Direct Mail Guarantees the Impression. Half Your Digital Ones Are Fake.

Welcome to the Marketing Madman. Nick Constantino here. I'm with Brian Jungles. Brian, how are you doing, bud?

Doing well. Thanks for having me.

Good. All right, so we're going to talk about another one of those things that has left the lexicon of sexiness in the marketing world. I've probably said the least sexy before, but this is actually the least sexy form there is out there. We are here to explain why it actually is indeed sexy, why it works, and why sexiness might not always be the best thing. So, Brian, why don't you quickly introduce yourself?

Hey guys, I'm Brian Jungles. I own City Publications in Atlanta. I live here in Atlanta with my family. I went to UGA, and I'm excited to tell you about how direct mail is making a big comeback in the marketing world.

I think we're having this conversation at a good time. It was about May or June when Google started putting out their AI summaries. The world went crazy, because all of a sudden all these people who for the longest time were masters of digital found that none of it mattered. AI was scanning the internet, doing the work for you, and they saw a huge drop in business. We can approach it from a couple of different standpoints, but as an opening point, why don't you give two or three of the top misconceptions people have about direct mail, and then we can unpack each of them one by one.

I would say the first one, and with my digital marketing background this is what attracted me to the industry, is that you can't apply the same kind of targeting that you can in other channels. What I've learned, and what I think is one of the most valuable points, is that the direct mail targeting list is in many ways higher value than a lot of what you can do in digital channels, especially social media, where we're doing cohort-based marketing. Because we need personally identifiable information to mail somebody something, their address, their name, and we can also associate other data points with that, we have very refined targeting. We get the same kind of data from the credit bureaus, from interest-based data, form fills online, subscriptions. We can layer all of that onto postage information to optimize your spend and your routes, and ultimately it's basically 100% deliverability in direct mail.

Like most things, the outputs are only as good as the inputs, so you have to have good, clean data for any of this stuff to work. Anyone who tells you they're going to magically find data in the ether is full of it. You need good CRM systems. You need ways to set up your own cohorts. You need ways to find how much money they've spent by zip code. Yes, you can layer in Amex and credit card data and all this other stuff. Zillow knows house values nowadays. There's a way to layer everything in, but you have to be clear about who you're targeting before you can get the output of who this is going to.

I will say I personally didn't know how creepy it was. I used to see things as the marketee, and it was creepy then. Now, as the marketer, because we have such a large client base, the stuff you can pull on people, and the stuff people are trying to sell you that they could pull on people, you're just going to have to come to terms with it. We've said this before: if you're getting something for free, you and your data are the commodity. That's the cash exchange. Like your parents told you, there's nothing free in the world.

All right, so we have data layering. I'm sure most people don't think of it that way, so let's dive a little deeper into that. As you and I have been talking, where I saw synergies was, okay, if you have really good geo-targeting, there are ways to increase your retargeting via different channels. Everyone can retarget. You see an ad, they follow you with an ad. That's annoying. But if they follow you with an ad, and then subliminally you also get one on your kitchen table, and then it follows you on CTV, that's a different story. So I think that's definitely part of the strategy. But talk about some other ways. Talk about the tech, talk about how the postal service works in optimizing those routes.

It really all comes from the data. The ability to layer all the demographic and psychographic data to know who you're targeting, and then make the most efficient use of the spend. If you think about it, when you have the home information, there are a lot of attributes that are relevant to your business that can qualify people or disqualify them.

And I have to imagine the margin for error is less than it is on the internet. One, because there's not as much fraud, because it's harder to be fraudulent. And two, there's no money in being fraudulent. The money is in setting up a Google search partner network, clicking on your own ads and stealing the money, and Google doesn't care because they're getting the other side of it. That's where the fraud is.

Exactly. Think about other ad channels and the number of impressions. We have this conversation all the time. When you look at true ROI from a campaign like this, if you look at cost per impression or sheer volume of impressions, you take that with a grain of salt on digital channels. Email, think about deliverability, if it's even landing in an inbox.

I can tell you right now, the biggest change in marketing has got to be email. Everyone's on Gmail. Everything drops into a promotions folder or a social folder. Nobody's opening those up. They're tired of getting all the spam. So I have to imagine email response rates are getting murkier and murkier, unless you're either really good at it or your scale is so massive and national that you can send a blast and get 10,000 people to click just because you have that scale.

That's a big trend. There are actually businesses built on replacing email retargeting or re-engagement campaigns with direct mail. Automation into re-engaging folks with an impression they'll actually see. So that's email. Then you talk about some of the other digital channels, where you mentioned fraud. We're tracking to $200 billion in fraud in the industry by 2030. Almost half, between 20 and 30% of any given campaign, can be wasted. It could be bots. It could be not fraud, just waste.

It's more than that. I promise you. I have fraud protection on right now. You're talking 50% of the traffic. There are mechanisms you can pull, levers you can pull. Google and Facebook tend to be somewhat patient in giving you some money back in credits. But it's either not fake traffic but fraudulent traffic, because they're coming out and staying for one second, and what kind of traffic is that you're paying for? Or they're bouncing to too many IP addresses, which is blatant. There are a million ways, but every time the tech gets better, Google's and Facebook's excuses get better also. Oh, we're just the marketplace. You're the one attracting all this fraud. That sounds good.

Right. So when you think about these options, think about, number one, the ability to target, so you know who you're reaching and you're intelligent about whether you're getting this in front of your customer. Then, guaranteeing an impression. Think about putting it out there and who's seeing it. Is it even a human? An impression on social media is very easy to scroll away from. The worst case scenario with a direct mail campaign is you see it and you throw it in the garbage.

But you see it.

You see it when you're throwing it in the garbage. I do this rendition all the time, because people say, I just throw those away. Okay, go to your mailbox. I don't know how long your driveway is, but you're walking up, flipping through, and you've got this and this. Here's a brand impression, and you go, okay, here's the message, here's the value. I'm interested or I'm not interested. You can discard it. Or you could say, I need to talk to my wife about this.

Google counts that as not only in view, it's an engaged view, because it's more than three seconds that you spend with it.

So Google, they're counting that.

There are caveats everywhere. For me, usually my wife picks up the mail. I look, I see it immediately, I rip it up and throw it in the garbage, but I am seeing it as an impression. The eyeball is on it. It stands out to you to some capacity. I think ads in this space are a little different. On the internet you're expecting a certain thing because it's around other things. Here, I bet bad ads work really well, because you're thinking, oh my God, this is terrible, but you're staring at it.

It's funny when you look at their performance. It's attention-grabbing. You've got four seconds or less to make that point. But the better case that is not possible with other ad media is that these can live, and they often do live, on the counter, in a drawer, in the kitchen for weeks. We know because we see the call tracking. We put QR codes and tracking phone numbers on these, so we see it come through. When I got into the business, it was late January into February. We had multiple customers who hadn't advertised since the prior October, and they were getting calls rolling in weekly because people were saving them, and then the calendar turned or they got their bonus or whatever, and then they called.

I'll tell you, I'm waiting on trees right now. It was the middle of the summer, and I knew it would mess up my grass. I figured there's going to be less demand in the winter, so I'm waiting until the winter to get it done. I think one of the big problems is that home improvement got hit really hard coming out of 2020, because so many people had extra money and were doing all this work on their house that a lot of those projects got pulled forward, and they thought that rise from 2020 to 2021 was going to last forever. What actually happened was, because so many people were in demand for their services, it was easy to capture all of those people. Now you've got to go back to creating your own demand, and you've got to go back to your own brand marketing. The best brand marketers are the ones succeeding the most now.

So how do you talk to people about this? It used to all be about conversion, which it should be, don't get me wrong, you should convert. But I'm sure they say, I expected this many conversions. Are you having the conversation that this is a little bit of brand marketing also? Tell me how you overcome some of those objections with clients.

It's interesting. Depending on the design of the campaign, it can really serve multiple purposes. In some sense, broad awareness, if you're giving a message.

That would be very compelling if you're thinking you're doing brand awareness, if you're being broad. I want you to finish this statement, but to me the most important thing is you have to understand what you're doing. If you're putting a really good offer on, anything works.

Yes, that's right.

Anything works. And if you have something that's really good, a really strong ad, somebody is going to look at it. Those will never change across any kind of medium. So this is just an extension of it. But go on.

What a postcard does is give a trusted invitation that's reliable. People see that there's a durability to it. There's a tactile experience with the ad, where you're engaging more of their five senses.

Now you put smell in. Are we putting cologne on the jacket? Are we going to do pheromones, maybe?

It's possible. As long as we can spritz some of the cologne on there. So it's about making it memorable. From a brand experience, that's one thing, but these are very strong for driving leads. Number one, it's the targeted nature of it, and the ability people have to hang on to these things.

Speaking of lead generation, one of the objections I hear is, hey, I tried direct mail, it didn't work. A lot of times I ask, well, how did you do it? They say, I sent out a postcard campaign to 2,000 people, found a mail list, hit these neighborhoods. And I go, okay, 2,000 people, one time. Do you run Meta ads?

That's not even 50 cents worth of ads.

Correct. So there's no doubt this works like other advertising. The repeat impressions are key, and that's why it's important to work with a business that knows the data, has a relationship with the USPS and has been doing this for 30 years. Because there are options. The USPS has an Every Door Direct Mail program, which some viewers might know about. This is a way to execute, and on a cost-per basis it might be lower. But it's easy to waste a lot of impressions, and then you get into, why are we even doing this? Like email marketing and some of these other channels, you get a very low cost per impression, but why?

Those work if you're dealing with hundreds of millions of impressions. But it's too expensive on that basis, because unlike something like the internet, where your cost to get a banner ad is basically nothing since you're already paying for it, your cost per lead for this is the mail, which unfortunately has gone up. Most people know the post office is a disaster, but that being said, these have to be really important for the post office. You deliver these at a pretty good capacity.

A couple of things. Through our longstanding relationship with the post office and with some of the biggest printers in the US, our rates are going to be lower than what you'd see. Just in Atlanta, I'm doing over 15 million distinct pieces of direct mail this year. So we're doing it at scale. We're in the loop on all the incentive programs, we're qualifying for them, and we're getting volume discounts. It's very important to manage that budget, and it's done through using a provider like City Publications, which has a local presence and operates on a national scale.

I have to imagine the barriers to entry in the industry are pretty high. It's not easy to just start one of these. If you want to be a digital agency, you snap your fingers and you can be one. Nowadays, even connected TV: everyone on Earth was saying you could only watch on my platform, and now every day someone says Netflix is mine, Amazon is mine, wide open world, bidding, bidding, bidding. It's a mess, it really is.

I'll tell a story about when I got into the industry. I used to work at Adobe, selling digital marketing software to Fortune 100s. Coming into this, I thought, obviously there's an opportunity to innovate here, and in my mind that meant do more digital. You get out there in the landscape and you realize exactly what you said. There are a million digital agencies out there, and you'd better be the best.

It's a race to the bottom. It's been commoditized. Price is the only sensitivity.

And now everything's on its head, like we talked about with AI, where everything you thought you knew is out the window. Then there's a retreat to, listen, if I want to get my brand message out there and make sure I'm reaching the consumer, eliminate fraud, eliminate having to work through algorithms, maybe this tactile nature is a good way to do it. I realized that's a differentiator.

That's the way I think about my digital girlfriends too. It's just not the same as the real thing.

You've got to keep them both around. That's really the opportunity here. There's a paradigm of historical direct mail in the era of the Yellow Pages, when it was print marketing, and then it was digital marketing. There are still not a lot of businesses out there thinking about the and instead of the or. How do we take that high value audience and the ability to deliver and reach them in more channels?

First of all, there are a couple of things. Look at radio, look at billboards. You're reaching someone in their car. You don't know what kind of consideration they have. They're driving home, they're driving to work. I actually really like audio and radio, because there are fewer distractions. You're in your car, you're trapped, you can't do anything. Unless you're that one person on the phone on the highway getting honked at, you're stuck there.

The thing about home is that's when you're thinking about these things. When the roof's leaking and you have this thing in front of you, or you're looking outside and you see the trees, you're reaching them at the point where they're most likely to make a purchase. It works really well with radio for fast food, because what happens when you're hungry? Fast food on TV is branding, but the call to action is, hey, 99 cents, come in right now. So it's not just different points on the funnel, brand and then consideration phase. It's also hit them at home, hit them on their mobile, hit them in all these different places.

Which brings us to some of the stuff you and I have been talking about: how do we round out this approach and bring in other modern techniques like pixel tracking, impressions, retargeting and look-alike audiences? I don't want to reveal too much, because we're going to have a grand reveal at some point. But I do think the industry has separated itself. There are these full-functioning digital agencies that have gotten very complacent and lazy and don't want to push boundaries. They want to do whatever is easiest for them, and they're not seeing opportunities in something like this. What they're telling you is, don't buy direct mail, we're better. When you ask why, they have no answer. Don't buy radio. Now those same digital agencies are begging people to do these things, because it makes them look better and then they take credit for it. I've seen it in real time.

That's another trend. When I got into the industry, I realized that if you turn around and hit a digital agency, they are coming every time. They say, oh, I heard direct mail's making a comeback, I'd love to talk to you. So it's a unique offering. It's always been there, it's kind of flown under the radar for a few years, and it's a really cool time to take another look at it.

The other thing you mentioned is the timing of receiving something in your home about your home. A lot of the business we do today is with home services companies around Atlanta. By nature, you're talking about welcoming something into your home or accepting something into your home. That's what you're doing when you're hiring a plumber, an electrician, somebody to do a remodel in your house. So this is introducing that same trust, getting that brand in the home.

Guilty by association.

Exactly. It also adds credibility. You mentioned radio or TV advertising, whether linear or over the top. There's a level of credibility to it.

If you're on the right things. Nowadays you can't even control where you're going, usually. Sometimes you end up on garbage TV at some odd hour. You just don't know.

That's true. But say you're a growing brand. Maybe you did a million in revenue, you're on your growth journey, you want to be legitimate, you want to be the brand. You see a quality ad on TV or hear one on the radio, and people say, oh, those guys, they've got a commercial, wow.

That's step one in the journey. For me, the sports teams are the pinnacle of that. When you're with Georgia or with the Braves, that's when you're playing with the big boys. Or you're on a Monday Night Football broadcast. If you're on cricket on a Tuesday at 2 o'clock in the morning, I don't think you've made it yet.

Well, it's a start. But contrast that with, the only way I know this brand is because I see a flashing monkey banner ad. If you get a really high quality piece, and again get back to the tactile nature, you look and you feel, and then you see these guys in multiple places, it brings a level of authenticity to the brand, and it's a trusted media in the home.

I love it. Ultimately, as the years go by, I think a lot of this retro stuff is coming back for a reason. There was a bit of a wolf in sheep's clothing with a lot of these internet companies that were promising XYZ, didn't really know how they were doing it, and didn't have to show any work. You can't argue with this. What are you going to say, the post office lied? These things are tactile, in someone's hand. Yes, they ripped it and chose to throw it out, but that's very different from an ad on my phone that never even gets seen.

That's right.

So counting it as an impression anyway. Even this podcast, you know how many people are going to download this and not listen to it? I know the numbers. It's a large percentage that don't listen, but they still give credit for that. I'm not making money on it, but they're getting credit for it. We've just got to go back. As long as it's part of a robust, broad, full-funnel marketing approach, there's a space for everything, at the right price points.

Now let's spin this around. We've done a good job of explaining what it is and how it stands. What advice would you give to somebody on the other side who's saying, I'm thinking about doing direct mail? I want to go first, because there's one that really annoys me. My advice: if you're going to do an offer, don't do the same offer that's on a billboard, on a website. People don't feel special. Do a unique offer. Make it something that only exists there so people feel special. People want authenticity and they want to feel special right now. If you put the same stupid ad that is everywhere else, you are doing nothing to help. I don't care if it's $499 versus $500. It's got to be something a little bit different. Otherwise, all you're doing is saying my price should have been discounted to this price to begin with.

That's a great point on the offer, the design and the creative, which is very important. The number one thing I run into, and what I would encourage any marketer to think about when we talk about and-or, is that you've got outbound advertising, pushing ads out, whether that's a direct mailer or Google Ads or whatever you're displaying. But no matter what, you're driving people in. You have a web presence, however much attention you pay to it. On customer behavior, we'll put tracking phone numbers on these and people call, we see the calls come in, and especially with the boomer generation that's still a high propensity behavior. But more and more, that Google Business Profile is the centerpiece of your reputation, no matter how people hear about you. So if you're going to invest in direct mail, number one, make it part of an integrated marketing campaign, but also make sure you've firmed up your foundation, because people will inspect your brand, and leads will leak and fall out no matter how great your ad is if you've got five reviews and three of them are bad from six years ago.

I'll give you one further. What if you're the competitor who just made it to the big boys? The bigger boys are going to be there trying to capture every bit of name recognition you have, because you don't have that brand recognition. That foundation is a huge part of all of this. It may not be what Brian wants to hear, because he's selling this stuff, but don't advertise if you don't have that stuff. If you think you're going to go out there without a Google My Business that you're posting pictures to, that's updated, without being on every single directory site, and you're going to start advertising, you might as well take the money and light it on fire. I promise you, you will hit one or two big months off of it, because some of this is luck and some of it is your competitors coming back. But in the long run, it's like chasing penny stocks in the stock market. It'll look like it pays off until it's not there, and you build no actual equity whatsoever.

Right. Thinking about your brand and its omnichannel nature is totally mandatory these days. That's why I never argue. There are certain advantages that direct mail has over certain other advertising media.

It fits better on top of anything than it does alone. If you fit it in, there are things it works better with. Put it this way: if you have geo-targeting software, if you have something like a Klaviyo workflow where you can match emails and addresses, and you can push a segment to Facebook and Google, with some ground targeting, all hitting people with the same message from the same point, the propensity to succeed is just financially higher. You're not actually spending more money, you're being more targeted.

I don't know if any of my former colleagues at Adobe will end up watching this, but I bet people are laughing, because this is the same conversation we had with the chief marketing officer organizations at the biggest companies in the world. They've got this data, and in their case it's their own data, but it's still the holy grail for marketing, and the puzzle is how do I get the same message to the same person across the same channels? Many marketers today are saying, well, I have the same kind of segmentation criteria, and there's probably a big overlap, but you have no idea.

Nowadays Facebook and Google are begging you to use AI where it makes that assumption for you, which is actually worse. I shut it off on everything, because how do they know which ad is going to work best? For me, you need frequency. You can't change your message and then expect to get the same frequency.

With frequency, if you don't know that you're hitting the same actual individual, there are no repeat impressions, because it's ID A or ID B that looks like ID A.

As cookies disappear, it's going to get even harder. Okay, let's end with this one. I know I said the last one was more important, and these are kind of the same thing. If your copy sucks, your copy sucks. It's not going to work to begin with. Put time into it. Whether it's a logo, whether it's the tactile nature, whether it's a pretty girl or a good-looking guy on it, I don't care, but put something that's going to draw the eye. Like Brian said, when you look at this, something has to grab your eye immediately. It's just like social media. They say you have three seconds on social media. They're lying. You have half a second to grab someone's attention on social media. So make it compelling. Don't make it boring. Make it something that would grab your attention had you not been in this industry your whole life. Send it to your children and ask, do you know what this is? Give it to a five-year-old. Send it to your wife or your husband who know nothing about the industry and ask, will this grab your attention? These business owners know what they know, they don't leave their comfort zone, and they just keep making the same thing. Usually it's because their friend in the same industry made the same one, or they think their buddy who's a window guy and a roofer should look the same. It never works that way. A/B test. I'm sure A/B testing works for you. Pay to have four for the year, and A/B test four different ones. You know what market research costs? You can use these marketing tools to do market research. If you bake that cost in, it's cheaper than market research used to be.

I'll comment on the other misconception, or something people might not know, which has to do with A/B testing and measurement. Measurement has come a long way. I mentioned unique phone numbers, so we can track who's responding through that particular response mechanism, which is calling. QR codes leading directly to a booking page that we can track with a pixel, for example. A/B testing is a great example as well. If you're blanketing an area, and you know you usually do this many jobs year over year in this area, now try adding a direct mail campaign, and you can measure the increment, or use similar demographic targeting on that data platform to understand how it responded.

That being said, you cannot do that with one. The margin for error is too big. You have to do multiple, and this is with any form of marketing. If you think two weeks is your sample size, or one direct mailer, all you're doing is throwing money in the garbage. You might as well light it on fire. If you don't try this multiple times, and my rule of thumb no matter what is three months, but because of the way you're doing things, multiple sends, at least three sends, you don't have enough data to make these decisions. If you're the kind of person who thinks you're going to get that immediate impact, you'll be taken advantage of the rest of your life, because people are going to lie to you and sell you a fake bill of goods. If that existed, everybody would be using it and it would just be an absolute race to the bottom. That's the truth. If everyone uses Google, Google jumps out of its seat, because all you're doing is pushing up the auction costs. That's what they want. They want everybody to use it. So I completely agree with you, but measurement has to use industry standard margin for error and sample size, otherwise it doesn't work.

That's right.

And the worst part is business owners do an A/B test with what they think is going to be the thing, and they always show favoritism to what they want or think is going to win. Don't do that. You need to pay someone else to do it, and be open-minded about it. All right, bro, any other tips for anybody on the fence about a direct mail campaign? And then tell them how to find you.

We always start with a conversation. What are your business goals? What are your marketing goals? What are your sales goals? Where are you in your growth journey? What does the rest of your marketing look like? Then let's figure out the right type of campaign for you. We have a number of offerings, from standard campaigns that deliver repeat impressions at a manageable cost, to solo campaigns that are ultimately flexible, to specialty campaigns that target a cohort like new movers, for example, where we have priority data. No matter where you're coming from, the conversation is worthwhile. And I'm not shy to say, maybe this is not the right time to start in direct mail. I'll be totally upfront.

Usually those are the people who end up advertising, though. How dare you. Now I'm going to advertise. All right, tell them how to find you, bud.

My email is brian@citypubatl.com.

No naked pictures. We had this happen last time. No naked pictures.

I've got the filter active now, at least. That email filter is very handy. Find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, or reach out directly. I can share my phone number as well. citypubatl.com is the website.

All right. Thank you, bud. You've been listening to the unsexiest turned sexiest episode of the Marketing Madman ever. We'll catch you next time.