From Print to Performance: An AI Driven Playbook for Omnichannel Direct Mail

And I woke up this morning, I’m like, this is the session I really want to check out. Why? Okay, so we have two people at this session and they’re both from Direct Mail 2.0 and who’s mailing

what? We have Brad Kugler and Morgan DiGiorgio. Okay, now here’s the thing.

They know all about how to do AI with direct mail and omni channel stuff, but not that Morgan’s not cool. Morgan’s

very cool, but Brad might be the coolest dude in the entire direct mail industry.

And let me tell you a little bit about what they built, okay, with direct mail 2.0 and who’s mailing what. They essentially built a giant intelligence

engine for direct mail. If you don’t know what who’s mailing what is, I’ve used this thing, I want to say for the last 20 years. They have almost 400,000

direct mail campaign images that get scanned and you could search them. It is wild. From over 48,000 marketers and they keep getting new campaigns and new

campaigns and direct direct mail 2.0, No, they got a whole thing on where they’re layering in all the latest technology into direct mail stuff. Not

just tracking and digital integration, but all the AI stuff that we’re confused about. They’re doing it. They’re crushing it. This session is going to be

wild. Welcome to the stage. Let’s see what you guys got.

Thank you very much. Just want to make sure I get everybody can hear me and see me properly. Right. Yes.

All right. So we are here to talk about a direct mail tech stack. What is that?

We are the technology layer layer to make direct mail amazing. All right. So I’m going to introduce myself and I’m going to turn over because we have a lot

to cover in a few minutes. I’m Brad Kougler. I am the co-founder and CEO of Direct Mail 2.0. Who’s mailing what and now DM2O.AI.

Uh Mo, introduce yourself and take it from here.

I’m Morgan Deorgio. I’m the chief revenue officer for DirectMail 2.0. Who’s mailing what? And DM2O.AI.

And uh let me figure out how to change.

Oh, here we go. Okay, there we go. All right. So, anyway, let’s start with what all of us in this industry have heard.

Direct mail is dead. Marketing doesn’t work. It costs too much. There’s no guaranteed ROI. And I actually think those objections tell us something

important. The problem isn’t necessarily direct mail. The problem is that marketers are under enormous pressure to

prove that every dollar they’re spending is doing something. And at the same time, we’re asking consumers to process an unbelievable amount of information.

The average person encounters somewhere between 6 to 10,000 marketing messages every day. So, think about that. Email, social search, display, text, video,

mail, billboards, you know, we’re all fighting for the exact same finite resource, attention. So the question

isn’t how do we create another marketing message. The question is how do we create something relevant enough to earn

attention and then prove what happened after we got it.

So technology is what has revived direct mail. And Brad Cougler is very cool as

Jay has said because he is very good at doing this. We’ve built an entire three companies around this. Well, we acquired

one. Bill two acquired one. But technology is what has re revived direct mail. AI helps us make better decisions before we spend. Competitive

intelligence helps us understand what the market is already telling us. And omni channel marketing allows us to amplify the physical mail piece and actually measure the customer journey.

So you put those three together and direct mail starts behaving like a modern performance marketing channel. So

instead of here’s a list, here’s the creative, let’s mail it and see what happens, it’s what does the data tell us before we mail, what happens while the

campaign is running and what can we learn afterward and how can we improve going forward and that’s a very different way uh of thinking about and

utilizing direct mail as a marketing channel.

So in today’s marketing ecosystem, as marketers turn to digital more and more, the physical mailbox has actually become a relatively uncluttered environment.

There is prime real estate right there.

I mean, how many emails do you receive every day? And if you do what I do, you delete them. I never see the marketing message that was intended to reach me.

Sorry. You know, unless it’s something that I’m waiting for, a company that I already do business with and I want that offer, that 20% off or whatever they’re sending me. I don’t ever see it. You

know, how many ads you scroll past? How many texts, notifications, and social posts are competing for your attention? Now, compare that with the mailbox.

There may only be a handful of pieces there. And there’s something else fundamentally different about physical mail. You have to interact with it. You

pick it up. You look at it. You decide what you’re going to do with it. Even if you discard the mailpiece, you saw the marketing message. Now, that doesn’t

mean every mailpiece works. Bad marketing doesn’t magically become good marketing because we printed it. But it does mean we’ve earned a moment of

physical attention. And that’s really important. And it’s our job as marketers to make that moment count.

So there used to be a proverbial tugof-war between offline and online marketing. And sometimes we still hear people debating is direct mail better

than digital or vice versa or what’s more cost-effective. And that’s really the wrong debate. And we’ve heard this this entire conference. Okay, omni

channel integration with digital is where it’s at when it comes to utilizing a hybrid of offline and online.

Consumers and prospects don’t live in channels. Someone might receive your postcard on a Tuesday, see your Facebook ad on Wednesday, Google your company Thursday, and finally convert on Friday.

And to that person, those aren’t four marketing campaigns. They’re one experience with your brand. And and

that’s why coordinated campaigns become so important. USPS has found that a 63%

response rate lift when direct mail was intentionally coordinated with digital follow-up along with an increase in website visits and leads. Now, that

doesn’t mean that you just simply, you know, bolt a Facebook ad onto every mailing, but it means that you start designing a journey, not just the mail

piece. And that is omni channel marketing. Now, I’m going to turn it over to Brad, and he’s going to talk about AI.

All right, let’s see if I can be as cool and as quick and as eloquent as Morgan.

I I won’t claim it, but I’ll give it a shot. So, basically, what we’re talking about here is how do we take technology and improve this thing called direct

mail. All right, marketing has gotten very complex. All right, uh there are so many variables in hitting it out of the

park with a marketing campaign. it really gets hard for a single brain or a single person to manage it. So what

we’re doing here in essence is basically making that mail equivalent to some of the digital technologies, making it

trackable, making it attributable and we do this by collecting huge amounts of data and building it together into a

predictive AI engine. So you get enough data. I think somebody once said this that if you can gather enough data you

can predict anything. Okay. So going on that kind of basic data I have access to

huge amounts of direct mail data. I have who responded to campaigns. I have creative on 400,000 campaigns from

50,000 advertisers. So we’ve spent the better part of the last year and a half putting this together to see can we

predict the male outcome based on past activity and well all of the mathematicians say yes. So this is what

we’ve done is we’ve built a predictive model database and we’re able to map and

I’m going to try to do this kind of quickly and easily to give you an idea of this and you can read the charts later but basically what’s happening

here is we want to build and I’ll I’ll just take the slide away so you’re not distracted. Imagine you have a 100,000

campaigns in direct mail and you dump them into buckets based on verticals.

Home services, auto, finance, nonprofits. And then in all those verticals, you get a baseline of how those campaigns were engaged with.

Whether a QR code, a phone number, they verified it’s gone to the website, they converted through some form, you now

have a baseline of the conversions to that mail piece. Now what we’re looking at is the deltas or where that mail

piece what was different in the creative or the targeting or the timing that lifted the response rate of that mail piece and what detracted from it. So in

all simplicity all the AI is doing is actually finding out what improved or distracted from that engagement rate. It

could be a zip code. It could be time of year. It could be design. It could be keywords. It could be color patterns. It could be imageto text ratio. Well, no

single brain is going to be able to do that in their head. So, we’ve built models that will do that for you. And as far as I know, we are the only people

doing this and we’ll give you some more information how you can try it free on the end. But if you’re doing direct mail, we have the data to help ensure

that you do better on it. This is in this is besides the omni channel campaign. This is just the existing ink on paper and sending it out to thousands

of people. Morgan, tell us about our competitive uh intelligence process, too.

Sure. So, um that was, you know, our first takeaway about leveraging and utilizing artificial intelligence and direct mail.

And, you know, Brad has has really taken it to the next level in a very specialized use case. And there’s so much that you can do with artificial

intelligence. And I think that uh you know propensity modeling and a lot of what Darcy touched on um is a very good use case of how we can leverage and utilize artificial intelligence as well.

Um but now for our second takeaway uh before creating something entirely from scratch, I think it’s really beneficial

if we can study what’s already happening in your market because your competitors are constantly giving you data and information that can be used to your advantage.

So, uh, this is actually one of my favorite areas because marketers sometimes dramatically underestimate the

value of competitive intelligence. And there are databases that index hundreds of thousands of direct mail campaigns.

We have one of them. Uh, and when you start looking at that amount of creative over time, you will start to see patterns. You see what major brands are

mailing. You see the offers, the formats, the headlines, the calls to actions. you see when the creative changes and more importantly you see

when it doesn’t change. So in direct response marketing we will often call uh that a control and and that’s a piece or

a campaign that a a company continues running. Now, we don’t have access to that competitor’s internal financials.

So, we can’t say, “Hey, that campaign generated X ROI.” But if you think logically, if a sophisticated marketer keeps spending money putting the same

campaign into the market month after month or year over year, that’s a very useful signal. They’re telling you something through their behavior. And

that’s what competitive intelligence is all about. You’re not copying, you’re learning. uh or or maybe you’re a print

service provider and you discover companies that are actively mailing in a category where you already have expertise. So now competitive

intelligence isn’t only helping with creative, it’s helping identify business opportunities. So instead of starting every campaign from a blank page, we can

begin with evidence and understanding which brands are mailing, what they’re mailing, competitor activity, repeated

formats, offers, and getting potential prospecting opportunities is truly

invaluable information. Um, so now, uh, we’ve used AI to help plan,

we’ve used competitive intelligence to help develop strategy. So the third piece is integration, execution, and measurement. Because ultimately, every

marketer is going to ask, did I maximize my response on this campaign? And what did I get for the money I spent? That’s

what everybody wants to know. Um, so this is where the physical and digital worlds really come together to wrap

digital intelligence around the direct mail campaign. The mail piece remains that foundation, okay? But but now we can surround it with coordinated digital

touch points to employ what works in marketing which is repetition and then use attribution tracking and and we’re

doing this through the use of digital ads informed delivery QR codes pearls and a lot of other tracking and attribution features. Some are proprietary some are sophisticated

different companies have different ways of utilizing this or deploying attribution. So from the consumer’s perspective they simply experience the

brand more consistently. They receive the mail piece and then they also see the brand online or through other media and the marketing reinforces itself and

behind the scenes we’re collecting signals and response data or marketers are. So we begin to understand the customer’s journey and see the impact of this firsthand across our programs.

We’ve historically seen approximately a 23 to 46% lift in response when omni channel is added around a standalone

direct mail campaign which is monumental. But even beyond response lift measurement changes the conversation. Okay? So a print provider

no longer has to say uh we printed and mailed it or uh VP of marketing just says oh we printed and mailed it. You know they can begin saying here’s what

the campaign generated we delivered or we got results. And that’s a fundamentally more valuable conversation that’s going to lead to continued investment in direct mail.

So everything we’ve discussed today are isolated and disconnected strategies, but they work best and deliver the most powerful results when utilized together

in a repeatable loop. So predict, use AI and historical data to evaluate the campaign. Differentiate by using

competitive intelligence to understand your market and sharpen the strategy.

Execute by putting the physical, mail, and digital channels into market together. And then lastly, you measure,

okay? And and then you take everything you just learned and you feed it back into the next mail campaign. Campaign

number two, you should know something uh that campaign number one didn’t.

Campaign number 10 should be dramatically more informed than campaign number one. So instead of continually running isolated campaigns, we’re

building a learning system and every campaign creates intelligence for the next one and direct mail becomes a

remarkable performance channel or way more remarkable than it already is. Huge advocates for direct mail. So um Brad, go ahead and uh close us out.

I I even have a few minutes. I guess I can opine. I I like to go down to basics. I like to make things crystal clear. What is the purpose of marketing?

It’s to find and create want for a product or service. All right, so there are literally thousands of tools you can

use to find and create want for a service. Now, that isn’t as simple as it gets because you’ve got to deliver the

service. You’ve got to get above the fray of the noise in the room to get your message across. But in the end,

marketing is to find and create want for a service. So, uh, this is what we’re all here for. This is what we all want

to learn. There is no one ultimate path to nirvana in marketing. There are thousands of things that work.

And and my my I guess my gospel would be to keep testing, keep trying new tools, and keep your eye on the prize as I

said. But um one of the things I don’t know if if uh Jay wants to come on early, but you know we we’ve offered a little free thing here uh called

marketing test.ai. And I’ll give you a little story. I I have such a love for technology and I never could be a programmer because I get too frustrated

with mistakes. But this vibe coding stuff with AI has really gotten me into the game like I never was before. So I

built this marketing test.ai AI on a random Saturday morning and it will as much data as you feed it, it will give

you a grade on how well your marketing is for free. Try it out. It was made by me. So, it is not an enterprise product.

It was something I did for fun, but it it it’s come up with some interesting results and people have really liked it.

So, uh if it helps you, great. If it’s garbage, you can blame me. But again, it it’s something for fun and it’s

something I like to share and you can use that. The other thing is our both of our two out of three of our tools are

who’smailing what.com and our dm2.ai are both free trials. You can try it before

you buy it. It’s it’s you know just put the information in. It gives you a result. Uh, our dm2.com is a little more

involved because it it requires some implementation, but we’re here to help, man. We are the performance stack for direct mail. We do not print or mail

anything. We are absolutely a technical stack for direct mail only.

Well, you know, I have to take something back. I said that you were really, really cool. I think Morgan’s way cooler than you because you’re talking about vibe coding on a Saturday morning. You

might need to like go touch grass or something. But that is incredible. It is. and everybody should be checking that out. But all right, here’s my first question.

I’m a I’m I love who’s mailing what. I mean, I’m an old school who’s mailing what customer forever. And the thing about who’s mailing what, I don’t think

there’s another resource on the planet where you could really see what mailers are mailing at scale and all these different categories. So, here’s my

loaded big question. What are some of the biggest changes that you are seeing that people are putting that brands are putting in the mail that they weren’t

doing maybe a year or two ago? because you are sitting in this position where you could see it all.

You know, I would have to be a daily user to answer that accurately and I I we have just retoled it by the way so that there people search for mail on

who’s mailing what for decades was a bunch of filters and click buttons or you had to understand boolean logic include this and this but not this, right?

We made it uh plain language input. You can just ask it that question. You could literally go on and say what are the

newest trends that you that are in this database over the last couple of months and it will show you which mailers are

growing their mail volume. It will tell you. So we have you know we we are an AI first company now. There nothing gets

built in our company unless it’s AI principles first. So uh that’s a great question but I would leave it to our AI rather than ask me to be honest with

you. It’s smarter than I am. So let me ask something about AI then specifically. You talk about how with all the stuff that you all are doing,

you’re able to see the delta the what you know what has lifted or detracted from performance by by putting it all

into AI. So one of the things I’m curious about is how small of a change to a direct mail piece can really have a

meaningful impact? I mean does the AI actually break it down saying yes you changed that one line and that’s the

thing that detracted. Absolutely. In fact, our tool will tell you, it allows you to uh build a test of a piece you’re

going to mail and it will give you recommendations and changes and then you are allowed to upload it again and it will show you line by line, parameter by

parameter, how those changes are expected to affect the outcome. Now, obviously, there’s no guarantees in

marketing, but I’ll I’ll give you an example. There’s still people that don’t believe in QR codes on mail pieces.

Those things are known to raise the engagement significantly. Now in certain things it raises it more than others. It could be the offer or the headline or

some some keyword you have. But we delineate every parameters delta if they make a change to a mail piece and how it will predicted to affect the outcome.

Yeah. I mean every the littlest thing matters and I that bo that bothers me so much when you know a mailer will just change like seven things and they’re like oh you know they’re not they don’t understand one thing has that impact.

So, all right, one more question. This is kind of just kind of digging into Brad and Morgan’s brains here.

Obviously, it’s clear that you all are the bleeding edge of technology. You’re trying to utilize every AI thingabob that’s out there to the benefit of of

marketers everywhere, but I want to know, forget about actual direct mail for a second. How have you brought AI

into your business overall? Because I feel like you’re not just leveraging AI for marketers, you’re leveraging it for

yourselves. How have you brought AI into your business? What could like what should we steal from you? What are the tools? What are the things you’re using?

I I’ll tell you just a simple example. I put out a, you know, because I’m really pushing we use AI internally. I had a

contest. Anybody that builds an agent inhouse that saves time or affects more than one person, I gave a thousand

award. All right. We’ve had two people win it. And it’s boring stuff. A lot of it was list driven. we get a mailing list and we append certain data and you

know you do your code your concatenation with Excel which takes time and everybody screws it up because it’s you if you don’t use it every day you don’t

know how to do it and and one of my staff here uh Jason built something that will put those spreadsheets and data

sheets together automatically and simply and 100% accurately. So I know it sounds boring but this is something that I

struggled with with multiple spreadsheets that is now solved with an agent. Then the other things we work on is automating AB testing with agents.

You know is this campaign doing better this campaign? Let’s see if we can change a few things that will increase the impressions or clicks based on other

campaigns, you know. So so we’re all about this here, you know. Um, am I the next anthropic or open AI? No, I’m not.

But you know what? I try and we try to use this technology wherever we can.

I got to give you props. That’s a great idea. I mean, to create an incentive internally about best use cases for AI for your organization. I’m definitely

stealing that. Um, and then I’ll I’ll win and just give it to myself and and it’ll be a never- ending cycle. Morgan, I noticed he didn’t mention that that

you won or anything. I feel like you’ve done stuff and Brad’s just not recognizing you. This is your moment to get it to get it off your shoulders.

I mean, there’s just too much to even mention. It would take all day, you know. So, I agree. All right. Well, you all are awesome. Who’s mailing what? Direct mail

2.0. Morgan, Brad, you guys are leaders in the industry. Thank you for being here.