2332 - What Swimming Teaches About Direct Mail Success with Zairmail's Wilson Zehr

0:04Well, hey, Thoughtful Leader. Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. On this show, I interview purpose-driven founders, experts, and change makers who are making a real impact in the world. Want to be a guest? Simple. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click podcast. I'd love to promote your story to our audience of over 100 ,000 and across over 2 ,300 daily episodes and counting. Want to get booked on other great shows like this? Simple. Go to podverified.com and get your free guest authority score. Thousands of hosts are looking for high quality guests and Podverified connects you the right way. Now let's dive into today's episode.

0:58With us right now, it's Wilson Zare. Wilson, you are the founder and CEO of ZareMail. You're found on the web at zaremail.com. We've got that all linked up in the show notes. Wilson, it's great to have you. Thank you, Josh. Great to be here. Thanks for the opportunity. Absolutely. Before we kind of get into what ZareMail is and what you do, I understand that you have a background in competitive swimming. You've spent some time doing laps. I have. I've done way too many laps. I'm actually just recovering from a biking injury and getting back into it again. So I've been putting in some more mileage now and it feels good to get back into the swing of things.

1:38I guess since I have you here, I may as well ask. So when I have swum regularly, swam regularly, I get a lot of my shoulders end up getting like, oof. And then I get like shoulder pain and, you know, kind of like overuse injury. So is if there's a new swimmer, is it really important to kind of ease into it? Is stretching really important? Any tips you could give me or any beginning swimmer that wants to make swimming a bigger part of their physical life? Of course. Yeah, no, I'm not sure I qualified to really coach in that way. But certainly with any kind of exercise like swimming, it works to, you know, to start out with some stretches and a, you know, warm up, a mild warm up or, and work up to a higher intensity kind of workout.

2:32And I find that, you know, as I get older, I need a longer warm up to, you know, much longer. But that's really important to ease into it. The other thing is with swimming over the years, the strokes have changed too. So if you have having shoulder pain, you may want to look at the rotation, the way you're, you know, pulling into the strokes, you know, you know, there might there, I'm certainly there's a YouTube video for everything. I bet. I bet. Yeah, it's, and I think it's perhaps maybe a little deceptive, because it's low impact. And so you're like, let's go to town. And again, I'm speaking as someone who is crested into their 50s.

3:12So So there's just kind of the reality of that. But in terms of like your experience with swimming, you did compete at one point? Oh, I did, yeah. And I'm recovering competitive swimmer. I swam for a lot of years. I swam as an adult. I swam at, you know, I've been at Long Course Nationals, Nike World Masters. I still swim, you know, one to two miles, three to four times a week. So that's, for me, it's the fitness piece is really good. Cardiovascular fitness, muscular fitness. But it's also, you know, there's a little bit of zen to it. You know, when you're in the zone, you're swimming, you can think, you know, sort through problems at work, you know, kind of disconnect from things that are, you know, from troubling you a little bit.

4:06So it turns out to be very therapeutic for me as well. Likely not looking at your phone while you're swimming. No, it's funny because I had one at the edge of the pool the other day and the lady said, well, you're very trusting. I said, well, I've had to replace more than one. Your business is airmail.com. You have been at the helm. You founded this company over 26 years ago. Congratulations on your longevity right before the new millennia. So tell us what XerMail is. XerMail is, you know, our focus is on convergence. And in particular, convergence in this case is, you know, blending between the Internet,

4:59at the interactivity, robustness, connectivity of the internet with the traditional postal system. And we've done that within the context of direct mail. So if somebody wants to send a direct mail campaign, they upload a document, upload a list, see a preview in real time, push the button, they're in the mail tomorrow, the next day at a fraction of the cost. So we've really made direct mail as fast and easy as email. And we can do that. We are a software company, so we do fulfillment through a nationwide network of production facilities. It gives us all kinds of additional capabilities. We have almost unlimited capacity.

5:41We can get things in the mail tomorrow. We can do fault tolerance. We can route things electronically as far as they need to go before we turn them into paper. I mean, we can do a lot of really interesting things because we are digital in our foundation, even though we're delivering an analog product. Yeah. How is analog or how is physical mail and other? I imagine you have some great info and data about this. How is it performing today? In my experience, there's just been so much noise with things that AI wants to spit out, you know, slamming DMs, slamming email marketing, ads everywhere. To me, it all becomes noise.

6:26And so, you know, I hear the argument frequently of those who deliver physical material that is just not as competitive these days. Right. I mean, I hear that argument, too. And it's one that, you know, as you can imagine, we would embrace, you know, when you deliver a letter to the, you know, to somebody's mailbox. In that moment, in that space, you don't have any competitors, you own that moment with the customer. And that's really hard to find in the digital environment in that way. But beyond that, I mean, I think if that was the only advantage, then that might pan out as well. You know, the Direct Marketing Association says that on average, direct mail returns$12 for every dollar invested.

7:14Those are great returns. And part of the reason for that is that mail does some things that no other medium can do. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't use digital media because we use it too. I mean, we use AdWords. We use email. We use all the tools to market our business too. But it is, we should look at all of these things like tools or the portfolio of tools. And it's, you know, we need to use the right tool to address where the customer is in the customer journey and how we get them to where they need to go. But in terms of direct mail or in terms of mail, you know, the thing that advantages to mail as a tool is, first of all, reaches every household or business in America six days a week.

8:03And it does that by mandate. It's required by federal law to do that. Secondly, it's proactive communication. With a lot of digital stuff, I'm putting content on the web, but I'm waiting for people to come and find me. But with direct mail, I can reach out to find someone and I can, you know, deliver their message right now. Whether, you know, and so, you know, in some sense, I'm in control of the timing. Thirdly, it's precise audience targeting. You know, people have been doing mail for a lot of years. So the demographics are very well developed. So if I want to target Jewish Dennis in New Jersey, who bought a new car in the last six months, I can grab that list.

8:44And in fact, I can grab all kinds of lists. If I'm doing mortgage marketing, I can pull FICO scores and credit ratings and underwriting criteria so that I'm talking to exactly the people that can do the job. I can look at new movers, new homeowners. I can look at families with children or incomes in a certain range within a certain geographic area. it's very difficult to do that online. And finally, it's just built into American psyche. I mean, people are used to coming home, looking at the mailbox and seeing what's there. The U.S. Postal Service would call it the mail moment, you know, where you go to the mailbox and there's music from the heavens and light shine.

9:27And I think they maybe romanticize it a little bit. But the fact remains that people, you know, that's part of their daily routine. They check the mailbox because of that you don't have the negative reaction for some other kinds of advertising mediums imagine the last time you got a you know a cold call on the phone at home you know how did that go um so the complete industry vaporizing you know that people um as you mentioned before people are bombarded by advertising you need to find a way to to connect with them and inform them without causing them to recoil. And mail does that. Yeah. And so I think obviously we're looking at postcards.

10:14What other pieces are quite popular that you handle? Well, I would say that the top four are our postcard for us. is postcards, self-mailers, something called a snap pack, and then a letter itself, a traditional letter. And those, you know, once again, they're tools and they have different purposes. You know, the two most popular products of those are, you know, a letter and a postcard. And we do a ton of letters, first-class letters. So, you know, millions I've written in. And we do a bunch of postcards as well. The thing about postcards is that there is a discount postal rate for postcards. So it's usually the least expensive solution.

11:02It's also, it's like a little billboard in the mail. So it shows up, I get an impression. Almost always I'm going to get some kind of impression with it. And how I break through the clutter has to do with, you know, the verbiage and the image that's attached with it. the downside to a postcard is that of course it's um the space is limited you know so the message has to be very simple and and crisp the the other is that there's no you know personal information it's not hidden everything's exposed to the world so if you want to talk about things like more you know mortgage balances and payments and credit scores and stuff that's not the place to do it But if you have some more complex offer, a lot of times we'll move to something like LetterMail.

11:54With LetterMail, I have more space. Most of the letters we send these days are one page. There was a day when people were sending Publishers Clearinghouse, right? Oh, yeah. The big package. But today, we live in a short-form video world. So people aren't spending as much time with things as they would. So one page is just about right. It gives us a lot more time to develop the offer. The contents, of course, is going to be personal and confidential. So if we wanted to talk about, you know, your new mortgage rates, your new payments, what the APR would look like, that's a better content, you know, environment to do that.

12:33but the trick with the letter is of course i have to get an open before somebody can get my yes so we can do that with uh you know some kind of a teaser on the outside we can do that with you know the return address um but that's where a snap pack comes in a snap pack a lot of people aren't familiar with this format well you're probably most people are familiar with it they just don't know it by name so um the tip the technical name is a pressure sealed mailer and you've seen these if you've got a pin number from the bank that came or a check in a mail where you tear off the edges and you open them up so we do a bunch of those two so we call it a snap pack and with a snap pack we we almost always get an open because people associate it with like a pin number a check or something of that nature and we've got more space to work with and so we do a bunch of stuff like that self-mailers is not are not as common but they have elements of both you know, a postcard because they've got external surfaces that are exposed to the world, but they also allow us to add more content.

13:36So, I mean, typically, you know, those pieces are on a continuum. Some people, customers will select something in between, you know, along, you know, somewhere in between a postcard and a full-blown letter. Sorry, is that too much? I love it. I love it. The website, Zeramail.com, you've got some resources. Do you mind going through to our friend that's been listening to our conversation where they go from here? Also, too, like, I would imagine some people are curious about what the costs are. Well, you've got a direct mail price calculator, so you can figure out pretty close exactly what your campaign is going to cost.

14:16Is that right? Yeah, no, that's true. I mean, if you go to the site, the top right-hand corner is all the quick navigation stuff. You come here, you've been here, you want to just log in, send direct mail, that's where you go, just click a button. If you go all the way to the bottom in the footer, that's where we've put more detail to kind of declutter things. But down there, you'll see a link, second column over. It's a second column over, first item, mailing formats and pricing. Once you click on there, you'll see all the different formats and the pricing associated with that. There is a direct mail calculator, as you mentioned.

14:54We do have, you can request a sample kit. There's templates, libraries. There's articles with information. We also have a blog called the Direct Mail Journal, www.directmailjournal.com, that has tons of articles and tips and information on how to be successful, not only just with the mail, but marketing your small to medium business. If you go to the top of the site, on the right-hand side in green, you'll see send a single letter for free now. So that's for a product we call Speedy. It's a brand new product for us. And you can download a copy for free at www.zermail.com slash speedy. No credit card required.

15:36And basically, it's a desktop icon. And you can drop a PDF or a Word file on it. Or you can just double click on it and type in it. And it'll take that content and turn it into a letter. It'll ask, where do you want to send it? You give it an address. You push a button. It'll send it out as a letter. First two letters are free. not a lot of people give it away free postage so that's a great opportunity i would encourage everyone to download it give it a try you'll see that our toll-free number is right on our website unlike a lot of places sites we want you to call we'd love to talk to you um so give it a try give us a call let us know how it went you know what do you like what would you change we we need the input.

16:18Wilson Zare, your website, zaremail.com. Wilson, it's been a great conversation. Again, you've got a lot of those great free resources that you'd mentioned directly on your website. Thank you so much for joining us, Wilson. Thank you. Thank you, Josh. Really appreciate it.

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