Why Are Shopify Brands Quietly Spending Millions on... Postcards?

0:01I'm hearing about brands crushing it with direct mail. If you were to look at the top 1 ,000 brands on Shopify, 82 % of them are already doing direct mail. It delivers something that allows the brand to connect with the customer in just a unique and different way than they're not used to. What does Postpilot do? We're not SaaS. We're ad spend. We're an ad network. From scaling go-to-market engines at Tapcart and Disco to leading revenue innovation as SVP at Postpilot, Neil Goyle has helped brands unlock new profit streams, rethink customer acquisition, and turn bold ideas into scalable systems.

0:33The value of a website actually goes down over time. Humans in a basement could build 90 % of what a legacy provider took seven years to build. They could build in four months by virtue of AI building software. Where is there a channel that really is desensitized to AI? Our sends that are going out are non-offer based. their simple relationship builders. And it still triggers the conversion simply because that whole moment is to evoke a certain emotion.

1:06OmniSend just shipped something that I've always wanted. You can now connect OmniSend to ChatGPT or Claude and just say, where can my email and SMS campaigns be making more money? And it actually figures it out. It reads your store data, all your campaign details, your store history, and it tells you. And the insights are legit good. And even better, you can then say, okay, let's fix that or build that campaign. And it actually does it right from your chat. It's wild. Now, if you're one of our listeners, you can get 30 % off for three months on OmniSend. Just go to the show notes. There's a link there.

1:37Or you can just use the code J30, J-A-Y-3-0 when you sign up. Now, if you're using another email and SMS platform and you want to switch to OmniSend, which is a great idea, they will do the migration for you. Just give them five days and then you show up with everything set, ready to go. Now they've migrated thousands of stores from Klaviyo and on average, they're saving 35 % on their email and SMS bills. If you're listening to this show, you clearly care about your Shopify business. If your store isn't backed up and protected, it could all be for nothing. That's why I tell every store owner I know who cares about their business, you 100 % need Rewind installed.

2:13It's a non-negotiable for me. One bad CSV import, one app that edits your store the wrong way, which has happened to basically everyone I know. One bulk edit gone wrong. And now AI making changes for you. Listen, Shopify does not have an undo button. Rewind is the undo button. Go to shopify1percent.com slash rewind for 30 days free on us. Links in the show notes too. Last year, I went to Commerce Roundtable in San Diego and it was so good. I'm going back again this year. It's September 21st and 22nd. And honestly, you should come too. It's the one e-commerce event that I recommend to everybody without blinking.

2:53It's not a trade show. There's no booth demos. It's really just operators on stage sharing what's actually working in their stores right now. And it's basically a room full of all founders. I was actually scrolling through my camera roll from last year, and I have over 100 pictures of slides from people's talks. I learned so much. It's that kind of an event. Now, I have five passes to give away for a 30 % off ticket. It's first come, first serve. So if you're interested, email me, jay at shopify1percent.com and I will hook you up. They will go fast. So email if you're interested. And if you're going, come say hi.

3:28Let's grab a coffee or a drink during happy hour. I'd love to meet you. Paid acquisition, it's gotten harder over the last couple of years. You all know that, everyone listening. It hasn't just gotten harder. It's gotten less reliable and way more expensive. But there's something that I'm hearing a lot of brands doing that's working, and it's direct mail. And it's not just working. I'm hearing about brands crushing it with direct mail. And it can actually be a real performance marketing channel. It's not just thank you letters. It's a performance marketing channel that you can measure, that you can grow, that you can track.

4:09So I wanted to bring on our show, Neil, with Postpilot, which just recently with Postpilot, I want to talk a little bit about why you decided to join Postpilot. I know you're excited about what they're doing, so excited to hear about that. But I want to get into the mechanics of how direct mail works, where does it fit in, how do you implement it, how do you measure it like a performance channel, all the nitty gritty. So first of all, Neil, thank you so much. Welcome to the show. Jay, it's an absolute honor to be here. I've been following your journey for such a long time. Just the fact that being invited as a guest on the show, just absolutely thrilled and honored to be here.

4:42So I appreciate it. Well, thank you so much. That means a lot. It's funny. We've been following each other's journey, but we didn't know we were following each other's journey. And then we bumped into each other on LinkedIn and the rest is history. Why did you tell me about Postpilot? Why did you you you made the move over? Tell me, first of all, what is Postpilot and why were you so excited to join the company? Yeah, great call. I think if you know me in person, if you know me as a teammate, if you know me as someone who serves the customers, if you know me as a persona on LinkedIn, I'm basically the same human being in all of those places, which means I'm super optimistic, always overflowing with optimism, high energy, over caffeinated, all of those things.

5:21In every room I'm in, in person or virtual, that's how I am. And that is a direct reflection and result of the happiness and joy I get out of serving the e-commerce, serving e-commerce brands. I genuinely love what I do. I'm just very expressive in showing that in all formats, which also means I'm very bullish on the space, hyper bullish on the space. But there came a time about eight months ago where I felt like I needed this like this moment of like I don't know therapy but it was not therapy in its traditional sense therapy in the sense that as bullish and optimistic I was for the Shopify merchant and what the road ahead looks like for them as they grow scale their brands, I had a very growing and dark view for the software ecosystem that supports that space.

6:17Right. Very dark view. Right. And for me, that caused this like very conflicting belief. So bullish over here on brand side and very bearish view on the software that's supporting all of these brands. And that really kind of came from a three part journey to this, I guess, climactic moment in realization. The first part of the journey started in like 2021-ish, I would say, where, you know, it's just post-COVID. Now we have 4 million brands that have popped up on Shopify. 14 ,000, 15 ,000 software companies that support them have popped up overnight, right? Yeah. So those are looking back in my days at Tapcart where, okay, amazing provider, been around for a long time since before the go-go days.

7:04And when you think of all these new entrants that come into the ecosystem, with a very limited Shopify TAM, arguably you have 14 ,443 companies chasing the same 2 ,000 brands on Shopify, these poor inboxes, these email inboxes, right? I can only imagine. Now, that created a starting of a race to the bottom effect almost, right? In terms of pricing and competition, just like yes feature but like the commoditization was accelerating quickly now that's nothing new that's in literally every category of e-commerce whether you're a loyalty provider subscription provider mobile app provider it doesn't it didn't matter like it was a downward pressure on price right but yeah all adapted to that and then phase two came about and that was the start of 2023 where ai to build software was a new thing chat gbt hadn't really hit the scene yet right retail consumer front.

7:57But AI building software, there was this like new up and coming group of software companies that came and it was like four humans in a basement could build 90 percent of what a legacy provider took seven years to build. They could have been four months and they did build in four months and they were able to charge pennies on the dollar in that process. So we accelerated that race to the bottom by virtue of AI building software, right? Yeah. So if you think about someone that's like needs to be part of a career that is focused on hey there's going to be a great exit someday there's a potential for real scale that churn is not the challenge you're focused on all day every day it really made it quite difficult and very limited like i see myself in e-commerce till the end of time until they put a bullet in the back of my brain in the backyard i'm in e-com right but then where do you go in e-com if you really want to see a tailwind so that came into part three of this kind of dark view and that's this whole concept of agentic commerce which is kind of a fancy buzzword right now no one really knows exactly what that is we're getting greater signs of what it could be from like learning from what shopify is saying and whatnot but we really don't know what two years from now it's going to look like like we're all kind of guessing but what we do know is that the way consumers shop right now is going to be different, right?

9:21We just know that we don't know what it's going to be, but we know it's going to be different. And the website is not the only place people are going to go to shop anymore. It's right now we force a customer, hey, you like, you're interested, go to this www.com, add a couple of products to cart, check out and force everybody down that same funnel. And in this world of agentic, everyone's going to have their own buying behavior, buying patterns. And the amount of ways someone can make a purchase is going to be limitless in my view. So the value of a website, a static website, got it. That word static is almost like taboo to say out loud, but like the value of a website actually goes down over time, right?

10:00And therefore the software supporting the website and the value to the brand goes down over time. So the question is, where do you go? If that's the case. And so that's why I entered the world of ad spend. Postpilot is not a software company. We are a software company, but we're We're not SaaS. We're not selling software as a service. We're ad spend. We're an ad network. So the question is, what is a brand willing to pay meta if it's printing 5X? That'll go up and to the right forever. They'll never turn that off. If it's printing 5X, never turn that off. You can go into the millions and never.

10:34Same thing with Applovin. Up and to the right. Could go forever. And same thing with Postpilot. If it's performing, it's an ad channel. It has unlimited runway. And so that's why I actually moved into the ad spend world as opposed to software. I had so many thoughts. I really appreciate your well thought out process there. And I didn't want to interrupt, but like so many thoughts are coming up to mind because I mean, I think everyone is thinking this and there's so much uncertainty. And I mean, we have products for sure that AI will be a threat to. I mean, it's not just SaaS. I the last person I had on the podcast was an agency owner and he said the same thing he's like I don't know what our future looks like is am I is agency work going to exist or are we going to just be AI consultants or when and to say people might not be coming to your website I don't it maybe sounds radical but it's really not if you go back 20 years and you would go to a brick and mortar store and you would go to Macy's and say people won't be coming to your retail store.

11:42one day they said no and they had different divisions there was the retail division and the e-commerce division and then eventually it just became one it was commerce and they tried to bridge that gap and now the website will be the legacy channel and it's unclear what the exact way it's gonna play out but I think we could all agree that there is a better way and once you do something once like when you experience something like say you go to a really good hotel or you have really good service at a restaurant or something you do something that's like a really great experience the saying like it's hard to go back and like once you use chat gpt to find an answer to a problem you have like you're fixing a dishwasher i don't know let's just say and it tells you and you hold up your phone and it scans the dishwasher and says oh i can see the issue here it's hard to go back to google and search and scour through blogs and read blogs and find a youtube video and find the spot in the video like it's painful it wasn't painful until your eyes were opened and you saw holy cow like i have the meta glasses i can put them on i can say hey meta tell me how i need to restart this dishwasher as an example and we don't even know what better is until we experience it.

13:01And so I think it's coming, but we like no one can say because, but as soon as you do, and it's like, it's on the horizon and it's right there. And it's, I think your thought on what the value that Postpilot brings, I think is bang on. I guess we should define what that is for listeners. So what does Postpilot do? Yeah. I mean, great call out. So when you think about what got me so excited about joining post-pilot it's worth understanding okay so where do you go with your career if all of these things are happening by virtue of ai right now right and it really only falls into two buckets you could go one the ai first companies that are going to shape what agentic means right shopify is obviously number one at the top of that list and they're working with google and open ai and whatnot but in terms of and talking about like more niche software companies we don't actually know who that winner is going to be yet.

13:52So yeah, whatever, if you choose to join the AI first AI native solution, you don't know who that winner is. And if you pick a right winner, great, that could be amazing, right? From my perspective, I prefer to choose a second category, and that is let AI do its thing, but be in a category that's truly defensible against AI. In other words, AI could just like make it better. Easy example, logistics. You still need to ship a box to your customer into the day. That'll always exist. AI is just going to go make it better and more efficient and smarter, right? So, but oh my gosh, I could not sell logistics.

14:30I am not that guy. I am like a marketing guy, right? So that goes into the question. It's like, okay, where is there a channel that really is desensitized to AI? And that is our physical home, right? The concept of the physical home. And so that's what got me so excited about Postpilot is Postpilot direct mail for brands on Shopify. When you think about direct mail, you think about kind of this period of time where direct mail has been around since the beginning of time because we've had a home address since the beginning of time. And it's always been a part of brand strategy, except it fell out of favor like beginning 2017, I would say, like fell out of favor as a channel because as Facebook took over, we as performance marketers became so programmed for click conversion direct response measurement performance track it it's not worth doing and if you can't there you go you said it beautifully right so we be we as performance marketers our behavior and standard and changed and so direct mail never really went away it just got like downsized in budget or in priority and whatnot And so that's where like Postpilot was born was understanding that, hey, we've now fast forward seven years, eight years from that point, digital channels.

15:50I mean, there's amazing digital channels out there. Everything's built on meta to start. And then TikTok, AppLovin and all of these other channels that are popping up, retail media. But at the end of the day, they're getting harder. They're getting more expensive over time. It's noisier, right? It's much harder to capture the attention than it was before. And so now the question is post-pilot direct mail cuts through that noise, allows that in real life experience, but in a new school way that meets the performance marketers rigor and standard for measurement and demonstration of incrementality.

16:24And so that's where that's why post-pilot has been such a tailwind or had such a tailwind is kind of this old school meets new school rigor for measurement and evaluating a channel. Okay, so let's talk about that real quick. What exactly, I'm a Shopify store, someone listening right now, what can I do with Postpilot? So you say direct mail. What does that mean? I can mail my customers. Can I send promotions? You say you can track it. On a very practical level, what can I do with it? At the simplest level, imagine you have a set of customers that purchased from you a year ago, but they haven't purchased in the past year, right?

17:04They're familiar with the brand. They know the brand. They have obviously converted before, but they've gone dormant for whatever reason. They may unsubscribe to your emails. They haven't come back again to the website. This is an opportunity where you can deliver an in real life touchpoint, literally a postcard that arrives in their mailbox. It has 100 % open rate because it's every customer is walking to their mailbox at some juncture over the course of their week. And it delivers something that allows the brand to connect with the customer in just a unique and different way than they're not used to, right?

17:41Again, a non-digital way. In that moment, the brand has the opportunity to build that relationship, has a craft a unique offer. But that concept of sending a postcard is nothing new, right? The way it's set up, it is in the format of hooking up into Klaviyo, having different segmentations, being able to target a one-off postcard based on an individual shopper's previous shopping history, previous attributes, based on their own behavior, based on their actual on-site behavior. They can receive a one-off postcard. So traditionally, you'd think of a mail house. I got to go print 10 ,000 postcards and mail them all out.

18:20No, this is truly programmatic. It's just always on. So as your customers fall into a particular Klaviyo audience or whoever you use for your segmentation, they fall into a particular audience or segment, boom, trigger a card that day. And it essentially ends up being Klaviyo for mail, right, where you can throw them on the back of a welcome flow or an abandoned cart flow as well and use it in limitless fashion. Oh, they came to a website, they started browsing certain products, and then they just bailed. They didn't give an email. They didn't buy. We can de-anonymize that physical home address and target them with a single card based on what they were specifically looking at on site.

19:01Right. At the beginning of the show, I told you why everyone serious about their Shopify business should have their store backed up and protected with Rewind. There is no excuse not to. There literally is no undo button for Shopify. Shopify's own terms actually say that your data is 100 % your responsibility, your products, your theme, your customizations, your settings, everything. They don't back up any of it. And no, a CSV export does not cover it. With CSV exports, there's no images, no meta fields, no themes, settings, et cetera, nothing. I was talking to the people at Rewind about a brand where one team member actually ran a bulk update and accidentally overwrote 11 ,000 products, orders, customers, contacts, all of it gone in a single action.

19:51Luckily though, with Rewind, it was a simple one-click rollback. It could be anything, a bad CSV import, a random app you just installed that messes everything up, or all of these AI tools that everyone's using to manage their store. Now, I have heard so many horror stories. Rewind just gives you peace of mind no matter what. If you don't have Rewind installed, you absolutely should have it. Go now and get it. Shopify 1 % dot com slash Rewind. You'll get an exclusive 30 days free on me. The link is also in the show notes. At the top of the show I mentioned, OmniSend can now talk to ChachiBT and Claude.

20:28And I want to tell you why that's even bigger than it sounds. So if you missed it, quick catch up. OmniSend is what I use for email and SMS on every Shopify store I work with, plus for this show as well. And you can now connect your AI, Cloud Chat, GPT straight to your OmniSend account. Your data, your campaigns, your flows, everything. You open a chat and you ask, what should I focus on this week to make more money? And it will come back with real answers about your store, which flow is underperforming, which automation needs improvement, which customers are going quiet, what's missing, everything.

21:02My favorite part, though, is AI segments. I used to build these by hand, clicking through filters forever. Now I just type something like customers who bought twice but ignored my last campaign and it just builds it. and anything it writes already sounds exactly like your brand because it pulls from all your previous emails, from your website, your logo, your color, your voice, everything. I've been doing this for 15 years and this is the closest I've ever felt to having a full-time marketer sitting right beside me. I have a link for you in the show notes that will give you 30 % off for your first three months or you can just use code J30 when you sign up, J-A-Y-3-0.

21:38If you're ready to migrate from Klaviyo to Omnisend like thousands of others, they will do everything for you. You just show up and all your campaigns and automations from Klaviyo will be set up and running in OmniSend, ready to go. And usually at 35 % less what you were paying Klaviyo. So even if they've never bought from you before and you don't have them in as a Shopify customer, you can de-anonymize them through like RB2B and other tools like, is it that type of a data, similar database, and get their info and actually send them a physical card. Yeah. So like what RB2B does for emails, we do for, we have our own hidden out solution for physical mailing addresses.

22:21Right. So. And I guess if you know a customer on one store, if that customer is on another store who's also using Postpilot, you can connect them, I'm imagining, right? That is correct. We understand through an IP address, we're able to match back to their physical home address and fire off a card and do so based on. online, I abandon. I might get a postcard now in three days instead of the abandoned email that I never open. I'm going to get a postcard saying, hey, Jay, we saw you left this in your cart and here's a coupon or something. A thousand percent. Like right now, if you go to the postpilot.com website and go click on a couple of blogs and if you spent over a minute on those blogs, you, Jay, are going to get a postpilot postcard that says, do you know why you received this card?

23:06It's because you were hanging out on our site reading our blog. That's the best marketing because it's literally what you do and you're doing it to the customer. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Right. That's awesome. So what are all the types of automations or campaigns that you can do? Yeah. I mean, we work full funnel. And so when a full funnel, obviously retention, where we typically would start is like lapsed buyers. Again, like I mentioned, they just haven't bought in a long time. Or a lot of brands are like, oh my gosh, I need to suppress certain audiences in my CRM to save on my Klaviyo costs or whatever.

23:39So they've like suppressed this audience because they've gone non-responsive on email. Well, that's a wasted audience, right? Like you effectively have given up on that audience. And so we have an amazing ability to retarget those and reinvigorate and reactivate that customer too. So that's where we typically would like to start the customer to at least prove the channel out. Then we can move a funnel to what we call retargeting. That's like the on-site behavior. They've never actually made a purchase before. Or maybe they subscribe to a welcome flow. They gave you their email address. They went dead on a welcome flow because 90 % of 90 plus percent of welcome flow emails don't end up yielding a conversion.

24:17But we can de-anonymize with email address and fire off a card on the back of that flow. That's like what retargeting is. And then the part that's most exciting and one of the reasons why I joined Postpilot is there's a lid on what every brand is willing to spend on retention. Right. There's like a cap to it. What is a brand willing to spend on acquisition if it's performing? And there is no limit, like we said, right? There's literally no limit. And so that's where Postpilot has acquisition AI, true cold prospecting. We build lookalike audiences just like in meta. We are meta for mail, right?

24:53You can set daily budgets. You can... How do you build a lookalike audience? Like, OK, so in meta, I would have a pixel on my website or I have I upload an email list and I create an audience from that. Yeah, to a degree. I mean, we are using data sets from multiple sources as well as our own. So like you'll see traditional direct mail players that are buying data and demographic sources to figure things out. Yeah, we we have the data. So for instance, Jay, you, we know what you bought from the 38 other brands on Shopify to the penny. We know you've gone over here. As long as they're also using Postpilot.

25:34Correct. Correct. Yeah. Right. But we now have the shopping history for every single human being in the United States on a Shopify brand. So think of Jay has gone over here to Ella Yoga and bought a hoodie and went over here to Reef and bought a pair of sandals and went over here to this brand. We know your entire journey. We know what you like, what you don't like. We know when you subscribe, when you don't subscribe to a CPG. Yeah. We know what your LTV is with every brand you ever shop from. We know where you're one and done. We know where your repeat book. That's insane. And then, and so with all of that, how do we understand like, what is a good, like what kind of persona is Jay?

26:12That's a live shopper behavior thing, right? As opposed to I'm targeting males in this particular income demographic. Yeah. That's so vague in general. 30 to 50 year old people who make$100 ,000 or more. That's like about as granular as you can get with mail. But you're saying I can target someone who's interested in yoga, fitness gear. There you go. Or whatever. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. You can also target and say, hey, I want to go for cold prospecting, but only target customers that have previously converted somewhere else with a postman. So this is a customer that responds to the direct mail channel, right?

26:56Yeah. And just to clarify, the way you know they converted, are you shipping address? Like if you send to someone at a certain address and then an order comes in for that address, you connect it? Like they don't need to use a QR code or anything like that. They can just order it. That's correct. Yeah. That's awesome. That's correct. So we know the exact date it arrived in that particular customer's mailbox. There's like a delayed attribution window. So it's not like a Facebook ad, click convert. Yeah. But there's a delayed attribution. might sit on the kitchen counter for a minute, but we'll know within seven to 14 days if they convert it and it'll show in Shopify, right?

27:27Yeah, isn't there some crazy stat that like the average piece of direct mail sits on a counter for seven days and is touched like nine times or something? I read this the other day, but like before it's thrown out, like it's not like email you just delete if you're not. It's some crazy number like that. Thousand percent. So if you think of like the length of the impression that you're getting from that direct mail piece, it's absolutely wild. Like you think of a Instagram ad, it's like a quick thumb stop and then gone. And then you'd think of why app loving has been so successful. It's because it's in game, but it's a forced like seven to 10 second viewing time that you're forced to do so in order to continue playing your game.

28:10Like that, the value of an app loving impression is so much more than a meta impression just by virtue of what you're able to do from a brand copy creative perspective because they're forced to stay. They can't thumb, keep scrolling. They can't just hit skip. And so the value of that, and then take it one step further, the direct mail impression. You're absolutely right. Sits on the countertop, sits on the fridge. Constant reminder. How many times is it being seen before the conversion? Nine times is right about anywhere from nine to 12 times. Someone sees a piece of mail before they act on it, right?