In this episode of the Custom Apparel Startups Podcast, host Marc Vila is joined by Michael Palme and Austin Gordon from Taylor to discuss how direct mail can be a game-changer for custom apparel, sign, and promotional product businesses. While digital marketing gets a lot of attention, direct mail remains a powerful and underutilized tool for targeting new customers, retaining existing clients, and cutting through the clutter of online ads.
Michael and Austin break down how direct mail works, how to effectively use data to reach the right audience, and how you can integrate it with digital advertising for even greater results. Whether you’re a startup looking to establish your brand or an established business aiming for the next level, this episode will give you practical strategies to expand your reach and increase sales.
Topics Covered in This Episode:
✅ Why direct mail still works in a digital world
✅ How to use data to target the perfect audience for your business
✅ The cost of direct mail—how much should you budget?
✅ How to track results and measure ROI
✅ The best types of mail pieces for apparel and sign businesses
✅ Combining direct mail with digital ads for maximum impact
✅ How to start a direct mail campaign—step-by-step guide
✅ Common mistakes to avoid when using direct mail marketing
Listen now and learn how to use direct mail to take your business to the next level!
✉ Have questions or want to connect? email us at marketing@coldesi.com.
Transcript
Marc Vila:
Hello and welcome to the CAS Podcast, the Custom Apparel Startups Podcast. And my name is Marc Vila, and welcome to our show today.
Just as we’re starting off 2025 and this is our first podcast of the year, so we’re trying to adjust the format a little bit and really get to a higher level of business. So previously we were the Custom Apparel Startups Podcast, CAS, and I’ve been saying CAS a little bit more because we’re trying to move not just for the startups, but actually moving and growing into folks who are really trying to grow their business and potentially have an established business, too, that are really trying to take it to the next level.
So with that in mind, if you are a startup or you’ve been in business for 10 years, this episode is going to be amazing for you because we’re going to have some great education from two fantastic gentlemen from Taylor. So today, we’re going to be talking about growing your business with direct mail, and we’ve got Michael Palme and Austin Gordon from Taylor. So why don’t you guys say hello and tell us a little bit about Taylor.
Michael Palme:
Yeah, so I’ll kick us off. Like Marc was saying, I’m Michael Palme. I’ve been with Taylor for about five and a half years. Really, Taylor in the business unit that I’m part of, we specialize in direct mail packaging and commercial print. But just a little bit more about Taylor. I think the easiest way to describe who Taylor is and what we can do is if you think about anything you could put a brand or logo on, whether it be promo items, any sort of printed collateral, any sort of marketing pieces, we can do that here at Taylor. So thanks for having us on, Marc, and look forward to a great conversation.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, Austin. And awesome. Awesome, and then Austin. Austin, why don’t you tell us a little bit about just what you do over there and what it’s like doing some direct mail business with Taylor?
Austin Gordon:
Yeah, definitely. Like Marc said, I’m Austin Gordon, and today is my first day on the proverbial mic so I’m excited to be joining a podcast. What I do at Taylor here is that I’m an account executive and I work with our customers to make sure that we’re optimizing their direct mail campaigns, whether that’s incorporating digital sides to a direct mail campaign, getting the right message to the right person at the right time, and just really making sure that the dollar on direct mail spend is most efficiently spent.
Marc Vila:
Okay, excellent, excellent. Well, so one thing that I’m going to mention here is we’re recording this and a new feature of the software is this AI transcription. And it just wanted to show it on the side of the screen the whole time. So as I’m trying to introduce and talk just, for anyone who saw me fumble for a minute there, there’s this AI bot just… And I’m like, “How do I get rid of this thing?” It’s the first time I’ve seen it. So new feature that’ll hopefully take the transcription and put it online to make it easier for folks to digest if they prefer to read. But man, that was driving me nuts. Problem solved though. Let’s get right into a little bit about direct mail.
So I run marketing here at ColDesi. What’s the hot topics and the fancy and shiny thing nowadays is should I do influencer marketing? Should I be advertising on Instagram? Is TikTok a good place? What about LinkedIn? All these digital online places and even Google Ads, this is the hot stuff that’s talked about over and over again. And it is a great way to reach audiences and it is an important way to do advertising, but we forget that there are tried and true methods that are still great and one of them potentially could be direct mail. And we wanted to talk about how to get started with that if you’re currently not, what potential impacts that could have on your business, and how it could be a different way to reach out to your customers, especially if you have a large existing customer database that you want to get repeat business from, or you’re trying to reach a new niche group of people that you can get your branding and your image and your message in front of their face in a different way, especially with the digital space being incredibly crowded.
So what I’ll do is I have a series of questions that I put together. So we’ll do a little Q&A style. And I think a good format would be I’ll just back and forth or if I feel one of you can answer it better, I’ll start with one of you and then if the second person has somebody to add, this way we’re not talking over each other. So I’ll do like Michael and then Austin and Michael and Austin. And then once you’re done with what you have to say, finish and I’ll give a brief moment for the other one to jump in if they want to add something. And then if I have any comments, I’ll add it at the end. So that’ll be the format today, and let’s just get right into business.
The first thing that I wanted to talk about, and Michael, we’ll start with you as I mentioned, why would direct mail work for a sign or a t-shirt shop?
Michael Palme:
So a couple of things that come to mind as it relates to t-shirt shops specifically doing direct mail, I think the first thing that comes to mind, Marc, is the highly visual appeal. Signs and t-shirt shops are graphic-based and a printed piece can really highlight the design, the colors, any sort of past work. And also I think the physical side of it too, when you’re sending out that direct mail piece and it’s a physical thing that your audience might be receiving, typically we see t-shirt shops and more of the manufacturing side. Those physical pieces tend to do a lot better than some of the other categories. So those are the couple of things that come to mind as to why a t-shirt shop should be doing direct mail.
Austin Gordon:
And Marc, a few points I’d like to add is you touched on the digital space, and we’re not here by any means to bash the digital space. We actually think it’s a very powerful tool, and where direct mail can be very powerful is when it works in tangent with digital ads. I’m not sure how many printers are working to make sure that you are marrying the two together. I know that for example, that’s something that Taylor does is, okay, we know we’re sending a physical piece of direct mail to this address. How can we match that with an IP address to make sure that people in that household or in that business are also getting targeted with Facebook ads, with Instagram ads? They’re on espn.com, how can we marry the two together? So also I’d add that there’s probably less competition in the mailbox. You’re not fighting for real estate on Instagram. So in that sense, it can be a powerful tool to use too.
Secondly, what I think it does well for a sign shop or a t-shirt shop is it does really good at local targeting. In my eyes, I see sign shops and t-shirt shops probably operating in a specific area, and direct mail allows for precise geographical targeting.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, so that’s fantastic. And I have a couple pieces of comment that actually are really just both of you had said.
So when we survey out our customers and we do interviews on folks that are in this t-shirt space or sign space and other promotional goods, as you said, most of them are working within a targeted area. So within a city or within a state are going to be the two most popular, or they may specifically be working with schools, so therefore they’re working within a certain school board or whatever it might be. Government, they may be working with local government agencies. And the way to expand that is typically just to either spread out that map or get deeper into that map that you work in. And the first one is within the area that I work with, are there more customers? And you can really target well as you mentioned in a less crowded space.
And we get… Everyone will joke how much junk mail you get or don’t get, right? But when you talk about your mobile device or YouTube, we’re almost more trained to skip those ads because what are you doing? You’re flipping through Instagram. You’re there to have fun. And then the fifth thing you get is somebody telling you to do your taxes and just get out of here. And direct mail though is mail is business. That’s how I think about it. Mail is business. It’s not fun. So when you open your mail, you’re saying, “What’s a bill? What’s an important letter? What’s an invitation to do something? Is there something of value in here for me?” So there’s actually you’re actually searching for value where on social media or YouTube, you may be searching for value. You may just be literally rotting your brain in the bathroom. And there’s a reality.
So it’s something that I think is very cool about doing direct mail that if you operate in Orlando, Florida and you work with a particular niche business, you can identify all of those businesses through a company like Taylor. You’ll identify all those potential businesses and you can send them something physical, which is, Michael, you had said that’s great. That actually is designs with your physical product. If you’re selling promotional goods or t-shirts or signs, you’re handing them a physical good. It’s not a piece of software. It’s not a digital download. So you have the opportunity to show, like you said, show past work, show something that’s vibrant and eye-catching. And if you’re trying to sell signs or t-shirts that are vibrant and eye-catching to businesses, what better way to do it than to impress them immediately with something vibrant and eye-catching in their hands. So there’s a bit of subconscious, I think, to it as well.
Austin Gordon:
Absolutely.
Michael Palme:
Sure.
Marc Vila:
Great. Well, so that actually bounces into another question that I had here. And Austin, let’s start with you then. So if you do only operate in a small area or a very local business or even in an area where the population is not incredibly large, how can you handle direct mail? Will it even work at that point in time? Or maybe in other words, how big does your audience have to be for you to be able to mail them?
Austin Gordon:
Yeah, I would say for the sake of a company that’s just operating in a local area or trying to sell t-shirts for a local sports team, direct mail in a local area for sure is a viable tool and you’re going to want to just target that specific area. You’re not going to want to sell t-shirts if you’re operating in Orlando to people that live in Lake Mary. You don’t want the Orlando schools… I’m using Florida cities. Not totally familiar with the surrounding area, but just for the sake of you, Marc, being in the Florida area. But you’d want to target people that’s getting the piece and it’s relevant to them. And knowing who your audience is is important to what piece you’re going to be sending them.
So for the sake of can you operate in a local area, the answer to that is yes. And for how big or small it can be is we can do a mailing as small as 500 people if that’s what your budget calls and that’s what your data is telling you. But we can also do as large as a million, just throwing out numbers there just to give background for how big or small we can do.
Michael Palme:
Yeah. So one thing to add to that, Marc, and Austin, I think, hit the nail on the head, but when it comes to if the question can direct mail be effective in a local area, I think we need to go all the way back to the data piece and who exactly your target audience is, who you’re going to be marketing to. Because if there’s enough of those individuals in the local area, absolutely. Direct mail can crush it. So when you can hone in and figure out, okay, this is I’ll use the example of an ice cream shop. If there’s data out there, and maybe you’re in Fort Myers Beach and you can find people who often vacation to Fort Myers Beach and then you can market to them in advance. In Florida, everyone wants ice cream on a hot sunny day, so maybe you can market to them in advance with a specific offer that next time they vacation down to Fort Myers Beach, 50% off your ice cream.
I’m just making that up. But I do think that the data portion of that, especially in a local area, is so critical to having success with direct mail.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, data is probably the most important thing for all marketing. If you’re going to advertise on Instagram or Facebook or Google, you want to make sure you’re sending that… It’s rare that you want to send the message to everybody. We’re not Coca-Cola. Coke wants to advertise to literally everybody because everybody drinks liquids. Everyone needs hydration. They want to advertise to everybody. But if you are a sign shop and you specifically work in, say, doing yard signs and graduation season is coming up so you’d love to print a bunch of pictures of some graduates and their faces and 2025 graduates, all that stuff, you’re probably going to be dealing with a local area and understanding, “Well, all right, how am I going to get to the folks in this area? Well, can I get an audience of people who have children that are estimated to be between 16 and 19 years old? Am I able to get that data?”
If you’re able to get that data for your local area, which potentially you could, now you potentially have a mailing list of a certain size. Well, at this point in time, the size, it might be huge. You’re like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t think I want to send to that many people.” So now you want to tighten it down. “Well, I just want to do certain zip codes. I really just want to focus on these three high schools.” And there’s something about doing print advertising that can be brought directly to the high school, but there’s also something about potentially getting a database of people that would be of a certain age, more than likely to have children that are in within these certain zip codes, which are within those high schools. And you could direct mail out to those. And these campaigns can really be done beautifully if you have the right data. And like you said, the data has to be of a certain size. It has to be of certain accuracy.
And then the last little bit of it is on the commercial side of direct mail, you mentioned 500, a thousand or a million. Well, you may find that you want to do something with local dentist offices. Maybe that’s a niche thing you want to jump into, but there’s only 40 in your area. Well, this is not as big for Taylor, but it’s a toe dip into it. If you have printing equipment because a lot of folks here do, and you want to print 40 things, you can print 40 signs and just mail them directly to those 40 dentists. So direct mail can start on your own, especially being in our industry. You can start by printing 40 t-shirts and mailing them to 40 dentists.
But this is a way to really expand and grow the business, and that’s what the conversation is about today. So how do you grow from that small niche of 40? What is a larger niche that you can get into where previously you had one salesperson that would take 40 t-shirts or 40 signs and they would drive around town and drop them off and hand off a business card. And that’s great as you get started, but if you’re trying to scale and you’re trying to move up to another level, well, now I’m not interested in advertising to 40 people. I’m interested in advertising to 4,000 people, like potential parents of graduates. And that’s what we’re talking about is scaling the business. So data is a really great way to do it. And if you talk to folks like the people at Taylor, they can really dive into that data with you.
So another thing I wanted to cover is just cost. Everyone wants to know how much everything costs. We sell printers. Everyone wants to know what does it cost to print, how fast can it print and all that. So what does it cost to mail something? I know, Austin, you had mentioned that you had done a little bit of math on that, so could you just give us some bookend numbers? Let’s say that you wanted to mail a thousand postcards in Orlando. What’s something like that going to cost about?
Austin Gordon:
Yeah, and there’s a lot that plays into it, something like size or the stock of paper. But for example, for the sake of giving an example, I got a 6 x 9 postcard here. This is on a 10 point piece of paper and you’d probably be looking anywhere from 50 cents to 60 cents with an addition of 40 cents for your postage. So you’re looking at about a dollar per piece to get it to a mailbox. Obviously, USPS needs to get… They need to get paid too. So we print the piece and then we give it to them too to deliver the piece so that you got two people getting paid on executing a direct mail order. So a thousand postcards to the Orlando area, you’re probably looking at about a thousand dollars. And where Taylor tries to live is the larger run. So you maybe could get a more competitive price if you’re going to a local printer that specializes in those smaller runs.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. No, and that’s a great summary for that. So a really just nice simple summary is if you want to do real simple math, just napkin math, you could just say, “I want to send a nice postcard.” You didn’t show a little guy. You showed a nice large size postcard. If you want to send color printed both sides and you want to mail this, you could say a buck, right? A buck for each one you want to mail. So if you start looking at data and you say, “Okay, well, I’ve got 5,000 potential customers in this area. Okay, my napkin math, I’m going to say 5,000.” And that just gets you started, and then that’s when you’ll have conversations with Michael or Austin and really get into those numbers because chances are that napkin math is going to be even a little exaggerated. It’s probably going to be cheaper for you than that. What about scaling up to something larger pieces, something folded or a brochure or something a little bit larger than just a postcard?
Austin Gordon:
Yeah, I pulled another example. And for the sake of targeting, let’s say the whole state of Florida and you want to send out 10,000 brochures, we’ll just give an example of a tri-folded brochure, you’re probably looking at anywhere from 16 cents to 30, 40 cents per piece. And again, that’s going to mail as a letter. So you’re looking again at that 40 cent per piece for your postage. All in all, you’re probably looking at anywhere from 60 cents to 80 cents all in-
Marc Vila:
Right, so…
Austin Gordon:
… for those brochures.
Marc Vila:
So if we say, I’m just going to bring out my little math here, so if we said 60 cents on the low end of that times 10,000, you could get for… So $6,000, you can get a physical piece in the hands of a very targeted group of people. We talked about the data is important. You’re not just mailing to an entire zip code. You’re mailing to people of this age who potentially own this type of business in this demographic. You could really tighten that down to almost anything. We didn’t talk about this ahead of time, but Michael, can you talk a little bit about how granular can the data get if you really want to target a certain audience?
Michael Palme:
So to answer your question, Marc, very targeted. And to the point where if you want to go after a certain age group, maybe between the ages of 20 to 35, that has been looking at, I don’t know, what do age 20 and 35-year-olds care about? We will use video games as the example, I guess. We can figure out, okay, here’s how many of those individuals in that age group have been shopping for a new Xbox 360, or I shouldn’t say new Xbox 3… Xbox One or whatever-
Marc Vila:
Xbox One.
Michael Palme:
… the new Xbox is. Is it One S?
Marc Vila:
PS 5, maybe.
Michael Palme:
Yeah, PS 5. Okay. But anyways, yeah, there’s a lot. You can really drill down deep into the data. Now, as the deeper you get, the cost, right, because some of that data is just a little harder to generate and I’ll say mine, but it’s out there. And what we would typically recommend and what we’ve seen is the more in depth you go with the data, going back to what we were talking about earlier, the more effective your piece is going to be, the higher the ROI. So it really works out. And again, I think the more that you can go down and just really find who those individuals are, the more success you’ll have when doing direct mail.
Marc Vila:
We live in a creative space, so almost everybody listening to this is a creative-minded person. So they’re a graphic artist or they know what something… If they’re not graphic artists, they know what good art looks like. They know how to capture attention. They know how to decorate something and make it pop. That’s what they do for a living. And so since you’re a creative person, the gold in this conversation, I think, comes right here. If you can put together a niche product that you sell and find that niche audience and you can advertise that to them in a physical piece in direct mail and back it up digitally, you can open up a really cool market that potentially there’s almost no competition in your area for.
And I’ll give… I had an extreme example come to my head, but if you want to operate in the state of Florida and the niche you have is you do Latino style, anime manga style art that’s in Spanish, you could go through and you could potentially buy an audience of people who are Spanish speaking, interested in anime, manga and other types of animation like that. And you could potentially buy that target audience, people who are 25 to 45 years old, males, Spanish-speaking, that’s an audience you could potentially purchase. Then you could put together a digital and a direct mail piece selling the t-shirts that you sell that are very specific to that audience. Who else is advertising that product? Minimal.
So the gold is really in do you have a niche that you work in? Do you have something that you’re passionate about? The audience is obtainable. And then once you have that audience, how do you get to them? And getting a physical piece in their hand is one of the closest ways you can get outside of literally shaking their hand or having a phone call. It’s the next level down on physical touch to be able to actually capture that audience.
Michael Palme:
Yeah, for sure. And I know we’ve been spending a lot of time in this whole data topic, but I would just say, it’s pretty mind-blowing the amount of companies that I feel like aren’t really leveraging data in their marketing today and their marketing efforts they’re doing today. So I would just say if you never really use data or maybe you use data but not to the extent you should be using it, there’s just so much information out there to your point, Marc. And it can really improve your campaign, so take advantage of it.
Marc Vila:
Now, that data is something that your company and others sell. Or is it that you lease the data, you can use it for a certain period of time, or how does that work?
Michael Palme:
So Taylor, we have our own internal data analytics team and it’s really our own, I’ll call it data engine that we have. So we do in fact sell that data and we sell it it could be a one-time use or if you sell it to a customer and they want to pay the price, it’s theirs to use however they would like to use it. So there’s a couple of different, I guess, options there.
Marc Vila:
Okay. And the cost on that is it can vary widely too, right?
Michael Palme:
Depending on-
Marc Vila:
I imagine from hundreds to tens of thousands if it’s a giant pool of data.
Michael Palme:
Yeah, I would say you’re typically, these are rough numbers of course, but anywhere maybe between a hundred dollars per thousand up to… Per thousand records, that is. And then on the high end, 3 to 400 per thousand records. So it just all depends.
Marc Vila:
So a nice simple list. If I said I wanted to get 10,000 doctor’s offices in Florida with a certain niche, that might be on the low end of that because a pretty simple piece of data, right?
Michael Palme:
Exactly, exactly.
Marc Vila:
You could almost just Google search all those. Now, if I wanted to find more specific Spanish-speaking male doctors interested in sports, that one might go on the higher end of it because there’s a lot more data behind it. But either way, affordable. You figure your first mailer, you could spend 500, a thousand dollars on data and then a thousand dollars to mail it. Theoretically, if you had a nice small one, for a couple of thousand dollars, you can get started. And that’s on the low end. If you’re doing on the high end, you may be spending 2 or $3,000 in the data and you may be spending $5,000, $8,000 on the mail. It really just depends on the size, but it’s scalable.
Michael Palme:
Yep, absolutely.
Marc Vila:
Well, great. Now, there’s a couple other things I wanted to cover before we wrap this up. For one is just we’ve talked about money and a little bit of what it costs to send out a piece of mail, but what about an overall marketing budget for this? What do you think is a minimum number, let’s just say for a year or six months, something like that, that you would want to spend on this?
And the reason why I bring this up is all the time I have folks come up to me and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about advertising on Facebook. I had a few hundred bucks. I was just going to drop it in on an ad.” And I would just say, “Just spend the few hundred dollars on something else. Print samples and just mail them to people or just print samples and drive in your car around town and drop them off, because a few hundred dollars is not necessarily going to be that impactful on something like Instagram or Facebook.” And I’d find direct mail is probably the same thing. Just dropping one 4 x 6 postcard in your area is not necessarily going to make you a million dollars. So what do you think is a starting budget for a six or 12-month period that you should have in your mind before you want to go down this journey?
Michael Palme:
Yeah, for sure. So I’ll start and then Austin, you can feel free to chime in. But typically, Marc, I would say if you don’t have budgeted at least a thousand or $2,000 a month to spend on direct mail, I would say it’s not really worth it.
And one of the things also that I would highlight just as it relates to direct mail, it’s typically, it can be a long game in that depending on what your call to action is and the piece and ultimately who you’re targeting, what your product or service is. It could take a while. So if you’re able to pair that direct mail with an omnichannel type approach, including direct mail marketing ads and email, all of that going to that one person, we typically see the fastest conversion rates with those. So again, yeah, it’s got to be more than a couple grand a month to make it effective.
Austin Gordon:
Yeah. And adding to what Michael said, a lot of times when a customer is new to using direct mail as a marketing tool is what we’ll do is a three-month campaign and do three drops, one each month, and just see how that performs. But even then, that’s not a full timeline for them to really interact with the piece. We’ve seen good ROI’s on three-month campaigns, but it can take a year of monthly mailings for them to see that ROI.
I think, Marc, we were talking earlier, when you’re targeting people on Instagram or Facebook, it’s not you’re sending ads to 500 people and one of them’s going to buy. It’s you sending 500 ads to 500 people or an ad to 500 people five times hoping that one of them is going to buy from that multiple touch points. So yeah, like Michael said, I think it’s a long game with direct mail and you want to have multiple touch points with the customer to see the ROI in the end.
Marc Vila:
Right, right. There’s a couple mindsets on this. There’s the longer one would be if you print signs and you print all different size and styles of signs, the great contract you would love to have is somebody who has five retail candle shops and every season they are changing window signage and signs that are out front and internal signage in the store. That’s a nice gold account to have, that every season they’re consistently changing too. Well, if they already have an existing provider because they have five stores in your local area, so they’re already doing this. Why would they switch to you?
That’s a long tail one for you. You have to continuously show them value that you provide this and then just wait for the right opportunity. Maybe you have a specific holiday offer that they’re interested in. Maybe you have a new idea they haven’t done before. Their previous provider dropped the ball too many times and now they decided, “You know what? It’s time to change.” And you’re the one that they recognize next. All right, so that’s a long tail.
Now, that’s going to be expensive to get that client. It may take eight months worth of direct mail and digital advertising and such to get that client. However, now you’ve got five stores doing seasonal advertising changing in their signage every 30, 60 days or less. It’s a serious big money account for you. So it could have cost you $2,000 in regards to how much it costs to actually get that client to place their first order, but they’d maybe worth a hundred thousand dollars a year. And that’s a great long tail game where you’re saying, “I’m going to invest in direct mail to this specific niche, these retail stores in my area because that’s what I want to go after.” The chances of one of those retail stores just coincidentally at the day they got the mail is when their current vendor just failed and they’re just like, “I’m…” And they just hate call you. They’re so mad at their other vendor, they just call you. That happens, and that type of luck happens in direct mail or email advertising, but most of the time it’s a long tail.
Now, there is a short tail side of this too. If you wanted to try to experiment with something a little shorter, like a 90-day plan where you can look for some activity. That needs to be a tight offer that’s an easy decision to make immediately. So you have one product potentially you’re trying to sell. If we just go down the sign route, maybe you have a particular style of sign you’re going to sell. It’s a particular idea. You’re going to have a very low price for it. Where a business owner may get that thing and say, “You know what? I’m going to order one of these and try it out.” Or if it’s a t-shirt offer, it’s got to be maybe a very aggressive deal to get that first conversion, potentially not a moneymaker if you want to try to convert fast.
So convert fast is going to be, “You can get 20 shirts at this price, get 10 hats for free.” And then someone’s like, “Oh my gosh, that’s freaking… I’m going to lose the money on that.” Well, but you’re trying to get a quick conversion. You’re trying to immediately get into those shops in a short period of time. You’ve got to have something aggressive to go after.
So there’s some short and long-term. The short one also might be the example of the graduation science, the Coroplast signs that people put in their yard. That’s going to be something that somebody is going to make a decision to buy that probably within the month that they’re graduating. So if you’re hitting them with direct mail pieces in April, May, June, or whatever those three-month period is, that’s when you’re going to make those sales. And then that campaign’s over because chances are somebody is not going to hold on to that flyer, that brochure, or that email until two years from now when their other kid graduates. They’re going to already have forgotten who you are. So those are short-term things where you’re trying to sell a product now at a very particular opportunity, and you look for results then too.
Michael Palme:
And Marc, one thing you just were talking through as it related to the perhaps timing that direct mail piece. So just so everyone is aware, typically after the printing portion of the piece is done and it’s sent off to USPS, it’s about two to three weeks potentially before that piece actually gets into the mail stream. So just from a marketing perspective and trying to time your message correctly, that’s just something to, I guess, keep in mind.
Marc Vila:
Earlier and planning is important on this. You can schedule an email the morning of to go out, but if you’re dealing… And by the way, everybody in this industry probably gets this immediately because they all have a customer who contacts them and says, “Hey, can you make me 500 shirts?” “Of course, yeah. When do you want them by?” “I think you can get them by Thursday.” And they’re like, “Do you have the art? Do you have this? “I don’t know. You’re going to have to pay a rush fee. So everybody in this industry gets it.
The additional piece that everyone listening needs to get is that you also have to deal with the post office. So you have to deal with the government to get them to help you finish this last leg of it. So it’s important that if you’re thinking about doing advertising for the holiday season, if you’re thinking about doing Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, that type of stuff, I would start having those conversations now. At least open the book now and have the conversation now because you’re going to want to have all the pieces in your timing just right, because if you start to have the conversation in October about sending something out for Christmas or New Year’s, we’re not saying that can’t happen but you’ve got a tough road of everything’s got to line up. So it’s just important. Planning is really important for this more than anything else.
And if you’re used to doing digital advertising or cold calling or selling, which are all things I’m used to doing, we can execute that stuff immediately. So my team and how we handle any type of print type of stuff. We recently put together a magazine as you can see right there if you’re looking on camera, and that took months of building out the content, getting it approved, printing it. All that took months to do and that’s not something we normally were doing. So for us, it was a learning experience. And I think as we go into more print type of things, like additional copies of that Customize Now magazine, we’re still learning lessons. So no matter how dedicated our team is and experienced our team is, when you move into a new media, it’s going to take you some time to learn. And we’re still learning doing print. Just a small pitch on that.
If you are in the direct-to-film business or screen printing business, if you’re thinking about direct-to-film printing and you’re still in that decision-making phase, be sure to go to coldesi.com and you could just live chat or fill out a form and let them know that you’d like us to mail you a copy of that Customize Now DTF edition, and we’ve got a bunch of articles and a bunch of great information that’s in there. It’s completely free. So just a little pitch for that.
Okay, there’s one other thing I’d like to ask and then we can wrap it up today. So maybe Austin, if you would kick this one off, what are the steps to getting started? So let’s just use somebody wants to start sending direct mail out for the summer, something going on the summer camp type of stuff, and how do they get started today? What are just some of the steps to they’re going to be able to get their first piece in somebody’s hands?
Austin Gordon:
Yeah. I would say the first step is defining who your audience is. This is a step that someone like Taylor could help with in brainstorming, but truly no one’s going to know your ideal customer better than you yourself. You know who your customers typically are, and defining that is a first and most important step.
Secondly, after you know who that audience is, let’s work to collect the data to see how many people are out there. Once we figure that out, we’ll determine, all right, now what’s the budget that we can work with to how many pieces we can mail out and target to that specific audience.
After that, it’s designing the mail piece and coming up with a call to action. We work hard to deliver to the right people at the right time using the data, but it’s almost most important to have the right message, that call to action that’s going to say, “I actually should do this.” Marc, you touched on it earlier, is that call to action, if you want those instant results or those quick wins, it’s probably the most important piece.
And then after you have your audience and your design and your call to action figured out, then it’s as simple as getting an artwork to a printer, getting the mailing list to a printer. If you weren’t working with them before that for the designing piece and the data, getting that to a printer and getting it to a press. It’s a lot simpler than you think once you get the planning done on who’s going to be receiving the piece.
Marc Vila:
Okay. Yeah, that’s great. So essentially it’s data, the message design, and then print and mail is a simple steps on that. And then I’d like to add in just a little bit of just general marketing for this type of advertising. This really goes for everything else. If you just want to advertise that you’re a new business in town, let’s just say that you’ve had your sign shop, you’ve had your t-shirt shop for six months and you just want to let everybody in the area know. Maybe you do want to do a little bit of a blast to every small business within three zip codes. That’s great. And you can put out your website and your logo and your name and some samples and your phone number and all this. The problem with that type of messages as it sits right there is how do you know it worked?
Now, you could say, “Well, I got busy,” and that is one indicator, but also were you doing anything else that could have gotten you busy? Were you making cold calls and knocking on doors and going to… you join the local chamber of commerce or something like that? So how do you directly do that? And one of the things you could do is you can… Just a couple little tips and tricks. Whoever does your phone service, you could probably get a secondary phone number. And everything’s digital now, so you could put a different phone number on that postcard. And then when somebody dials that phone number, they’re dialing the specific phone number, which just goes to you anyway.
Your business size, it may even still ring cell phones of a couple of people if you’re doing forwarding like that, but you could probably get a report from that phone company on how many times that phone number rang. So you put that phone number on mailers. You put that on for a year, then at the end of the year, you could physically say how many times did people call the phone number on that mail? And that gives you a nice piece of data.
You can also do it with a specific website. You can literally just, you can… And this is if you don’t know how to do this, whoever handles your website can do this. You have a different web address. It’s a name of your business, may be shorter or slightly different. And then whoever handles your web property can set up that URL. And then every time somebody typed that in somewhere, that you can get a report on how many people typed that in.
Also, very specific offers are important too, a very specific coupon, a very specific deal that people will mention. And I recommend doing two or three or four of these very specific things because you want to add them all up together because not everybody’s going to call. Not everybody’s going to use the coupon. It’s a surprising piece of data on how many coupons go out that people end up doing business with the company and do not use the coupon that they got. It’s less than 50% of people. So if you send out a coupon and you got five people who used it, chances are you had 10 people who actually bought from you because of that piece of advertising, but only half of them use the coupon.
So it’s important to stack these things together, a specific website, a specific QR code, a specific video you tell them to watch, a specific phone number or a specific action. So being very specific, so it’s trackable is really important. So that’s an important part of that center sliver there, Gordon, on where you mentioned. Like when you’re picking your plan and your message, make sure you stick in their ways to be able to track that.
And then just going back a bit to what Michael talked about earlier with data, you are more likely to get business if you say, “Okay, I want to expand to my area.” So I’m actually going to break it down into medical field, restaurants, finance, mortgage, investment type of firms. Maybe you break it down into five categories. And when you buy the data or you rent the data, you’re going to say, “All right, I want all these five different types of businesses in these five different areas. Okay, it’s a thousand a piece.” Now, I want to do the mailing for the signs for dental or medical. It’s going to be all medical themed. You’re going to have doctors stethoscope, the sign is going to say, “Free vaccines here,” stuff like that.
And then the thing for the finance people, you’re going to show people in suits, shaking hands, computers with charts with arrows going up, whatever. So when that person gets that message, it directly relates to them versus the doctor getting a message of a chart with an arrow going up. That doesn’t mean anything to them. But to the finance person, they really see that as impactful. So naturally that’s all possible, right, if somebody wanted to do that?
Austin Gordon:
100%. And that’s the space that printing in general is moving into is that highly personalized piece, that customizable piece that allows you to do those targeted mailings.
One example I want to give, Marc, when you were talking about tracking and how different ways that people that we’ve worked with have tracked is I was walking around one of our facility floors with a general manager of one of our facilities, and there was this cool piece of direct mail and he’s like, “Hey.” But nobody can take their phones out and take a picture of that because they have these QR codes that are specific to the person that receives it. So when someone takes out their phone and scans the mail piece that they get, the company that was doing this campaign would get notified saying, “Hey, Marc scanned the QR code on this mail piece. They’re interested in XYZ. You should email them. You should hit them with a digital ad.” It’s really cool what customization and personalization can do in the direct mail space that can really give you a lot of answers and really track how well campaign is performing and how are people interacting with the piece.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, that’s actually, that’s awesome. It’s really just so cool how tight you can go into everything. But yeah, the bare minimum is you work with some folks who know what they’re doing. You figure out a niche. You go through the processes. You work early in advance. And you plan on having a reasonable size budget of this over time. Don’t just say, “I just want to spend 500 bucks and send something out once.” That’s not going to get you anywhere.
And honestly, if you talk to a company like Taylor, they may even just say, “You should probably just do that on your own.” It’s not worth it for all the trouble. But if you’re going to go into, “I want to try out a 90-day campaign or I want an annual budget. I really want to dive into this,” then you want to work with people who will help to guide you in the right direction, give you some good advice, have a little bit of strategy phone call, and ultimately send out a piece that you’re going to be proud to have sent out that hopefully works. That’s the ultimate goal, is that it works.
Well, we covered a good amount of stuff today. I think it’s probably time to wrap up this episode. But do either of you have anything else you wanted to add or anything that we missed in regards to direct mail and growing your business?
Michael Palme:
The last thing that I was going to say, Marc, going back to the topic we were just on, is I think when starting off a direct mail piece, it’s really about how are you going to measure your campaign that you’re doing and then ultimately defining what success looks like for you as an organization. And those are absolutely conversations you should be having with your partner who you’re going to be doing the direct mail with. So is it going to be an acquisition type campaign? Are you going to be cross-selling a certain product or service? Those are all things that should happen at the beginning so that we all know as a group and who you’re partnering with, what we’re trying to accomplish. So yeah, but that was the last thing, I guess, that I had as it relates to direct mail. And I think those are two very important things to think about when you’re discussing doing a direct mail campaign.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Excellent. Well, I greatly appreciate you guys coming on here and educating some people for free on a topic like this that’s not necessarily, it’s not as flashy as because somebody… Everyone out there is, again, we talked about should I be doing influencer marketing? How do I reach influencers and get into that? And the problem with some of the new and hot things is they get to be really crowded spaces, and there’s a ton of question marks on what works and how it works, and everybody has a magic formula that they say works and nobody really knows that they do. But if you go to these methods that have been around for, I have no idea when direct mail started, this Pony Express, I don’t even know. I don’t even know, right?
But it’s been around so long that it’s a challenge for somebody to come and feed you a bunch of lies that you can’t verify like it is with brand new stuff like influencer marketing. You could be fed a bunch of information with nothing to back it up or a bunch of information that’s not tried and true. But when it comes to pieces like print and direct mail, this is stuff that the data has been there for decades. Not only has direct mail been happening for hundreds of years or however long, but good data has been around for, I don’t know, 50 years probably of when people really started marketing and collecting data. So there’s really good data on this, meaning what works, what doesn’t work, how to do it, bringing the cost down. There’s a lot of great, solid good information that you can get. So it’s a good tried and true piece of marketing that can help grow your business.
So if it sounds right for you, of course you can feel free to reach out to the folks over at Taylor. Gracious that they came on here. So if you wanted to chat with any of them, we’ll make sure that you’re able to reach them in the podcast notes. So if you go to customapparelstartups.com or just ColDesi and just reach out to anybody on the team, you can also send an email to marketing at coldesi.com. That’s going to go to our marketing team. And people do this all the time, but literally just write an email and say, “Hey, Marc, I listened to the episode about direct mail. Can you help get me an introduction?” And I’ll just pass it along. It’s really no big deal at all. The fact that we got some of this education to help you guys out is really important to me, and I know it is to the folks over at Taylor. So thanks for joining us, and thanks everybody listening, and have a good business.
Austin Gordon:
Thanks, Marc.
Marc Vila:
Thank you.
Michael Palme:
Thanks, Marc.