a postcard.

• We looked at MailMatch campaigns for recent subscribers because we can reasonably assume most of these folks are getting emails.
• We use incremental ROAS to determine whether there is a difference between receiving an email and an email with a postcard.
• Our sample size: 544K postcards across 122 campaigns

Our results 

We found that the average incremental ROAS is 2.89x when weighted by campaign size. This is extraordinary initial data showing what we've thought all along.

Combining email with a direct mail strategy generates a 3X incremental ROI compared to email alone. 

1 + 1 = 3.

Now That You Know Direct Mail Works…

We want to know more about your business. 

Learn more about what we do at PostPilot. Or, if you're ready to chat, drop us a line here.

(Still not convinced? You can check out a ton of other direct mail case studies.)