Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:34
You know, I know that you get a lot of companies and maybe some have never done direct mail. Some of them have, and they come with their own thoughts ideas regardless. So I love to talk about some mistakes people make, because I’m sure you have to talk people out of, well, I think this will work, Mike. Well, you know, from 20 years I’ve we’ve tested things like that and maybe you have a best recommendation. Hopefully they listen to you and they listen to this, right.
What are some mistakes people make? And maybe we’ll break it down in the outside and the inside. Right. Because like you said, there’s mistakes. If you make them on the outside, they’re never going to see the inside.
So let’s talk about outside mistakes first and then we can go to maybe inside.
Mike Gunderson: 15:14
Yeah. Well the one thing I would say, and this is more from a package format perspective, is when you have when you’re doing B2B sales especially and say you’re doing A and B, ABM marketing. So your marketing may be a small subset, you know, maybe you have a thousand names, 1,500 names, maybe 5,000 names. Right. And by the way, the companies we work with, we’re doing 100, 100,000, 500,000, A million pieces of mail per month.
That’s kind of our volume happy spot. And then. But there’s a whole bunch of people doing really great direct mail, you know, in under that 10,000 threshold. But the biggest mistake that I see almost always is everybody wants to go big first say, I want to send a t-shirt or I want to send this or I want to, I want to do a dimensional I want to do. In theory, it works.
Really? Yes, that all sounds great, but let’s figure out how much. Let’s get a baseline. How much will people respond to a letter package to a nine by 12 package, to a flat package? And then let’s get a baseline on that at say, $0.80 a dollar a piece versus this $30 or $40 a piece.
And then from there start to ramp up your efforts and see if you get better response, better conversion rates by having these larger, more expensive packages in the mail. So that’s the first thing I would say.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:30
So the mistake starts with what to send. Yeah. First gotcha.
Mike Gunderson: 16:34
Because it seems like I should spend a lot of money because these guys are all very valuable to me. But you don’t have to spend all that much money. Now, the second thing, and this is the big one, always that we come up against is testing. Too often people want to test 5,000 pieces. 10,000 pieces against, you know, another creative or another creative.
Well, here’s the problem. And this is a real problem. And every day we’re trying to do a better job at it is we want to increase those response rates. The problem is, is an average response rate for an acquisition or prospecting campaign is going to be anywhere between a half percent to 1.5%. So that means out of 100 pieces, you know, one and a half people are going to respond, right?
So when you take the folks that respond and then you track them all the way through conversion, you just simply don’t have enough volume to make a decision on what a winner is. So if you have a small volume.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:26
And that’s probably even a good response rate, right? I mean.
Mike Gunderson: 17:30
1.5% is a great response rate, especially for B2B. Yeah. And which is another reason why you want to make sure you’re testing into those lower cost packages because you want to be able to get more mail out there. And now the trick is, okay, well, if it is a smaller volume and let’s say that the lower cost package doesn’t work, should I then go to a more expensive package? Yes, absolutely.
But just don’t do it the first time. Like just try to get the low-hanging fruit and see who says this is a really great product. This is a really great brand. This is something that my company needs. The targeting is on point.
Let’s go ahead and do business together. And let’s do that for a dollar a piece versus $30 a piece. And just see where does that land. Now you might not get anything and that’s okay. Then you can ramp it up and just kind of keep testing up.
And on those smaller volumes don’t. A B test, it’s impossible. You’re never going to be able to read the results on that. So just send out one mailer one month, send out another mailer the next month. It, you know, test into email strategies.
So test, you know, remailing to same person twice, three times, four times until they raise their hand. So there’s a bunch of different tests you can do that doesn’t require large volumes, but you’ll still be able to learn a lot from.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:41
Okay. So sending what to send. What about on the outside. The outside mistakes people make. Yeah.
Mike Gunderson: 18:49
Being promotional man, I hate to say it. I love to say that the design is the ruler of all. And that’s what’s going to get people inside the envelope. But ultimately, in our experience, especially with a lot of the brands that we work with, it’s really about getting them inside that envelope. So if you’re doing a postcard or a self-mailer that’s like a double postcard that folds, be promotional.
If you have a very visual brand, if it’s retail, if it’s something that’s easy to understand or you have a really great offer, promotional works all day, every day, right? And especially when you pair that to a really well-targeted list.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:23
I’m going to pull up ZipRecruiter for a second because it looks like that’s a good example.
Mike Gunderson: 19:27
There’s some good ones here. ZipRecruiter does a nice job of not only being promotional, but also being stealth. So they have a We’ve done so much testing with them that we’ve been able to kind of say, okay, well, stealth works, maybe this cohort, but maybe more promotional works for this cohort. I think currently their control package is like an invitation package. You know, it’s a, it’s a five by or a five by nine-inch package.
It’s usually got some really nice gold foil on it or something like this. And it gets a very good response rate and drives more people to convert. But we’ve tested like this is kind of a mix. It does have promotional copy, so it’s technically considered a promotional envelope, but it’s stayed. It’s not overly designed.
And if you click right, you’ll see there’s a couple of other packages. You just click right on those arrows.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:12
And by the way, if you’re listening to the audio, we’re looking at ZipRecruiter. And you can see on the outside of the envelope well there’s a bunch here. But let me go back to the first one for a second. I lost it. Oh it says post jobs for free right on here.
And so we’ll go to a couple of these other ones because I like the one where you’re actually have to open it up, you know. So we’ll go we’ll go to that one too. Okay.
Mike Gunderson: 20:44
All right. It’s a cool things popping up okay. Yeah. So like this example right here is a closed faced envelope. We call it an invitation package.
And what’s neat about this is once you open it up, you get hit with this very visual reflective foil treatment on the outside. And their team designed this. They did a really great job. And then as you open it up you have some fun copy. You’re able to walk them through.
It’s not too complicated. And we have this really cool tip on card that comes off. So they can save that for later. If they want. They can go ahead and reply instantly.
And then that’s exactly what it is. Your first post for free. We, as you know, especially as entrepreneurs, it’s important to drive in really great applicants. And ZipRecruiter is one of those companies that just have done a really great job over the course of ten years of like driving a lot of value through their platform, including one of the first using AI. And so it’s been really successful for them.
But the problem is when they first started, there wasn’t a lot of brand awareness, right? I mean, it was indeed it was monster. It’s these huge brands have been around forever and ever. And how do these guys break through. And so what we did was we found the prospects for them.
So we brought the brand to the prospects, not the other way around. If they were to just pump and pay for pay-per-click, they would probably get drowned on the response on that because they’re just going to get outbid all the time. So by having a strategy to go after the customers themselves and bring the awareness to the customer, that’s where direct mail became very successful for them. And by the way, leaders in podcast advertising as well, they did kind of the same thing there, which is amazing.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:22
You know what I and listen, I don’t sell direct mail like you do, right? But the way I sell people to like think about it is. I asked them, have you ever gotten a direct mail piece from Google for Google Ads? And they’re like, yeah, you know, and they go, well, guess what? They own Google ads.
Like they can run unlimited ads if they wanted to, right? So I don’t know if you’ve received it, Mike, I have you know, it’s a card here’s like $100 free or whatever for Google ads. And they’re sending direct mail.
Mike Gunderson: 22:54
The biggest tech companies in the world are sending direct mail. Amazon I don’t know if you saw their beautiful, ingenious catalog. I wish I could be the one to say that we worked on it, but they send out their catalog. First of all, my kids love it. They like going through it.
They like circling things. The second thing is, is all you do is take your Amazon app, point it at the image, and it automatically brings up the piece in the catalog, not scanning a QR code, not scanning some other code, not putting in some kind of you just scan the image and it automatically brings up that image in your Amazon app. I mean, that’s a genius. That’s a really cool way to use new technology.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:32
This one, there was another one I wanted to show. There’s some obviously unique stuff here with ZipRecruiter. Playing around with the imaging and everything. But there was just stop. Yeah, this one is the one I wanted to talk about. Yeah.
Mike Gunderson: 23:48
Yeah. So we call this a snap pack. And this is a pretty awesome format. Now what I love about this is most snap packs that you see in the mail are going to be kind of black and white. They’re going to look very official.
They’re going to look like some kind of financial document or tax document that you have to take that you have to take seriously. Now what we did here was.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:10
And obviously I just like tactile. I just like to make rip the perforations, you know that.
Mike Gunderson: 24:16
You nailed it, Jeremy. You know that. Because what we realize is it just has to have that look and feel of something official. Now, if you look at this, this is actually a branded snap pack. Their brand is up front there.
We’re using a branded color, a branded pattern. So it’s not this scary-looking text document, but it still has. It still exudes kind of this I’m important open me before you throw me away type of situation. And so you prep these off. We’re allowing that consumer that prospect to interact with the mail roll, fold it open and then have all the information they need right at their fingertips in order to respond.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:57
Yeah, totally. And at what point, you know, when you’re rolling these out for ZipRecruiter, are they rolling out like different tests at once or do you progress. How did it work with them?
Mike Gunderson: 25:11
Yeah. Well so at gander we actually now have kind of three levels of service right. So we have Gundir launch and that’s for a brand new brand, a brand new startup. Somebody who wants to get into the mail. And we have a very strategic way of basically bringing that mail to market.
And that’s usually working with our leap and repeat strategy where we’re able to test multiple elements. And then and then over the course of about 3 to 4 months, we’re able to test anywhere between 6 and 12 packages. And then from there we typically can start to identify the winner. And then from the winner we start to what we call roll out that mail. So we go from a couple hundred thousand pieces of mail to 500,000 pieces of mail to a million pieces of mail.
That’s exactly how we brought ZipRecruiter to market. Now that they’re big mailers and they you probably have seen, I’m sure, a ZipRecruiter, you know, direct mailer in your mailbox. But now they can be very strategic about the testing. They can test, you know, based off of seasonality. They can they can test based off of data and, and demand.
They can test different formats to try to reduce costs. They can. They can also. They have we have what we call just a lot of kind of second-in-command control packages. So in case one fatigues we can easily swap it out with another one that’s of parity and price.
And so that they can get that increase in performance, especially on the emails that they might not be getting in other places. So ZipRecruiter will typically test, you know, anywhere between, you know, 3 to 6 different packages, you know, monthly, sometimes quarterly to see if we can increase that response and conversion rate just a little bit.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:01
So you mentioned the Thunder launch. Yeah. And obviously as things go you know over time I’m looking at Thunder lead. Are they then like hey we can you acquire like the list is important. So talk about the list piece.
Mike Gunderson: 27:21
Yeah exactly. Well I mean that’s Probably, you know, next to producing the direct mail piece and getting out the door, it’s really the targeting that’s the most important. And so if we’re if new folks are new to direct mail, we want to start to build out that list. We want to try to understand exactly, you know, who those customers or those prospects are and who’s going to convert. So we oftentimes don’t know.
We just don’t have any baseline data. So we use of course demographic and firmographic data will oftentimes utilize a co-op database. So we’ll be able to see retail and transaction history. We’ll be able to kind of correlate that and then try to build a list that way that works really, really well. And then once these guys are in market for, you know, six months, eight months, we’ll start to utilize the response data, the people that actually responded.
So not only are we going after the right size company, the right size revenue, the right size, or the right geography, but then we’re layering on top of that a model that basically says, out of all this great rich data that we’re targeting from who also responds to direct mail. And so now we can get really, really tight on the targeting, not only going after essentially pre-qualified leads, but then pre-qualified leads that also respond to direct mail. And that’s called a response model. And that’s been really successful for our clients to be able to continue to grow their direct mail programs.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:43
I remember Mike, and I don’t know if it’s a tribute, but I attribute it to I don’t know if you know Bryan Kurtz. I think he’s sent over 2 billion pieces of direct mail. He worked for boardroom and they were $150 million company. And he said, Jeremy, Facebook didn’t invent lookalike audiences, right? Like, really it started with direct mail, like you’re saying, and figuring out who’s likely to buy and then replicate those people with targeted lists, right?
Mike Gunderson: 29:14
Yeah, that’s 100%. I mean, and there’s so many levers within, you know, building out a direct mail program. I mean, there is the creative aspect and the offer and the messaging and the copy. That’s all super important. In that alone can be a lever, right?
Then there’s your data. And just making sure that you’re able to, you know, figure out exactly who’s going to be responding to that, who’s important. You know, I was at a mixer just a couple of weeks ago and somebody said, well, what do you do? I said, well, you have a direct mail marketing agency. And they go, oh, you’re the junk mail guy.
You send me all this junk mail and I go, no, you do probably get junk mail, but we’re not the junk mail guys. We don’t do that. Everything we send you, there’s a very high likelihood you need or may want at some point. Like, we’re very, very strategic about who we’re sending the mail to. Now, not everybody’s going to respond to it.
As I mentioned, you’re looking at a half percent to 1.5%, but the mail that we’re sending you is relevant. We promise. We put a lot of work and effort into making sure that if we’re delivering that piece of mail to you, there’s a high likelihood that you should hopefully should be interested in responding to it. And so I was. And when I say that they always say okay, well and they you know I think they feel a little bit better about it.
You know we’re not spamming them. Ultimately. But that’s not to say that you don’t get direct mail. That’s spam. If there is a spray and pray method to everything with a lot of companies.
But we do, at least here at the agency, make sure let’s make sure who we’re sending this mail is relevant and that they’re at least going to be interested in opening it or interacting with that brand or service.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:47
Is it difficult, Mike, to scale this up? Right? Like if you find this okay, this is the perfect ideal person. You form a list, then you’re selling, you’re sending a lot of mail. Like is there saying hundreds of thousands a month, potentially.
Mike Gunderson: 31:06
Millions a month.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:07
Or more, right. How do you find big enough lists for this stuff?
Mike Gunderson: 31:13
Well, so part of us bringing on new clients, that is a criteria for us because we do work in the large volume direct mail space. Okay. So as I mentioned, we’re not doing ABM marketing to 500, you know, clients that you really want to get in front of. There’s companies out there. Send Doso.
It sounds like you guys do that. There’s companies that either do a really good.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:33
People who know that the account-based marketing. So you’re really just targeting really very small numbers of niche clients I mean small. I mean, a lot of the things are small compared to what you’re sending, Mike, but.
Mike Gunderson: 31:44
Yeah, exactly. And so what’s beautiful about our approach and our method is once we find out that winning combination of list, creative and format, we’re able to scale that with amazing accuracy. And one of the criteria of bringing on a client here is we do want to make sure there’s a universe for it, right? So we want to make sure that if it’s if it’s a ZipRecruiter, if it’s a triple A, you know, if it’s a SoFi, you know, if it’s a figure, you know, it’s a it’s a product or service that that lends their services to a lot of different people. And so that’s how we’re able to scale.
And then yes, when you’re building models, you are going to get a degradation as you start to increase your volume. And so it’s up to us to continue to refine those models, make sure that the creatives are fresh, making sure that the offer is something that’s interesting to get people to respond. And then what’s great is you can start to see that really consistent, you know, performance as you start to scale. You shouldn’t see too much degradation on that. Now, there will be a point where your cost per piece goes down and everything kind of like levels out.
It’s usually about 1 to 1.5 million pieces, at least in our world, to where you really do have to push harder in order to make sure that you’re getting those people to respond. But what’s beautiful about direct mail, and unlike pay-per-click or other digital services, is as we start to scale. So we go from 100,000 to 200,000 to 500,000 to 1 million pieces. We’re actually our cost to deliver go way down up to, you know, between 20% and 35% as you start to scale. And you just don’t get that.
If you’re doing that in pay-per-click, you’re starting to bid against bigger players, bigger players. Everything gets more and more expensive as you scale. This actually gets cheaper and cheaper as you scale, which is a huge benefit to the folks that market with direct mail.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:39
So, you know, we talked about the package itself. We talked about the list being important. We talked about even the outside of the package, and we showed some stuff on the inside. But I want to go a little bit deeper on the inside because there’s a lot of pieces on the inside, like the messaging, the copy, the offer. And maybe let’s talk about the offer for a second.
I’m going to just you have a really cool and people want to check it out. You can go to Gundir.com and they have a if you go under portfolio creative library We’re going to pull a couple of these up here. It’ll be fun. So on the inside, I don’t know if there’s any interesting one that we should pull up.
You have a lot of companies here that would be from the inside part. We can look at maybe the offer and the copy.
Mike Gunderson: 34:30
Yeah. You could go to the dish. Dish I think has a couple of, like gift card offers in there that are interesting.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:35
Okay.
Mike Gunderson: 34:36
Yeah. I mean the offer is key, right. Because if we’re spending the money and we’re trying to get people to respond on these packages, you know, it’s important to have a good offer. Now, free service is not really an offer. It does get people to respond.
But really what we want is an offer on top of an offer, if that makes sense. We want them to respond to this direct mail package. And so that means that these are not these are not offers that are meant for everybody. You know, Sally, who lives in California, might get a $150 offer, but Max in Arizona might get a $200 offer. They don’t have to be one-size-fits-all.
That’s what’s beautiful, is we can actually measure the data, measure the response and the conversion, and we can set an offer that makes the most sense for the type of customer that we’re going after. And that’s actually kind of a really cool feature that you don’t get. It’s not like an omnichannel offer where every single channel that you’re clicking on gets you that $200 offer. Now, oftentimes that does happen, but we always push our clients to just go a little bit further, give us a little tiny bit more to put on this direct mail so we can say direct mail exclusive offer, visit this website, scan this QR code to get this offer. And that’s a really, really powerful thing because that helps with our attribution, right?
We want to make sure that we get attribution back to the folks that actually receive the direct mail piece, and we don’t want them to get this direct mail piece. And then three days later, go into Google and then search up, you know, Dish Network, and then just click on that pay per click ad. And now we’ve lost our attribution. Now we’ll still get a little bit of that back. So we’ll do a match back, but we want them to respond with this offer on this URL, on this phone number, or on this QR code.
And so offers are super, super important. And I always tell people like give them something kind of interesting, give them something good. There’s so many digital things you can do as well. Like a I know with Easycare we do a, I believe we do an Amazon gift card when they sign up. So there’s all kinds of things you can do that really can cost you like no money, where you can offer a better deal on the product or service, or you can offer something a little bit more interesting to maybe the person who’s placing the order.
So maybe this isn’t an offer to the company, but maybe it’s an offer to the HR manager that’s setting up the meeting for their next catering event, right? So we can make them feel special, entice them to utilize the product, respond to the product, and then once the product does its thing now they’re in, they’re like, okay, this is a very good product. This is something that we want to utilize moving forward.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:10
Yeah. We’re looking here at the Easy Cater and you can see get your $50 Amazon gift card. I remember I had been settle on the podcast. I don’t know if you follow his stuff at all, but he’s, you know, direct-response copywriter. He sends a daily email.
And I remember him telling me, Jeremy, if you don’t have a PS in your emails or in your copy, like if he used some, you know, stronger words, but that’s terrible. Like you should always have a PS they’re going to read the PS and you can see here in this copy, obviously the offer is in the copy twice, but there’s a PS here and that has it in there. And let’s talk about the offer. Break down the offer because like obviously you said exclusive helps really compelling. But there’s an expiration.
What are some other things that are in the offer that are key that maybe you take for granted. You know because you do it so much.
Mike Gunderson: 38:07
Well, it’s Yeah, it’s trying to make sure that they drive to that URL, that QR code or that phone number. So if we’re spending this money, we’re spending this time and we’re delivering this piece of mail, we want to make sure that they’re responding to this offer on the direct mail that’s going to give us our attribution, that’s going to prove direct mail is a great channel, and that’s going to allow, you know, obviously, companies to put more spend against this to drive more leads and more conversions. So it is important to have an expiration date. We don’t want people to be getting this offer and just think it’s open ended by having that expiration. It sounds really silly, but having that expiration date really allows them to take action.
Now, if you don’t have an expiration date, that’s fine. Make one. You know, if you don’t have an offer, still put an expiration date. You can say something like respond by, you know, May 31st, 2025. You don’t have to say to get this offer.
Just say respond by just by putting that in there allows people to say there’s a stop date to this, and there’s a reason why I need to care about it right now. The other thing for attribution is if you’re not using a Perl or A or a custom QR code, personalised QR code, you know having an offer code is a really great way to have attribution back to that direct mail. You know, just saying, hey, put in this code. And then plus when you put that code, it makes the offer feel like it’s more exclusive. I have to have this code in order to take advantage of this offer.
So having a code on there, I don’t know if this one has it. I believe we might have. Yeah. Lunch. Lunch fell right there.
Oh no I don’t know. Maybe this one doesn’t have it, but most of them, almost all of our direct mail either has a customer code, a unique customer code, an offer code of some sort. And then we’ve gone so far. If you’re a serious direct mailer, it’s important to do two things.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:49
There is a thing that says easy care.com/vanity. I know that may be a custom URL.
Mike Gunderson: 39:54
Yeah, but the two things that you want to make sure you know, that what you’re doing is you’re collecting address if you’re serious direct mailer now so many startup brands that I work with say, that’s going to break the conversion cycle. We don’t want to put anything more on the landing page than possible. I say, okay, and that is a problem because we can still do a match back if they collect the address. But that address is key to attribution back to these direct mailers. The second best thing would be the offer code, as long as they’re putting it in the vanity URL.
Of course the vanity phone number, all these things are really great. So making sure that you have that is wonderful. Now, if you don’t have all that, almost every intake form that I get or that I, that I respond to has a dropdown, it says, how did you hear about us? So even if you have that, just add direct mail. If you’re doing direct mail, just add direct mail to that.
At least you’re going to get a little bit of incremental attribution back to the direct mail piece. If they are just kind of going through your regular sales funnel. But our recommendation is always to have a separate landing page, something that really speaks to the offer, have a separate offer, slightly better than the one that’s out there for everybody else, and then making sure that you have some way to track that back. And that’s through an offer code, a vanity URL. Obviously, a QR code is beautiful because we get to see every scan.
And then of course, what did I say, an offer code, a generic offer code like spring sell something like that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:28
And you could see here, Mike, on the outside that people can see it, you know, promotional stuff on the outside of the envelope. Like, I don’t have to even open it to see, oh, I get it. It’s almost like a free lunch, right? Obviously they’re giving me a $50 Amazon gift card. If I order, I’m like, okay, yeah, I’ll check it out.
Let’s do it. Right. And then obviously inside you said, you know, all that, that stuff. But that promotional piece is right here. So it’s like prompting me to open it, right.
You know, right away I’m interested. Do you find, you know, I had on it. I’d like to hear some interesting use cases. I’m going to share just like one thought, but like I want to hear what are some weird use cases for this? Like I had the.
The founder of Wild Chips. They’re made of chicken okay. I love them. Jason Wright was great, and I can imagine he was like, you know, I met him at the CrossFit games, you know, because it’s a functional food. So there’s a very targeted list that would probably respond.
Right. And I remember the Rxbar founder when I had him on, that’s where they started. They started with like Crossfitters. Right. I’m wondering if like that would work for them, like sending to all the CrossFit or athletic people who are really want just a high protein, low carb snack and do a direct mail piece for like a coupon code or something like that.
That would be do or have you found that CPG companies are using this or. Yeah.
Mike Gunderson: 43:05
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’ve worked with a couple of them. There’s a lot of big box DTC companies. You know, you have HelloFresh and do a ton of direct mail, maybe one of the larger direct mailers right before the pandemic. I mean, every box meal box company was doing direct mail, right?
There’s a lot of DTC brands like I know Fight Club we worked with to kind of bring that to, again, Fight Club. Like think about this for a second.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:33
I don’t know what Fight Club is. What is it?
Mike Gunderson: 43:34
So Fight Club is basically like.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:36
I know the movie, but yeah.
Mike Gunderson: 43:37
They give you a punching bag and then an app and then they basically can track your, your boxing and all this stuff. That’s such an innovative product. Nobody really knows what to search for. Like, hey, is there an innovative boxing like you may or may not even care?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:52
I’m not searching. Can I search an innovative boxing app?
Mike Gunderson: 43:55
Yeah, but I can bring that to you by basic demographic information and say this person and they’re, you know, 20 to 30 might be interested in an at home boxing kit during Covid and then be able to sell them on direct mail that way. So DTC is very big for that one. Medical you know, there’s a lot of different companies here. Nom. Now you know bringing dog food to pets.
So you wouldn’t even know to search for that unless it was brought to you. And that’s the beautiful thing about direct mail is it’s this is being brought to you. You are a pre-qualified prospect. I’m bringing my brand and my product and my service to you. This might be something you’re interested in based off of your demographics, right?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:36
I’m curious. Mike, this is just a selfish question for a second. Can people go to the creative page? And I don’t like, you know, I have a dog. I’m like, are these offers still good?
Like, can I go and actually get can I actually use this offer, like to get $60 off or.
Mike Gunderson: 44:54
Yeah, I mean, almost everything I mean everything on our creative library won’t have any likely any real offers, maybe not even any real.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 45:01
Benefit of them working with you. They get people get you know, they can get sales straight from your website.
Mike Gunderson: 45:08
That’s so funny. Yeah. No. But obviously if you go to our Crave Library, if you’re interested in direct mail, our Crave Library is a great resource for wonderful creative and then also our direct mail lookbook, which we’ll ship out to anybody who wants to request it. It’s a hardcover book with a ton of examples, a lot of great tips.
That’s been a really great kind of product for us to kind of give it to, to, to new folks in direct mail. And then even folks that are very established in professional direct mailers are finding a lot of really great resources in this book. Totally. We’re just kind of switch it up and come up with some new ideas that might that might move the needle.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 45:46
No, I really think, in my opinion, like if someone’s like, well, I don’t do direct mail, whatever. Like you can get ideas for your website, you can get ideas for your social media, you get ideas for your paid media on the social channels because, listen, people are spending a lot of money on these direct mail pieces. It’s cheaper to test it online sometimes just to throw it up and do a quick test and then go further. But I find this gets the mind at least creative juices flowing on the online stuff as well. I do want to touch on Post Reminder and how you came up on that up with that and how that fits into the picture.
Mike Gunderson: 46:27
Yeah. So Post reminder kind of came out of I was talking with my head of data, Alexa, and we were just kind of, you know, we were just ideating on some ideas. And what we were looking at at the time was a chart, which was a response curve for I can’t remember what product or what service it was, but what we were. I think it might have been life insurance. And what we were realizing is we would do a response analysis, a match back report, 30 days in 45 days, 60 days in, and then we would continue it, you know, even past that.
And what we were realizing is we still kept getting responses off of the same exact direct mail piece with that offer code many, many months into the future. And what we had realized was what was happening is people were setting their mail to the side and then getting back to it at some point, which, you know, is we all do it. Oftentimes it ends up in a huge stack and we never get back to it. Or when we do get back to it, the offer has expired, right? So what I was saying to her is like, you know, what would be really cool is if somehow we could remind people of the mail that they’re not responding to in the moment.
You know, maybe they got a mail piece. They looked at it, they were excited about it. And then they had to go pick up their kids. And they can’t respond to it in the moment. So they typically would just stuff it in their purse.
They’d put it in a, you know, on their bulletin board. They’d put it in the stack of mail. What if they could just scan the QR code and say, remind me in a few hours, remind me next week, remind me this weekend to take advantage of this offer. And that’s where Post Reminder came from. And so what we did was we built a platform that allows you to scan an enhanced QR code.
This enhanced QR code not only allows you to respond instantly, which is what we want folks to do, but in addition to that, set a reminder for the advertised offer or event. Another use case is the gap. So the gap has been using.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 48:19
I’ll do that with like restaurant stuff. I’m like, oh, I want to eat here. But like literally sit in a drawer somewhere and I’ll forget about it. And so it’s a perfect reminder.
Mike Gunderson: 48:30
That’s right. Well, so with the gap, what they do is, you know, friends and family. So they kind of invented the friends and family. So don’t quote me on that. But that’s the first place I ever saw friends and family.
So was the gap. And it was kind of a big deal. The issue is, is that they send out these postcards to bring awareness to the friends and family. So just about 4 to 6 days before the sale starts, which is great. It provides awareness.
I’m excited. I’d love to be able to save, you know, up to 60% on clothing items. That’s fantastic, I love it. I want to pass it to my friends. Well, what we did with them is we added our enhanced QR code.
And then when those folks got that postcard just a few days before the sale started, they scanned the QR code to set a reminder for the day the sale started. So even though you scanned it on Tuesday and the sale’s not until Saturday, on Saturday, when you’re walking around your house drinking your coffee, you get an alert right to your mobile phone that says, hey, today’s the Gap Friends and Family sale. Click here to get started and start shopping today. And this has been just a really great benefit to their prospects, as a lot of the mail that they’re doing is to their card members. And so they’re getting awareness.
They’re transacting in real time. They’re getting a warm-up by getting that postcard, and then they’re transacting in real time when the sale starts, once they get that alert. So that’s been another really great use case, is when you’re trying to promote a sale, when you’re trying to promote an event. This is perfect. You know, think about voting.
If you’re voting for something, scan. The QR code will remind you who to vote for when you get to the polls. So this has been a really great product of bringing this to market and then starting to see it grow. And all these different industries has been really exciting for the business.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 50:10
Yeah. I’ll have to take a look at this more closely. I’m going to send this. I had a guest, Paul Jarrett of Ballou, and they do a lot of fulfillment stuff, and that’d be really cool for them, whether it’s subscription boxes, because you could see, you know, there’s a lot of use cases for this. You know, from the subscription box thing, you put QR code set renewal reminders.
I mean, that could be appointment reminders. So there’s really interesting use cases. Obviously I could see it with events themselves. There’s a lot of cool ways people are using it.
Mike Gunderson: 50:44
Yeah. The new one that we just tested with a customer was trade show. So she had a trade show booth, so she got the trade show list. Right. That’s what we typically do.
We get an email list and then we’ll also get a direct mail list oftentimes. And so what she did was she sent out a postcard to everybody who was attending that trade show to basically say, hey, come by trade, you know, booth number 387 and get your free sun cap. That’s what it was. And like, okay, well that’s great. What do I do with that?
Well, before you’d hope to God that she could they come by your booth. But now she put a call to action. Scan the QR code and will remind you on the show floor to come by our booth. And so when they scan and they set a reminder when they’re walking the show floor, it says, come by our booth and get your free hat. Bam!
Redirects them right to their booth and they’re good to go. And what’s beautiful about Post Reminder is we really built it for direct mail, but it works awesome for Drtv. Anything with a QR code, you know, out of home. And then in addition to that, anything really digital marketing. If you’re doing emails, if you’re doing social media, you can set reminders for those offer and those events as well.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 51:52
Amazing. I have one last question, Mike. You can keep it as long or as short as you want. I know we’re right at the top of the hour, so if you have to go, you keep it short. I’ll let you keep talking as long as you want.
But I want to talk about mentors and some of the, you know, really key mentors for you. And I know EO has been a big part of your journey. It could be distant mentors and EO mentors, meaning the direct mail people or you know, so talk about some mentors and some best advice you’ve gotten.
Mike Gunderson: 52:29
Well that’s fantastic. Well, so the my first and foremost my, my, my mentor as a guy named Don Capri, he was an excellent copywriter. And when I worked at this large credit card company, he kind of took me under his wing. And he kind of taught me everything about direct mail. And Don Capri is no longer with us.
But I tell you what, That guy is amazing. And so? So I learned everything from him. He was so excited. He was as excited as I am now about direct mail.
And so it was just he was just always an awesome mentor. The other thing that you mentioned was EO, you know, when my business finally hit $1 million, it was me and a studio artist. That’s it. And we grew the business. We got it there.
And I had a buddy named Jamie Keating who said, hey man, when your business hits this, you have to join EO. It’s like it’s going to change the trajectory of your business. And he told me this like a year. I was I think I was at like 500 or 700,000 in sales. And he told me like, well, so I saw him.
We’re buddies. We rode motorcycles together. And I said, hey, man, my business finally hit $1 million a year. And he goes, good, you’re coming to an EO event. So we went there and it was really amazing.
And I met people like Hunter Elkins and a couple other folks, Scott Allison, who was also a mentor of mine, who was fantastic. And from the day I signed on the dotted line and joined EO. My. My entire business trajectory changed. And I’m not just saying that like it.
It was profoundly different. I didn’t go to business school. I was an art major. I knew nothing about hiring anybody, about finances, about KPIs, you know, for the business, financial KPIs and EO. And my forum has been in now for 13, almost 14 years, and it has just been an amazing experience.
And so from there, I’ve been able to navigate a lot of different business changes. I’ve been able to grow my business from two people to 30 people. I’ve been able to grow my revenue from 1 million to 20 million. It’s just been a really, really great experience. So I say to anybody out there who thinks they can go alone and do it to themselves, there’s nothing better than having a peer group like that, not only for all the stuff that you learn and kind of what you learn about yourself and your relationships and everything else, but then also just the events that they put on and the thirst for knowledge and being able to continue to grow yourself and your business. That’s just a really great organization.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 54:54
Love it. Micah. Yeah, I’m also in Chicago. My business partner, John Corcoran, is in San Francisco. So we are huge proponents.
And just like you said, I’m in even specific peer groups for different industries too, just because I learned so much. So first of all, like I want to thank you. Thanks for sharing your journey, your knowledge. It’s fascinating. Everyone can check out Gundir.com they can also check out postreminder.com to learn more. And thank you so much. Thanks Mike I appreciate it.
Mike Gunderson: 55:26
Thank you Jeremy.
