Morgan DiGiorgio & Brad Kugler presented this session to hundreds of attendees at The World’s Largest Virtual Direct Mail Conference called DELIVERED 2024!
Transcript below.
Mail 2.0 and who’s mailing what where our sole purpose is to make Direct Mail the most effective form of marketing by
integrating it with Cutting Edge Technologies and I’m joined here today with our co-founder and CEO Brad Kugler
say hello Brad hey guys happy to be here excited all right today we will be
discussing the power of mail and how we can improve the Channel with the use of artificial intelligence and other
emerging technologies that lift the response rate and ROI on Direct Mail campaigns we will be doing a Q&A at the
end so if anybody has any questions throughout the session we can address them then so let’s go ahead and kick it
off first things first let’s start with the foundation of it all and that is Direct Mail Direct Mail advertising is a
58.5 billion industry with 10.9 billion of that in the US from 2023 which is
forecasted to reach almost double that at 20.3 billion at the end of 2024 now
nearly 72% of businesses use direct mail to generate sales with over 91% of promo
rail is read and opened I don’t know about you Brad but uh what do you do in the morning when you get a bunch of spam emails you read every single one of
those or delete delete delete delete delete delete me too right so I never
get the marketing message I never see what’s what’s in that email right but when I go out to my mailbox and I get a
mail piece even if I make the decision to discard it or throw it away I still receive that marketing message and it
impinges because it takes 21% less cognitive effort to process than digital marketing it’s activating the long-term
memory centers in my brain so when that message is repeated or I see it again it has very high brand recall and this is a
an effective channel for all demographics across the board so Direct Mail is such a powerful Channel at core
but traditional mail or how it’s been utilized historically can be taken to
the next level with technology and we happen to know a lot about that at Direct Mail 2.0 and who’s mailing what
and Brad is always finding ways to try to take mail to the next level with
technology um and with the leveraging of other tactics so today we’ll be focusing on how you can leverage AI to predict
optimal Direct Mail attributes uncover winning tactics with competitive intelligence and lift response rates
improve attribution with Omni channel so harnessing the power of technology to
improve Direct Mail leads to favorable outcomes and results for marketers and print and mail service providers in
numerous ways first way you’re adding value in differentiation as a marketer you’re standing out from other marketers
in the ad space and you’re taking advantage of increased Roi now as a print provider you’re harnessing the
power of technology to bring meil to the next level and as Brad would say you’re not just doing traditional ink on paper
right and and this allows you to acquire new mail business and draw it away from mail providers that are solely executing
traditional mail and this is allowing you an opportunity to sell more mail and tap into a greater portion of that 58
billion industry and also not lose customers to other print providers
because unfortunately in the print industry we often find ourselves in a cost based environment we’re pining for
business based on who can do it for less and that is a very poor place to be so
when you can add value and you can set yourself apart this removes that cost factor and it’s leading to a sticky
that’s keeping clients engaged and it’s going to lead to more reorders and in the print industry we pretty much live
on reorders once you acquire a new customer being able to secure successful ongoing business from them is integral
to our success and you’re going to get better results you’re going to get higher response rates when you’re using
technology and adding value you’re going to get more leads for your customer which is also going to lead to more
reorders and from a marketer’s perspective you’re going to be able to differentiate your
uh with marketing campaigns that are standing out they’re capturing more market share leading to higher Roi on
and uh on your marketing dollars and lastly with technology you can find ways to make mail more effective and trim off
unnecessary fat in testing scenarios and other ways that lead to saving money on
marketing so let’s Deep dive into technology that lifts Roi on Direct maale I’m going to turn it over to Brad
He’s going to kick us off with speaking about mail and artificial
intelligence excellent thanks Morgan so just to give a little background I myself and my brother bought our first
Apple 2 computer in 1980 I was 13 years old and we saved our our dog walking
money and it was like $2,000 and all of our allowance for a year and we bought this computer and one of the first
things we were able to do with it is we were able to code a mathematical equation that created a snake that SC R
up and down the screen so at that point I was hooked you know data and computers and math were sort of like a thing for
me so fast forward 40 some years without giving away my age how do we take this
data and turn it into something that’s actually usable by people uh I don’t
remember who said it but someone once said you give me enough data I could predict every outcome and when it will
happen so basically the gist of the AI powered
modeling basically just takes past results compiles them to a point to
predict future outcomes all right so a lot of people think oh this AI is new
and it’s it’s brand new it’s never been around there are some parts of it that are new and and just to kind of separate
the weed from the cha the new stuff are these large language models that you’ve seen with chat GPT and Gemini and hard
and and then some of these these uh sites that create images and stuff but
the the power of predicting an outcome Based on data is not new the part that’s
new about it is the speed and the quantity of data that can be ingested to
come up with an outcome you you don’t need a room full of computers and even if you do their house somewhere else
with somebody else’s information so it really comes down to what do you need to
predict an outcome you need a stable consistent source of data all right you
must have a longterm history the longer term
the more data the better the next thing you need is you you need some talented folks who will take it and create this
analysis that will take all of these different data points and from those
data points they can create a the way I’m trying to explain how it’s
actually done so that this is makes sense to people and it’s not the Wizardry in science you think that it is
and could never be done by you it can be done by well maybe not you but if you understand how to do it it’s easier to
understand where you can go with it so if you have all this data and the data
has a benchmark or a average outcome then there’s outliers
that changed that outcome they either made the outcome above the space line or they made the outline the outcome below
the Baseline and there may be subsets of the data that moved that that outcome
line below or above a center point so now what you have is when you encapsulate those outlier pieces of data
you now have things that will move the needle and you can use those to predict things in the future so that in essence
is really what it’s about here so in any data set you have a mean or an average
and then you have outliers that are above and below that average and then you have attribution points that cause
that needle to move above or below so by isolating those things and proving that
those outliers repeated in numerous situations with other outliers and other
data points you now have a predictive ability that you didn’t have before so you know a guy sitting there on a pencil
and paper cannot do that it requires computers using a lot of processing power to do that all right so how do you
do this with mail well you have an you have a few things that are very key you
have a creative piece you have a targeted list and you have a location or
people that you’ve sent it to so they break down into those three major categories and within there you have
other things what was on the creative was it personalized did have a QR code you know what was the image to text
ratio within the targeting was it a certain vertical was it a certain socio
demographic group was it a certain time of the year was it a certain location
what did all of these things do to change that outcome all right so computers can very quickly manage all of
those different variations or attributes or parameters and come up with a prediction or a potential reason with
high probability why those things occurred next slide my dear so this is an example of a model
that that we’ve been working on and and again I’m doing this for educational purpose so you understand how it’s done
and I’m hoping this understanding brings you to a less fear to using the data or
more understanding that this is something you can actually do from your job or whatever you do in life and take
advantage of these tools so very quickly here I have about a hundred and some verticals the list goes further than the
screen shows and then we have if you look in the box for financial services we have we’ve
done 1,47 different mailing campaigns all right and I’m gonna jump down two lines
and I’m G to go to the total pieces mail there’s 28.6 million pieces mailed all right
from those 28.6 million pieces we had
888,246 went to a website they scanned a QR code they called a phone number they
did something that was attributed to that piece of mail that we know was caused by that mail so there is a c a
cause and effect this isn’t a correlation we know the mail caused those attribution points so now what we
have for that entire category is we have a baseline of an engagement rate per
piece simply by dividing those engagements or attributions by the number of pieces mailed that 3% is that
Baseline I was telling you about so with outliers or other parameters that drove that Baseline high or lower we can
predict future effectiveness of male all right this is not a mind-blowing
technology this is math the the the technology is the speed of computers and the data scientists that can crunch all
these parameters and do it quickly next SL so as an example what you have here
is you have a situation where you can take any AD or you can take any list or
you can take time of year and as long as you know that vertical you can upload
that imagery compare it to the images that were sent prior to those same
households for those same verticals during that same time and you can
compare what that creative piece is going to do to the creative piece the pieces that were’re sent before and the
computer will ingest millions and millions and millions of rows of data and come out with a predictive outcome
of what that piece will do and along with that predictive outcome you can tap
those outliers that raise that outcome and tell them what to do hey make your QR code 10% bigger use these key words
in your headline you know each one of those those parameters or variations
provided a lift over a large set of data that can be used to predict the lift on
future results not exactly it’s not guaranteed but it’s better than Just sh shooting something in the mail and
hoping for the best all right so kind of thing you need to do is you need to know
what your goals are are your goals to is this a customer loyalty piece is this a
piece that’s made to get somebody to come into a store is this a piece that’s made to get someone to go to a website
because you want to correlate past data to your goals if you’re doing a customer
loyalty piece and the the models are predicted against a brick-and mortar retail you’re not going to get the
correlation and therefore you might not get the data result or predictive model
you want so the data you’re using is very important obviously not everybody has the ability to do this you need to
find a provider who can do this for you and will they take your own data do they
have data that matches or is correlated at able to the data that you have if
it’s not I don’t care how much data they have but if what they’re doing and what you want to do kind of miss each other
the models aren’t going to work all right now if you want to build this yourself there are AI platforms where
you just dump your data you define what your results are and outcome some
results obviously you need somebody qualified to do this and that’s above my
pay grade so what we did is we interviewed many companies and we explained to them our data we
gave them samples of our data we wanted to be sure that the models that are
going to build hold water in fact one of the things we did we hired two different
data science companies we gave them the same data with the same parameters and
had them actually build a proof of concept using the same data in the same parameters so
therefore if one didn’t get a result we at least had another set of working with
another set of math equations and hopefully would get a different outcome rather than start all over or give up so
the process is tedious it requires an expertise but you know what it will work
and the data is useful next slide please you’re
done I mean that’s a lot of just as I can say I love talking about this stuff
I love finding uses for data please bring it up in the Q&A after the session and I I want I want to hear your data
problems and your AI problems and uh give you what I know yeah I mean really
good information right we always want to know how we can improve Direct Mail campaigns and with the artificial
intelligence insurgence uh I think there’s a lot of use cases there and Brad really out I like Brad how you you
made it like at the elementary level so they understand the technology and then the applications thereof within mail I
mean it really was a good explanation uh of how this technology can be used to
improve Direct Mail campaigns and the results so thank you braad um yeah and
now that we talked a little bit about AI now I want to discuss how you can uncover winning tactics for mail with
competitive intelligence by gathering insights from competitors mail pieces and then you can use that data to create
high performing Direct Mail campaigns so the first thing you need to do is you need to build a collection of mail
pieces or more importantly a collection of your competitor’s mail pieces and there’s a couple ways you can do this there’s some subscription Services out
there that they provide Direct Mail samples across various Industries you can Tamp into you can do some sample
request where you can personally Reach Out directly to your competitors and request samples sometimes uh also at
trade shows they might have uh they might be showcasing Direct Mail pieces or providing samples so you need to
acquire uh a a database right of mail pieces and in particular of your competitors now once you’ve assembled
that mail collection now you want to run an analysis and you first need to deconstruct the elements of the mail
piece and when I talk about that I mean we’re essentially breaking it down from its core components to understand what
makes it effective or maybe what makes it not effective so the first thing you look at is the format is it a postcard
or letter brochure does the format uh influence the overall message and impact the recipient then I want to look at the
design and that includes the layout the color scheme the topography the imagery
I I I want to ask myself how do these elements work together to create a cohesive look and feel or or do they I
mean is it just a bunch of things cluttered on a direct mail piece and then I look at the message what is the
message how is it communicated does it resonate are the calls to action clear prominent persuasive so by analyzing my
competitor’s mail pieces I can identify certain trends for instance I I might notice that the most successful mailers
in our industry are using particular color schemes or certain types of offers and I can use these Trends as a starting
point for my own campaigns or how I might want to improve my campaigns so once I have the components of of what is
set to Be an Effective mail piece um I want to focus on targeting and segmentation analysis because who you
are marketing to is the most important piece of the P effective Direct Mail relies on reaching the right people with
the right message and at the right time and in order to achieve that you need to understand your target audience and how
to segment that so I want to gather some Intel about how my competitors are targeting people what are the
demographics the interests the behaviors of the ideal customers um and by analyzing the my competitors’s tarting
and segmentation strategies I can identify opportunities where I can refine my own approach like maybe
there’s a big hole maybe there’s a specific segment that my competitors are completely overlooking and I can
capitalize on that um so now I want to talk about benchmarking and Improvement
and that entails actually learning from the competitors not necessarily copying them because the essence of competitive
analysis is not really to replicate what your competitors are doing but how you can use that as a benchmark for
improvement and I think that that’s really what almost any business does right is we’re finding ways to improve
things so we can come out on top so by understanding what works and what doesn’t you can refine your direct mail
approach uh try to identify Trends but more importantly the gaps so pinpoint
common elements that seem to be effective like the design and the offer but you also need to identify where your
competitors are falling short like maybe they’re not using personalization maybe the calls to action are weak when you
learn from their mistakes you can find a way to to really improve that mail piece and you can also take that data to
further improve mail by running some AB testing so if a competitor is using a particular headline very effectively you
could test that headline with a different angle or a different creative or a different offer maybe right uh
lastly I want to talk about leveraging digital integration with competitive intelligence so the modern marketing
landscape Demands a seamless integration of digital and traditional channels it’s really not this proverbial tug-of-war
between offline and online anymore you really should be utilizing both channels and by analyzing how your competitors
are blending their direct mail with digital elements you can really gain some valuable insights into how you can enhance your own campaigns look at their
mailers and see are they using QR codes do they use pearls look at their social media handles how are those elements
complimenting the mail piece and that can actually give you a lot of Clues too about their offer details their target
audience and and also maybe some c campaign tracking methods right you can
see how they’re tracking their direct mail campaigns so to sum it up by analyzing your competitors Direct Mail
efforts you can gain a significant Advantage into your own campaigns and and remember the key is to use insights
as a foundation for creating unique and effective mailers that are resonating with your target audience so that will
help you put together the highest performing creative for your customers and your own mail campaigns so that you
can have the best possible Roi for your direct mail marketing investment or if you’re a printer mail service provider
you can really gain Intel that can help lift response rates of your customers campaigns and that will lead to more
reorders as well so now that we’ve reviewed competitive intelligence tactics and
we’ve identified best practices for the direct mail piece I want to talk about how we can boost the response even
further from successful creative Elements by layering on an omni Channel marketing approach and I was just
talking a little bit about that and leveraging the offline to online and what I’m really talking about is driving
traffic from physical mail to digital platforms because that can really expand reach and deepen customer Relationships
by integrating digital elements like QR codes or unique URLs into Direct Mail pieces you’re creating the SE transition
between offline and online interactions uh it’s a cohesive experience across channels that’s
enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty and once the prospect gets to the website which they’re probably going
to go there anyway whether you use a QR code or not but the QR code and the pearls incentive to get them there so
you have a better opportunity to re-engage them with digital but this is where reinforcement and repetition comes
in by consistently delivering your message across multiple platforms you increase the like hood of capturing a
prospect’s attention prospects were inundated with marketing messages on average they’re seeing anywhere from 4
to 10,000 marketing messages a day so it’s even more important for you to utilize a marketing strategy that is
standing out in the sea of messages and this is why you need repetition it’s
it’s reinforcing brand awareness and it’s encouraging engagement and not to mention that prospects are typically
engaging in about eight or more channels in a buying Journey with a brand they prefer to start the journey in one
channel they they want to use other channels to um do Education and Research
and then they convert in others and this is why multiple channels is so important because it’s the but it’s also not just
using multiple channels but it’s the perfect use of these channels that lends to good results so start with the mail
okay you take a physical tangible direct mail piece the message is received it impinges and then you repeat that
message inexpensively through digital channels giving the prospect multiple opportunities to convert and through the
channels that they prefer most prospects aren’t going to convert right away okay there’s so many different variables and
reasons that affect when a conversion takes place and by employing the power of repetition and utilizing multiple
channels you’re keeping the brand top of mind you’re creating all of these opportunities for a serendipitous moment
when the prospect is ready to convert that message that brand that’s front and center now the other thing that omy
channel provides is proving attribution okay and understanding which marketing
channel or touch Point contributes to a conversion is very crucial for optimizing your campaigns and Omni
Channel marketing provides a lot of valuable data so that you can attribute conversions accurately now while
understanding which channel drove the final conversion and Omni Channel campaign is important all channels are
playing a part in driving the conversion so keep in mind that yeah you might see
that the final conversion took place in this channel but without the perfect mix of these channels and it’s like a
standalone use case they will not deliver optimally or provide the best results it is that perfect mix of
offline and online that is lending to the highest response rates and conversion of marketing dollars and if
you want to get more granular on tracking the response rate to direct mail campaigns just in general there is
technology available that can actually de anonymize a website visitor and suppress against a mail file so that you
can actually tell how many people from a mailing list actually went to a website
and that’s really good technology for a lot of reasons because all roads are leading to the website your digital
marketing is driving traffic to your site if they don’t convert you can follow up with them on with Mail based
on what they were looking at on the website and their specific Journey you can recover LW sales by sending physical
reminders to customers who abandon their online online shopping carts offer them a little bit better of a deal than what
you offer them online and drive them back to convert so you can start with mail enhance with digital and end with
mail right and just create this marketing funnel that’s driving conversions you can also reinvigorate
relationships with inactive customers um and I’m talking about here you know is direct mail retargeting you can send
tailor Direct Mail pieces based on their previous or online behavior and you might say well Morgan why would I want
to spend marketing dollars to engage my customers well you might be selling a
product day but you may not realize that they’re on your website looking at products B C D and E you already have a
relationship with them now you have an opportunity to to capture additional revenue from existing customers by
marketing to them about other products and services that they’re showing interest in based on the data that you
acquired right so lastly I want to talk about marketing automation platforms now
marketing automation platforms are essential for managing and analyzing Omni Channel campaigns effectively these
platforms integrate multiple channels into seamless streamlined experiences for job creation and Reporting they’re
providing a holistic view of the customer Journey it’s one thing to have a large internal marketing department
with tons of resources at your fingertips and it’s another to get all those departments to interact and engage together get budgets approved and deploy
all those channels at the right times integrated into the mail and with the right budgets okay that sometimes is
like moving a mountain but if you want to tap into a marketing automation platform that has all this down to a
science that can really lend the best results for you in addition to reporting uh where you’re going to be able to
track those customer interactions across touch points identify patterns you can use the data that’s provided to optimize
campaigns and you can deliver personalized experiences so we’ve talked about a lot
today uh in a nutshell AI competitive intelligence and Omni Channel talk Technologies offer a really powerful
approach to increasing response rates improving customers experiences and gaining valuable insights into campaign
of performance so by combining direct mail with technology and utilizing
Advanced tools businesses can achieve remarkable results and they can Sky Skyrocket Roi on Direct Mail campaigns
so now um I want to go ahead and open it up if there’s any questions uh Brad and I are happy to answer those bring them
on I want to hear those questions awesome thanks everyone for
attending this session please be sure to participate in the poll on the right side of your screen and you’ll also find
a free offer pin to the chat the deck for today’s presentation will also be available at the bottom of your screen
if you scroll down and let’s welcome Brad and Morgan hi how’s it going thank
you for being here our pleasure thanks for having us yeah you all ready for
questions we’re ready we’re ready all right let’s started so the first
question is do you think that all the AI platforms are basically the same or do
you rely on one more than the other for marketing and content help uh you know that’s a personal
preference I mean I’ve I’ve tried out uh Gemini from Google and of course open AI
uh chat GPT and I you sometimes I’ll ask the same thing to both of them and
sometimes I find a better answer at Gemini and sometimes I find a better answer at jet gbt I have not tried some of these other ones uh for images
because you know I’m I’m a creature of habit I like the two that I’ve been using and I haven’t had an issue with
them yeah I like Gemini too that one that one does not fail okay yeah I have
a preference on Gemini myself yeah I I actually just tried grock from from X
Twitter a few times and that was pretty good too I have to say oh okay I haven’t heard of that
one right next question AI seems complicated to me how would you get
started without a ton of budget or time to invest in this area uh you first of all I’d get
familiar with it through one these freebies like gemini or uh chat GPT just
so you understand it I would spend a little time watching maybe some videos so you understand the basics and
fundamentals of it because the more you understand the harder it is for you to get it wrong or take a few missteps and
then you have to isolate the problem you’re trying to solve or what it is you want to use AI for because there’s
different platforms that specialize in different areas is it a creative thing is it a Content thing is it a numbers
thing you know some people use it just to lay out spreadsheets you know so it depends on the use but I don’t know the
budget is hard to set because you have to have a goal in mind and what is that goal is it just for your own personal
use is it something that you’re going to automate in your business and deliver its scale to your customers there it
really comes down to use case before you can set a budget all right awesome all right next
question this is a good question how will AI impact direct mail in the next two to three years in your
opinion I I think that any type of marketing Direct Mail included is going
to be massively effective because what you have in marketing is you have a
combination of a science and an art and we all know there’s no guarantees in
marketing and there’s a lot of risk and people recommend test test test what AI
will do is it will take some of that risk out it will it will eliminate some of the need for testing because the huge
amounts of data storage that are out there from different platforms about past campaigns can be leveraged to
reduce risk on future campaigns so anytime you’re going to run a marketing campaign for a client and you have data
that will help reduce the risk or improve the chances of a successful campaign uh that is a good thing and I
think marketing because of the the amount of data now is perfect for uh AI
use in helping marketing campaign succeed sure great stuff all right do
you think that oh sorry I already read that one let’s see someone said how will
AI work with B2B campaigns the same way it’ll work with with consumer-based campaigns honestly
the AI uh the only thing that may make it a little more difficult is the amount of
B2B campaigns and the depth of the ma is less and the better you the more data
you have the more likely you’re going to get accurate results and with a much wider swath of B2B I’m sorry B to C
there may be it may be a little harder to predict as accurately in the B2B
campaigns is the b2c campaigns okay someone said sorry if I missed this but when you talked about
competitive Direct Mail research is there a company or platform that does this for you or how are you Gathering
data take it away Morgan I mean there’s there’s a couple of different organizations out there that do this for
you I mean we actually do have a company called who’s mailing what that houses a
massive massive uh database of direct mail campaigns performance insights um
and there’s a couple of others out there too but yeah I mean you can also on your own I mean if you want to compile your
own database you can do com competitor mail sample collection uh you can you can find
different ways but if you want to tap into a large database I would suggest using something like the who’s mailing what are some of the other organizations
out there all right that ends Q&A thank you both for being here so much we
appreciate it our pleasure thanks for having us thanks great thanks everyone
bye bye
