How to Use PostPilot for Direct Mail Campaigns If You're a Smaller Brand (Plus a Really Cool Report)
PostPilot is a direct mail marketing platform for DTC ecommerce brands. It allows you to send personalized postcard campaigns to prospects and customers, and thus can be used for acquisition or retention purposes.
It integrates with your Shopify and Klaviyo accounts, which gives you the ability to create targeted, personalized postcard campaigns based on your customer data, which they print and send on your behalf.
It also allows for some powerful reporting features that are hard to find anywhere else.
PostPilot’s founder Drew Sanocki likes to think of it as Klaviyo for direct mail, and I think that’s a great way to think about it.
Physical postcards are an additional marketing channel to paid ads and email, and there’s a great argument to be made for providing your prospects and customers with a tangible marketing experience, which can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates compared to digital ads.
The problem for most smaller brands, however, is that it is simply unaffordable. As of this writing, their cheapest plan is $500 per month, and on top of that you must pay $0.50 per postcard sent.
PostPilot’s Unadvertised Self-Serve, Pay-As-You-Go Plan
PostPilot advertises a free tier on their pricing page, but out of the box it doesn’t allow you to send postcards.
However, once you’ve created a free account, you can reach out to their customer support team and request that they set you up on their self-serve, pay-as-you-go plan. This is something they have to switch on for you on the backend, and all it requires is that you add a credit card to your account.
Once that is switched on, you can send postcards for $1 per send with no monthly fee. Certainly not as cheap as sending an email, but if you're targeted with your sends, you can see a real ROI.
Segments to Try Playing Around With
Two of my favorite segments to pull from Klaviyo and send postcards to are:
Unengaged With Email
Unsubscribed From Email
You have their mailing address from when they ordered, so why not send them a postcard to remind them you exist?
Here is a postcard I designed for a brand and sent to those segments in November 2024:
Here are the results according to PostPilot:
As with all self-reported attribution from any marketing platform, you should take this with a grain of salt. But when I compare coupon redemptions, and create a segment in Klaviyo of people who received the postcard and proceeded to order within 60 days of receiving it, it’s not crazy-far off.
Also worth a shot is sending postcards to people who received your product as a gift. In most of those cases you don’t have their email address, but you do have their mailing address.
You can’t pull that segment from Klaviyo, but with a little help from Chat GPT you can export a couple reports from Shopify and use a spreadsheet to isolate orders that have a different shipping address than billing address, or that include a gift message.
Postpilot’s “Time Between Purchases” Report
A very cool bonus of having a PostPilot account synched up with your Shopify account is that it unlocks a powerful report that is hard to find anywhere else.
PostPilot calls it the “Time Between Purchases” or "Intra-Purchase Latency" Report, and it looks like this:
(dummy data via PostPilot)
Shopify does not provide this report, but since PostPilot is synched to Shopify it can make this report, and they very generously provide it free of charge. You don’t need to send a single postcard to access this report.
What this report tells you is ridiculously helpful.
Assume the store in the above example is yours. What you can conclude is that, based on all of your order data, 56% of repeat purchasers (meaning people who place at least a second order) place their second order between days 0-29.
This means that before offering any discounts to these folk, you should wait a good 30-35 days to see if they place a second order. Chances are they will, at full price. But if they don’t, starting around day 34, you should begin offering escalating discounts (aka a “discount ladder).
Sanocki’s cohost Michael Epstein, on their podcast Nerd Marketing, puts it like this: "If I had to generalize, I would say just a general 30, 60, 90 day discount ladder. 10%, 20%, 30%. Works really well for most retailers."
You can automate this through Klaviyo Flows when a customer is subscribed to your emails, or postcards when they’re not. Sanocki calls them “tripwire flows.” According to Epstein’s rule of thumb, you can set up flows to trigger whenever a customer with just one order under their belt goes 30, 60, or 90 days without ordering, and offer them 10%, 20%, 30% off, respectively.
Amazing idea, right?! Now you’re not offering discounts needlessly, and you have an automated strategy in place to address the problem of one-and-done buyers.