From Postcards to Pop Stars: Direct Mail Meets Taylor Swift

Speakers: Katie Flynn, Heather Riexinger

in. Heather Rexinger, probably your fifth time maybe. You’re a recurring co-host at this point. This is now my profession. VP of strategy and planning by day, podcast host also by day. Also by day.

Well, today we’re gonna do kind of like a lightning episode. Like, not super long, just like keeping it fun, keeping it light.

Love it.

We’re gonna talk about our two favorite things,

direct mail and the prowess of Taylor Swift.

Perfect, they go together. They really do, hand in hand in terms of marketing.

Let’s start, I guess, with yours. To get the boring thing out of the way. Okay, I know you love direct mail. I think direct mail is really hard because it is. And I think people don’t realize just how much work and like science goes into a proper direct mail program. So I know there was a recent article that got you kind of excited because it was something about how direct mail is working again. So why don’t you just talk about that for a second?

Yeah, so there’s a lot of reports coming out recently talking about how in this digital world, direct mail is back. It’s gonna cut through. Yes, and people have said direct mail is dead forever. I don’t believe that. But everyone is so used to being interrupted in their daily feeds. And so to have kind of more of that human interaction, there’s the ability to personalize better. So a lot of what is out there, especially in the healthcare space is saying doctors,

offices, marketers, send the direct mail. People are getting too many emails. They’re being interrupted when they just wanna

scroll through their feed mindlessly. It’s hitting people at the right time. And a lot of times when people are opening their mail, they’re actually looking at it and looking for interesting things and looking for something different. So whether that’s a postcard or a number 10 envelope,

there’s a lot of different ways to stand out in direct mail and have a more human connection.

And a lot of what makes it so hard is the personalization because you can talk to people, you can segment very granularly in direct mail with lists, but you need to have the correct list and you need to have the correct information because it’s very easy to over personalize in the wrong way if you don’t know the audience. Creepster. Creepster or being completely wrong. I’ve been married for 13 years. I still get mail to my maiden name.

Things like that where it’s just by the new list.

Yeah. So there’s a lot of mail like that where when it comes to my maiden name, I know it’s not gonna be relevant. It’s not a brand or a company that I’ve interacted with in 13 years. It’s clearly someone who’s just bought a list.

I think that’s a fair point because that actually happens to me in email a lot. We have been Flynn as an agency for the last whatever, six and a half ish years. And whenever I get, “Hey, Katie, my boss told me I really needed to look into Martino Flynn. You guys seem like you could really use this service.” I’m like, “Well, we haven’t been that for a very long time.” So like automatically I’m kind of writing that off. So that totally makes sense. Now, when we’re thinking about direct mail as marketers,

obviously there are a few different things that you can think about. There’s the list, there’s the frequency, there’s the creative, there’s tiny little elements, like what’s on the envelope. Yes, what’s the offer? Do you,

I mean, I guess from a best practice perspective, like what’s, if somebody’s putting a direct mail program together tomorrow, what’s priority number one, the list?

Yeah, I would say the list, the audience,

and then having a compelling offer is very important too. What are you saying to them? How are you gonna get them to respond in a timely way? Because we all know direct mail, you open it, but then it goes to the side where it gets thrown away. Or the mail slot in the kitchen next to the coffee maker. Exactly, you want someone to respond immediately,

or direct mail is a very easy tactic to just be thrown to the side and never responded to.

do you have any sense of companies who do it well or what types of things work well? Like in a B2B world, we did a campaign, last campaign is like a strong word for that, but we did a small direct mail campaign with a dimensional mailer. We did video brochures, which were awesome. And the company that we worked through, it was called Mark, they actually had attribution built right in, which was very amazing. Like I would check the dashboard and I could see how many times it was opened, how long it was played for, even down to like the like geotags of where these things were. So it was great information to be able to use. Obviously with a traditional direct mail piece, like a postcard or something, you don’t get that same information back.

So usually there is something that’s like, okay, we need you to go fill out this form or scan this QR code or whatever, that it’s gonna give you a sense of how things are performing. But I feel like one thing with direct mail is when we talk to clients, we have to kind of level set that like,

success for direct mail comes in very small numbers. It’s not like we’re expecting a 40% response rate. It’s like teeny tiny.

It’s like a fraction of a percent or a couple percent if you’re doing it well.

And I think it’s hard because we are now in a space from a marketing perspective where there’s so much desire for direct attribution all the time.

I was having a conversation with an organization I’m on the board of the other day. They were asking if we can see how much has come through like social posts by way of applications. And we’re just doing organic and not using a UTM system or anything like that. It’s a small middle school here.

But it is interesting. We think there are all these ways that we can read things, but

can’t always. And like sometimes you just have to know it’s a piece of a bigger program.

Yes.

is a really important piece of direct mail is that direct mail alone does not perform as well as it does as part of an omnichannel program. And so you’re hitting people with different messages in different spaces.

And some of it is a frequency game. So there’s still a lot of brands. Wayfair is one that I constantly get postcards with coupons.

And most of the time I throw them out, but there’s other times when it comes and I say, oh, I did need a thing. And it gets me to go online and order whatever I’d been looking at. So that a lot of the chef kits are constantly sending.

They’re like big on the direct mail.

But it works well for them because you’re just trying to hit someone at night. When it comes, you’re getting home from work. Just burn their chicken. Don’t wanna cook. And there it is. Okay, I’m just gonna do these. This seems so much easier.

But there’s a lot of direct mail, like you mentioned that we do direct mail for a lot of financial services companies. The response rate of those is pretty low because you’re asking people to buy life insurance or a financial product.

But at the same time, you have a brand campaign running. You’re hitting them with social media and reminding them of who you are. So it’s really surrounding them with the brand.

Yeah, it’s that well-rounded approach. Totally.

Any other highlights about direct mail you’d like to share with our fans?

No, no, I think what you talked about a little bit there is in terms of response rate is the B2B. If you have a good ABM campaign and you know who your audience is there,

we’ve run a lot of those with great success and very high response rates because you know who that audience is and you can personalize the video, you can personalize the message. You can write a handwritten note which still goes a really long way. Yeah, it really does. There’s a lot of opportunity. You don’t need to be sending thousands of pieces out. You can do a direct mail campaign where you send out 30 different letters that are handwritten to prospects that you wanna talk to and it can be very successful.

Totally. Also, just an aside before we move on, that’s a fun game my husband and I like to play is, is it printed to look like handwriting or did somebody hand write it? Yeah, I know.

Some of them are getting good. They are getting good, but I still like the old fashioned, write it out.

We did it one time here where my hand cramped for a week as I wrote like 50 unique letters, but it goes a long way and people can tell. I agree.

All right, changing it up. Yeah, just total opposite. Taylor Allison Swift, let’s talk about it. Yes. The reason I wanna talk about this is really from a marketing perspective. So, you know, I’ll get there, but just to set it up, Taylor Swift was on the New Heights podcast last week.

I did tune in live. I watched all two hours.

It was a little long, I will say. And I’m a big fan, but I still was like, okay, wrap it up.

It was also 8.30, which is basically my bedtime. But it was a very, very highly watched moment. The premiere, when I was on, I could see that there were 1.2 million people watching,

which is kind of insane for this YouTube premiere. I took some photos of the ad age or ad week article that put out some stats yesterday.

As of yesterday, 19 million people have viewed that episode, which is just wild.

And so the reason I wanted to talk about it today is because, well, one, it was very entertaining. Two, I’m super excited about the album. I can’t wait for it to come out. Three, the whole Easter egg thing is a masterclass in marketing. Taylor has made a lot of money. She’s a masterclass in marketing. Taylor has made it so everybody thinks everything she says is an Easter egg, so they go back and watch all her old stuff, listen to the old stuff. It’s like just finding a way to constantly regenerate old content.

But then also all the brands have been getting in on it. I think the stat as of yesterday were that there were 2,600 unique posts basically tying into the life of the show girl,

colors.

And so there’s a piece of it. There’s this like coppery orange glitter color and this like mint green color. And brands have been changing their profile pictures or putting their product on those backgrounds or the brands that actually have colors akin to that have really leaned in. I think it was Reese’s that put out

24 hours.

We’ve always embraced orange or something like that.

And added the sort of like glitter said it was like a partnership from the vault. Again, another nod to Taylor Swift in her version of her albums.

And I think it’s one really awesome to see people just getting in on the like pop culture moment because like her or not, Taylor Swift is going to generate attention. And one thing that I wanted to talk about, well, I guess I’ll get there in a second. But with the Reese’s one, I think it’s awesome also that they were able to get that out there in like 24 hours. I think I read that they had had like by the time the podcast was wrapping up, the marketing team had their brief and was like ready to go so that they could get it out the next day. And that post has something like 500,000 views too because people are interested. People do think it’s fun when brands jump in on this stuff. You know, even if only for a moment. Now my big question is, do you think she’s going to perform at the Superbowl halftime show? I do. I do too. I do too. I do. She owns all her masters now.

There’s too many districts. Yeah, and I don’t know, I meant to look this up this morning because they said 47 a bunch of times, like just offhand, she’d be like, oh yeah, I performed in like 47,000 countries. And like Jason said something else. Is it, what Superbowl are we on? We’re in the fifties, right? I think it’s 60. Are we in the sixties? I don’t know. I was trying to figure out like, what does that mean? This is the most ridiculous, but we’re like, we, we, we. You know what I mean? Yeah. It means something. Yeah. But I do think she’ll perform at the Superbowl as well. I think in particular, because she owns all of her music now, it gives that opportunity. And she kept talking about how much she likes football.

And I know that there’s a lot of backlash,

you know, for people who were saying that it was annoying to have to see Taylor Swift. I don’t care. I feel like people should just appreciate the fact that it’s unlocking this whole other audience. For a lot of women who didn’t otherwise care, who maybe tuned in at first to see Taylor Swift, and then were like, oh wait, no, this is actually interesting.

You know, they’re unlocking a whole new audience.

I am curious about what it will mean for Superbowl airtime and commercials. Like, will we see an uptick in brands? Cause I think that Superbowl commercials, you know, obviously they’re very expensive. They always end up getting filled, I think they’ve been a little lacking these last few years, a little less sparkle going on.

Yeah, yeah, I would agree with that. That’s an interesting take. I hadn’t thought about that, but most of those spots are already, the briefs have come out, so it’ll be interesting. That’s true too. That, you know, Superbowl spots are already well underway,

making of them, you know, at this point in the year. So it’ll be interesting to see if those shifts. But I think most brands would be wrong to go the Taylor Swift route or over index on that. I think to your view, what you’re saying is, we’ll more buy airtime because there may be more eyes on the Superbowl than there have been.

Well, I think that’s the thing is people will think, yeah,

if she ends up performing at the halftime show, I bet you it’ll be the most watched halftime show in a very long time. Oh, I’m sure.

And, you know, there’s been really interesting shows these past few years, but I think it puts the pressure on for brands because they may have that many more eyeballs. I hope she does.

I do too, and it’ll be like an hour long or something, and you know, everyone will get there. They realize you just canceled the Superbowl and just like, you know, live eras.

Yeah, yeah, no, I think it’ll be really fun. But yeah, it’s always really interesting to tune in to the way that she thinks about her work and the way that she plants seeds to get people excited.

But I certainly don’t blame brands for trying to get in on the cachet around that because–

Yeah, I think what’s really interesting about the brands is so many people get, like you said, people get fired up about her being shown during a Chiefs game. People also get fired up at the brands jumping on it where you just forget social media’s for fun. So a lot of these brands, if you wanna throw up a post for Taylor Swift, great, who cares? You know, there’s nothing wrong with having a fun post here or there. Even some of them, you know, we’ve always preached relevancy and jumping on a trend if it’s relevant to your brand. But I think with Taylor Swift, it’s so big, it doesn’t need to be relevant. You can just put the colors in a post. And I was listening to one podcast yesterday who was talking about how it has been showing the human behind the posts because a lot of these are showing, oh, there’s a Swifty that’s working on– Somebody’s just excited. Someone’s excited, there’s a Swifty working on their social media or just a human behind it that thinks this is fun. And it adds a little human touch to brands. And it’s also,

you know, forever, there’s so much where it’s been proactive. You need proactive marketing, you can’t be reactive. But it’s shifting a lot with different cultural trends. And I think you sent me an article from Panera. Oh, yeah. And Panera jumped on their whole marketing strategy this year is reactive. And they were out with– The loaf story meal. The loaf story meal, they jumped. And that one was really fun because as you know, someone who watched two hours, she talked a lot about bread. Sourdough. And sourdough era, and they sold out of, they made sweatshirts that said I’m in my sourdough era and sold out in hours.

Okay, but also what I’ll say is, you and I are chronic TikTokers. I’m getting a lot, a lot of, because I already am sort of on Taylor Swift TikTok, so now I’m getting a ton of sourdough content.

It is fascinating to me how she can make sort of an offhand comment about a new hobby that she has. And it can like really bolster a whole industry. Yeah. You know? I’d be really interested to see for the people who like sell their starters and whatnot on TikTok, I bet you they had like banger weeks last week. Oh, I’m sure.

She was talking about how she likes to sew. I’m sure there’ll be new brands coming out introducing Taylor Swift sewing kits and all kinds of insanity.

I’m here for it. I love a granny hobby. I really do.

And I think that’s part of what makes her so charming is that she is kind of odd. Yeah, quirky. And all of us little quirky weirdos embrace that.

Yeah, makes you feel a little seen. Although, you know, a little different.

Than Taylor Swift. No, we’re not.

I feel like we’ll probably have about 19 million, maybe 20 million views of this podcast.

Probably you are the lead, well, apart from Grayson, my son, my pride and joy. I can’t beat babies, but. No, no. But you are a top viewed episode. I think two of them are at the very top, in the top three. Yeah, so, you know, just keep this up. Yeah, I also think it’s because we talk about fun and relevant things that people wanna tune into, but like.

Yeah, I think people just say, it’s the nonsense.

It’s the chaos in my brain.

All right, girly. Well, that’s all I got