Ep. 178 - MARKETING AUTOMATION in Direct Mail? 📬 ===> GUEST: Dennis Kelly, CEO at Postalytics - Direct Mail at a FRACTION of the cost and dramatically increased ROI!

0:08Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately. You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwetelson. Let's do this, not that.

0:40We are back for another episode of Do This, Not That, and we have a fantastic guest. We have Dennis Kelly, who's the CEO and co-founder of Postalytics, which is a super fast-growing company that automates direct mail. You're like, what does that mean? We're going to get into all that, but I asked Dennis to come on because I really want to share with everybody how you could be looking at direct mail differently. And it's not this spray and pray channel that maybe it used to be back in the day. So really excited to have Dennis on. Dennis, welcome to Do This, Not That. Thanks, Jay. Super psyched to be here.

1:16Awesome. So I know a little bit about this space to be dangerous. So I want to have a conversation because I think we're going to open the eyes of a lot of people that may not know that this is a thing, that this is going on. So I just want to frame it a little bit. And beyond just Postalytics, let's talk about kind of this direct mail automation category that exists now. So a lot of people out there understand email marketing automation, right? Somebody goes to a particular, let's say a pricing page on a website. And all of a sudden that may trigger an email in some marketing automation platform that exists out there related to what the person saw on a website, or maybe they signed up for a webinar, or they did 100 different things.

2:01And it triggers these emails all over the place. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that is now what we can do with direct mail. I mean, take us through exactly what direct mail automation actually means. Yeah, that's a great question. And you're right. The technology that has been built by ourselves and others, it really transforms the ways that direct mail can be used. And so in a broad sense, direct mail automation is really about trying to remove the complexities and the restraints of traditional direct mail marketing. And then enabling technology and automation in the marketing tech stack to be driving much more of what's happening in the channel.

2:57and so you know traditionally you have to batch up like great big numbers of of mailers to work with a printer to do anything that has any kind of personalization and it's very very complex all sitting in spreadsheets and there's all this communication back and forth direct mail invitations about removing all that so you can send out one piece of mail targeting one person and have it flow out of your marketing automation tool or your CRM or other part of your tech stack and not worry about those constraints that have traditionally been there in direct mail. So let's play it out for a second here because I want to understand.

3:39Let's say I send out, I don't know, an email campaign, right? And the email campaign gets a bunch of clicks, but only some of those people buy the product, service, download the thing, register for the thing, whatever. But I want to have an automation stream set up that whoever clicked, I want those people to automatically now get a postcard in the mail, sent to them, maybe building on what it is that they showed some level of interest on in that email. How is that possible? How quickly does the mail piece get in the mail? Can that all be automated? It can be entirely automated. And, you know, your marketing automation tools, your email marketing tools have all this great software and logic that are watching, you know, what's happening in those emails that you're sending out.

4:30And so you can easily configure triggers to say, hey, if Jay buys this thing that I'm trying to sell him, I want to send him a thank you postcard and ask for a rating. right and and so direct mail automation will sort of sit there and watch and wait for the marketing automation tool to say hey i got jay we're going to send he and his personalized data in here's a piece of here's the thing that he bought the date you know all sorts of information we're going to personalize a postcard through software with no human interaction and we're going to print and mail that in two business days. That's amazing.

5:11And so once you set these things up, they just run 24-7, 365, just like email marketing. See, this is the part that I think people are missing. Direct mail can be an always-on program once you set it up with all these personalized mechanisms, right, that are always these direct mail pieces can be firing off in real time depending on what people are doing on your site, interacting with your content, whatever. And take us through the cost because it used to be, okay, I'm going to do a direct mail campaign. I'm going to send out 50 ,000 mail pieces. My mail piece cost me somewhere around a dollar per.

5:48And this thing's going to cost me about$75 ,000 all in to get these 50 ,000 pieces out there. And I hope it does well enough to be profitable. But now what you're saying is the cost comes radically down because you're sending out onesies twosies. Is that a reality? That's a reality. And your price per piece really hasn't moved much. You know, and you hear a lot of kind of complaints about postage costs and everything going up and they have gone up. But in reality, you can send out a beautiful postcard or a letter to your prospects one at a time, you know, for a buck or less if you agree to send some over time.

6:29Right. Like so it's not really a lot of money that we're talking about in order to have a physical piece cutting through the noise. That you're seeing in all of your other channels. And so you can plug right into the tech stack you've already built and then configure campaigns and let these things run. And your spend is really reasonable. And it's a lot less than what you're seeing in some of the digital channels whose costs have been skyrocketing. What do you say to people that say, well, direct mail is legacy. Direct mail is dead. I don't get as many mail pieces, whether it's at work or at home.

7:14Why should I even bother with direct mail when I could do all this fun digital stuff? Well, so there's a couple of things. the fact that the mailbox is less crowded is actually why you want to do it, number one. Right. Right. So, I mean, how many emails a day do you delete without even looking? A lot. Hundreds. Who knows? Yeah, right. I mean, it's just overwhelming. You know, you might get eight pieces of mail a day or 12 or something, and you have to touch it. You have to hold it. You have to make a decision about what to do with it. So you need to be there because everybody else is over here, right?

7:56Doing the same thing. Just, you know, it's the old spray and pray junk mail from back in the day, except it's now in a digital format. So there's that. And then, yes, it is a legacy channel and it's been around a long time, but it's very effective. And so people say to me, oh, I never look at my mail. You know, I'm not going to direct mail. It doesn't work. I don't look at my mail. I said, well, yeah, I know you're not a data-driven marketer because you're just thinking about what you do. The data shows that direct mail is very effective. And so what we're trying to do is take that effectiveness and automate it and get rid of the complexity, get rid of the time and energy and make it a part of the modern marketing tech program.

8:53So is this like one of the better kept secrets in the marketing universe? I mean, I know you're trying to be out there and not let it be a secret. I know there's other players in your industry that are trying that are penetrating and whatnot. Or is it not a secret? And the majority of mail that I'm getting now is just for me. And it's this trigger based stuff. And I just don't realize it. Like, where are we at with marketing automation in direct mail? We're still really in the early stages of this evolution. It's been estimated that the total spend in the United States on direct mail is somewhere around$40 billion a year.

9:38and the total size of direct mail automation market is probably under$100 million. So we're talking a pretty small fraction of the total market out there. So we're in the early days and we're starting to see some traction in different segments and different types of audiences. So, you know, it's still a secret in the broader sense. And so from a do this, not that perspective, do this because your competitors probably aren't. And if you do it, you're going to get a step ahead. Yeah. And I'll say I use trigger-based direct mail in my own business. And I'm shocked about how cost effective it is. because you could send out hundreds of pieces and have an impact because you're doing it based on somebody taking an action.

10:40And that is how you really make direct mail effective. So I think it's great what your organization is doing and others in the space. So let's move on to a ridiculous portion of this podcast, though. We've talked a lot about direct mail. Now everybody's going to hit up Postalytics and be like, well, how do I do that? But I want to know a little bit more about Dennis because I may be wrong, but is it true that like you wake up in the morning and you like go swimming in the ocean? Like that's wild. Is that true? It's true. It's true. My wife and I and our kids actually started on Thanksgiving right before COVID.

11:23And we'd heard about this lunatic from Europe named Wim Hof. who is nicknamed the Iceman. And all the health benefits you get from cold water. We live right outside of Boston. Water's cold. And we started on Thanksgiving Day, and we've been going now ever since for the last five years. And so it's a part of our ritual. It helps us feel great. And, you know, this time of the year, water is probably upper 50s, lower 60s degrees. So we can stay in for a nice amount of time. In the dead of winter, it's upper 30s, lower 40s. You're only in for a couple of minutes and your body tells you to get out.

12:12But that hit that you get from cold water can really start your day off the right way. So we've been doing that for several years and we love it. It's just, if we can't do it, it's a killer. Like, we just don't feel right. So wait a minute. If I asked your kids, do you love it in the dead of winter, they're going to say, yeah, I love it? Or are they going to give me the side eye and be like, yeah, my dad's crazy, but he makes us do it? Yeah, there's definitely a lot of side eye. You know, my kids are grown. They live in New York. They come home every now and then, and we convince them to go with us.

12:49But they get it. Like they understand, you know, they just can't do it in their daily practice at this point. Right. I think you need like a daily, like you should post every day on LinkedIn. Like, all right, I just completed it again. I just went again. I think you might go viral because that is wild stuff. I don't even know. I want to like judge you and say all these crazy things, but that's not appropriate. But in my mind, I want you to know, I'm thinking like, this guy's wild. Good for you though. Better you than me. Yeah. I live down here in Florida. So I could do it down here in Florida and it wouldn't be that cold, but I still don't do it.

13:24So there you go. Good for you. It's us and the fishermen out there in the winter. That's better. Yeah, I bet. All right. So listen, I want everyone to find you, to follow you, to interact with you. So where can everyone get involved in your world and Postalytics? What should they do? Well, you can definitely hit us up on our website, postalytics.com. We have a free account. You can use the software for free. right you can you can build campaigns you can play around you build software for free you can engage with us you don't have to engage with us it's it's a freemium type of product and then you know if you do engage you can you can get into all sorts of different plans you know from a social standpoint we're by far most active on LinkedIn and so hit me up on LinkedIn Dennis Kelly and and our LinkedIn channel from a company standpoint is super active so So love to hear from anybody.

14:20Please check us out. And like I said, if you're not doing this, you should be. Yeah, and we're going to put all these links in the show notes. And if you do have questions, you should hit Dennis up, not just to become a customer post-alytics, but it is an emerging, really marketing channel. And it's an opportunity to get in on something and become an expert in something that I think is going to grow significantly. So really was excited to have you on, Dennis. And thanks for being here, man. Awesome, Jay. Really appreciate it. And thank you and your audience. All right. Take care. You did it. You made it to the end.

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