In this episode of "The Conversion Show," Erik Christiansen, CEO of Justuno, interviews Drew Sanocki, Founder of PostPilot. Drew has an extensive background in retail and shares his insights on how direct mail can be a game-changer for e-commerce businesses and explains the features of PostPilot, including segmentation, automation, remarketing, retargeting, and acquisition.

Erik and Drew discuss:

• The integration capabilities of Post Pilot with platforms like Shopify and Klaviyo.
• The concept of the discount ladder and the 30, 60, 90 plan.
• Optimizing retention, basket size, and conversion rates before focusing on customer acquisition. 
• The key to effective postcard designs is treating direct mail like a Facebook ad.
•  The shift in mindset regarding direct-to-consumer brands.

Watch the episode on The Conversion Show YouTube channel

Host: Erik Christiansen https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: Drew Sanocki https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanocki/

Justuno https://www.justuno.com/

PostPilot https://postpilot.com/

Transcript:

Intro 00:00:05

Welcome to the Conversion Show, a podcast that's all about. You guessed it, conversions, everything that gets you to your goal, whether that's purchase, lead capture app, install content downloads, chat engagement, or demo requests. We're talking conversions hosted by Erik Christiansen, CEO and co-founder of the leading conversion optimization platform, Justuno. On the conversion show, Erik sits down with industry-leading marketers, e-commerce growth experts, founders, and entrepreneurs to chat all things conversion marketing. Be sure to follow the conversion show podcast to be notified when a new episode goes live. Like what you hear? Leave us some love with a review. And now here's your host, Eric Christiansen.

Erik 00:00:51

Welcome to the conversion show today. I'm really proud to have my guest, Drew Sanocki, who we go back ten-plus years and I encourage anyone listening if you're in front of a computer and type Drew Sanocki into LinkedIn and you're going to find a background that is is very well, what's the word? Diverse. 

Drew 00:01:17

Long and boring.

Erik 00:01:18

It's well-versed. KarmelLoop retailer he's been a retailer himself he is now CEO of Post Pilot a direct-to-consumer postcards highly segmented which is what we're going to get into today. Very exciting. So let's welcome to the show Drew.

Drew 00:01:37  

Thanks, Eric. It's good to see you again. As you said, we've known each other for ten-plus years. I remember when we took over Karmaloop you know, we got it out of bankruptcy. And one of the first things we did was put Justuno up. And that was probably 2014, 2015, just to reengineer the pop up. And they were amazed at how we went from, I don't know, we probably ten next to the opt-ins in a week back then.

Erik 00:02:02

Drew has always been a big supporter it’s very exciting. You turned that thing back around to 100 million, didn't you?

Drew 00:02:11

It was you know we got it cash flowing again and I think at its peak it was up around 100 million. But you know, for us, the big the big win was just to right the ship and then sell it to a strategic which we did.

Erik 00:02:28

So huge background and retail background and turning companies around Drew for years I was so always so impressed with he has this 30 60 90 day. What do you call it? Can you share with the crowd here 30, 60, 90 because this is always been ...

Drew 00:02:51  

That came from private equity. I think it was like whenever you buy a company or acquire a company, you, the investors, all the board wants the 30, 60, 90 plan. And it's like, you might have a five-year plan for how you're going to grow this thing, but you have to show the team that gave you the capital how you're going to make significant changes in the first 30, 60, 90 days.

Drew 00:03:19  

So everything sort of came from that. I mean it Carmelo up at auto anything we had these sort of well thought out strategic plans. But what the board really wanted and what what I have since learned they pitch their investors on or they have to update their investors on is like what what what are you going to do in the first 30 days?

Drew 00:03:38  

You know, how do you hit the ground running? How do you get this thing cash flowing quickly?

Erik 00:03:43  

It's the low-hanging fruit.

Drew 00:03:44  

Yeah, it's always it forces you to focus on the low-hanging fruit.

Erik 00:03:48

And in today's market, there is still so much low-hanging fruit. And, you know, Drew had that years ago. It was, if I recall, it was the email. So, you know, sending a 30, 60, 90 day email to those segments and you're early on and, you know, segmenting your audience, your own channels with email. And I think what we're going to talk about today is where are we in that today?

Erik 00:04:14  

And when we talk about customer lifetime value and we talk about other low-hanging fruit, Drew has uncovered a great one with Post pilot. And can you share the new way to do postcards and kind of your approach?

Drew 00:04:33  

Yeah it's just Post Pilot started with so we do direct mail for e-commerce businesses our goal is to help more businesses unlock this channel to become more resilient businesses, right to diversify their marketing, to do everything from retention to acquisition through direct mail. I got the idea because I've always used it. So I've been in e-commerce for 20 years and as you mentioned, in turnarounds, we'd acquire a property or we'd take over a property and very quickly have to look for what's the low-hanging fruit.

Drew 00:05:10  

A lot of that was on retention. The brands were doing retention well enough. They weren't re-engaging past buyers. And when you looked at the data, most of those past buyers, there's a very rich audience. For any marketer, we're not subscribed to email. So they had either never subscribed or who had had unsubscribed. So there's really only one way to get a hold of them is direct mail.

Drew 00:05:34  

It's the only way you can get all your customers because the customers don't have to opt in. It was always very hard. The karma loop at auto anything, you know, you'd have to find a printer, you'd have to upload your designs. Attribution was a mess. Know there's a long lead time from when you decide to run the campaign to when you see the results.

Drew 00:05:53  

And I said like, why can't it be as easy, as easy as email? You know, I want it to be like Klaviyo or, or send Lane or Romney send where you just log in and send. So, I built Post Pilot to do that. I actually acquired it from the developer probably in 2018 and we spent about a year on the product turning it into something like Klaviyo for postcards.

Drew 00:06:17  

On the retention side, since then, the platforms evolved, so we've had to then remarketing retargeting and in our acquisition, you can do things like catalogs, you can do things like shared mailers to get the costs down. But it's all within the platform. And I think we timed it really well because in 2020, 2021, Apple comes out with iOS 14.

Drew 00:06:42  

This makes Facebook really hard for a lot of brands. So I think the last ten years made us lazy marketers where you'd throw money at that matter and it would work and all of a sudden it didn't in 2021. So brands started realizing that they had to be marketers again, that they needed to diversify, their revenue channels.

Drew 00:07:03  

And we were there in the Shopify App Store as the leading direct mail app. So it's just been a bit of a rocket ship since then.

Erik 00:07:13  

It's fun. Retention has been a major word with the customer acquisition costs, Facebook, everything. And so we actually, you know, we have been hearing about mailers becoming more popular again. What's new with postcards or catalogs? You know, as you go to post pilot, you're doing segmentation, personalized mailers, what's present, what's new, what's hot?

Drew 00:07:50  

What's new, I think, is the segmentation really it is it and automation. Maybe ten, 20 years ago, direct mail was you know, you you upload a C ISV to a printer and you send the same offer to everybody on that. CSP Well, now you can much, much like email. You can segment your customers based on what they purchased before and recency, frequency, and monetary spend, which is kind of how the catalog indu