Every eCommerce business owner has seen this happen:
Customers buy and love your products. Then they disappear. You know they’d make great repeat customers. And your mind goes to the same method we’ve all reached for customer reactivation: email marketing.
But email marketing just doesn’t work like it used to.
Most eCommerce business owners in this position give up on reactivation and shift to acquiring new customers, even though they know that’s more expensive than customer reactivation. They just don’t know what else to do.
But they’re overlooking a surprisingly effective channel, one we don’t think of much in a world dominated by the internet, search engines, and AI: direct mail.
That’s right. Direct mail, with stamps, envelopes, and all. It cuts straight through the noise in email marketing and yields real results for eCommerce businesses (and many other types of businesses with customer lists, really).
And I’m not just guessing that this would work. We’ve seen this work for a real business that we own, and I’m going to tell you all about that campaign and how to run your own below. Keep reading.
The Problem: Lapsed Customers Are Harder to Reach Than Ever
There was a golden era of email marketing when most emails you sent reached the inboxes you sent them to. And most emails you sent were opened. And most were responded to or acted upon.
But that golden era has come and gone.
Today, people’s email inboxes are overflowing. That’s thanks in part to every business realizing the power of email marketing several years ago and going all-in. Now, many recipients ignore marketing emails altogether. That drives open rates through the floor.
Then, you have some more technical issues that have popped up:
- Gmail has introduced new filters that make it harder to reach its users (around 75 percent of the U.S. email user market).
- Gmail has added the “Promotions” tab, which makes marketing emails much less visible to users.
- Email deliverability rules and requirements have become more strict for both platforms and email servers.
Put all those factors together, and you can see why it’s so difficult to re-engage lapsed eCommerce customers via email. It’s not that those customers don’t like your brand anymore; it’s that they’re not hearing from you, even if you’re sending them emails.
Why Direct Mail Is Making a Comeback
You might’ve read the title of this article and chuckled a little. I don’t blame you. Physical mail has been declining steeply since the advent of email decades ago.
But take a step back with me and think critically about why 4 out of 5 U.S. marketers said they planned to increase their investment in direct mail in the next year:
- Less competition. Advertisers and marketers have reduced spending on direct mail to almost zero while focusing on online channels, which have become saturated. Competition in direct mail is at an all-time low.
- Higher attention. Physical mail is tangible. You don’t just click a little trash can icon to get rid of it (or, worse, filter it so you never see it). You hold it in your hand. You have to do something with it. In other words, you engage with it.
- Novel again. Making the old new again is a favorite tactic of marketers and advertisers alike. And for good reason. People like that. Think about records and certain clothing styles. There’s no reason direct mail couldn’t be among those retro-cool products.
Of course, the idea that direct mail is coming back is separate from the idea that it’s actually effective with lapsed eCommerce customers. So let’s drill down a little more.
Why Direct Mail Works Especially Well for Lapsed eCommerce Customers
This is largely a question of psychology. Here’s what we know about lapsed customers:
- They’re warm leads.
- They’ve already purchased.
- They trust the brand.
With lapsed customers, you’ve already overcome all the obstacles that stand between new customers and your eCommerce business. All they need is a reminder or incentive to engage with your brand again.
And direct mail is a way to cut through all the digital noise and virtually guarantee that you’ll reach them.
Case Study: DermWarehouse’s Lapsed Customer Campaign
Let’s look at all of this in action. Here’s a case study that shows how the in-house eCommerce business we own, DermWarehouse, successfully re-engaged lapsed customers with direct mail.
We used email marketing platform Klaviyo to create a list of past customers who had lapsed. Specifically, we used Klaviyo to identify customers who had spent $100 or more but hadn’t made a purchase in the past year.
(Most email marketing platforms can do this, not just Klaviyo.)
Then, we designed a targeted direct mail postcard to send to these customers. Here’s what it looked like on the back:
And on the front:
Two things to make note of here:
- We used a promo code that was unique to this mailer so we could track engagement with this campaign.
- We sent this out shortly before Black Friday, hoping customers would shop, re-enter the email marketing funnel, and be easier to engage for holiday sales.
When all was said and done, DermWarehouse saw a 3x ROI on our spend for this campaign. And that’s just for purchases made directly as a result, not later purchases those re-engaged customers likely made.
As far as marketing campaigns go, that’s pretty darn effective.
How to Run Your Own Lapsed Customer Direct Mail Campaign
All right, let’s get tactical. Here’s how you can run your own direct mail campaign to reach lapsed customers.
Step 1: Find Your Lapsed Customers
To find the customers you should send your direct mailer to, head to your email marketing platform. This might be Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Shopify, or similar. Most platforms will have everything you need to find the right customer segment.
You’re going to want to know two things about the customers you have in this platform:
- Lifetime spend
- Last purchase date
For DermWarehouse, we set a minimum lifetime spend of $100 and a last purchase date of at least a year ago to find the perfect customer segment. That’s a great starting point for your brand, too.
Step 2: Create a Compelling Offer
Your direct mailer won’t succeed if it just asks lapsed customers to come back nicely. You have to make an offer, and it has to be compelling.
What you offer, exactly, will depend on your business, products, and margins. But try to make it as enticing as possible.
For DermWarehouse, we went with 30% off, and that was highly successful. Yours might look like that, or it could be store credit, exclusive freebies, or something else entirely. It just has to be compelling.
Step 3: Include a Trackable Promo Code
In order to cash in on your offer, the recipients of your mailer should enter the unique promo code you include on the mailer. This makes it easy for you to understand how many people responded to the mailer and track the overall performance of this campaign.
Step 4: Time It Right
We sent our mailer leading up to Black Friday because that would lead to more recipients shopping and getting back into the email funnel to be re-engaged on the actual Black Friday.
That’s strategic, and while that precise timing may not work for you, it’s an example of how you should think about timing. Think in terms of holiday sales, seasonal launches, and periods when your specific products tend to be in high demand.
Step 5: Think Into the Future
To get true long-term value out of your direct mail campaign, look further ahead. How can you not only re-engage these lapsed customers, but bring them back into the fold so you can more easily engage them again and again?
For instance, we timed our DermWarehouse mailer so that we could get more customers back and more easily send them emails (successfully) for Black Friday, a high-value shopping day.
Getting sales directly from your mailer is fantastic, absolutely, but you should also be aiming to rebuild long-term value.
Wrapping Up
Direct mail is highly underused right now. That’s especially true for eCommerce businesses with lapsed customers, but really, it’s true across industries and businesses.
Why? Because direct mail slices through the digital noise we’re all so overwhelmed with. And that enables it to produce measurable, repeatable ROI that many digital channels simply can’t guarantee like they used to.
