It can… if you know how to do it right.
Eric Smith is the SVP of Growth at Incremental Media. He helps direct to consumer, lead generation, and senior marketers acquire new customers cost-effectively using niche, scalable channels like shared mail, package inserts, and podcasts. You can connect with Eric via email at esmith@incrementalmedia.com and on LinkedIn here.
I talk to dozens of brands a month and one trend remains abundantly clear: The marketing playbook is evolving. The days of cheap CPMs and efficient conversions on Facebook, for a variety of reasons, are over. Search is more expensive than ever. Brands are looking for new channels to diversify their media mix, and shared mail has had a resurgence in our business… but it’s not for everyone.
In this article I’m going to break down the state of shared mail, what brands it makes sense for, how to stand out in the envelope, and what your performance expectations should be. If you are the right brand and test shared mail the right way it can be a very powerful channel, but one wrong move can crumble a test. Let’s get into it.
Shared mail is sharing the cost of sending mail to a home through vehicles like Valpak, Money Mailer, triggered mailings like new mover or new mom programs, and dozens of other options. Shared mail is usually mailed to upper-middle class suburban homes. Depending on the program you can narrow down shared mail to geographic areas as small as 10,000 people to as large as a DMA (i.e. Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Nashville, etc.). You can typically get a good amount of information on that area, from their average age, HHI, home ownership percentages, and more.
Your brand will be sharing space with as few as 6–8 brands to as many as 40 brands depending on the program. It’s important for your brand to be comfortable with sharing space with other brands, but if you are you can save a lot of money. Direct mail can cost as much as $0.50 — $0.70+ to get a piece of mail into someones hands. Many shared mail programs cost less than $0.01 to mail in someones hands. That means direct mail needs to be 50x — 70x more responsive to make it worth running over shared mail. For the primary reason of cost, we usually see 4x better CPAs with shared than direct mail so, for the right brand, it can be extremely effective.
I don’t have all the answers to that question, but I can tell you what we’ve seen work best based on working with dozens of brands for 15+ years in shared mail.
The first group is your brand should be a considered purchase. That means your product or service is a $100+ average order value, oftentimes with a subscription element that can make your lifetime value much higher than $100.
The second group is home services. From blinds to flooring to windows and gutter cleaning, consumers have come to expect deals for their home in shared mail.
The final group is financial services companies, especially insurance, debt resolution and companies that help you save money on everyday purchases like gas and food shopping. Just think about the names of companies like Valpak (i.e. Value Pack) and Money Mailer. If you get that in your mailbox, you know it’s something that’s designed to get you discounts, so the shopper who goes through shared mail is usually looking for deals or ways to save money.
Well, you can go to a company like Incremental Media (😊), who can handle the entire process for you and knows all the key decisions you need to make to set yourself up for success, or you can do it yourself. If you choose to do it yourself, you need to develop ad creative to help you stand out from the brands you are sharing space with.
In print media like shared mail, that usually comes down one principle: Keep It Simple. Shared mail isn’t a magazine. People are typically combing through these envelopes quickly. Use simple, powerful imagery, a strong headline, icons to communicate key messaging, and most importantly include a very enticing offer. Something like this:
This is probably the most common question we get about shared mail. It’s critical to remember that shared mail isn’t digital marketing. In most cases shared mail goes out a little each day over a week or a month. Results aren’t immediate. A home services company we work with who was testing shared mail noticed how initially results didn’t look good, but when they checked the data after six weeks, all of a sudden their cost per call, cost per lead, and cost per conversion were achieving their performance targets.
In short, patience is the name of the game. People get shared mail and might stash your printed insert away for months before they contact your brand. It’s important to be patient and educate internal parties to not expect results immediately.
Another benefit of shared mail is, in many cases, you can do a matchback! That means you can see, of the shared mail your ads were included in, which of those people ended up coming to your site and converting. That’s enormously helpful because most brands don’t get full attribution from the promo code, QR code, URL, and/or phone number they put on the piece. A matchback is the most comprehensive way to know if your shared mail is effective.
… and it can hit your CPA or return on ad spend goals. Shared mail can be a powerful piece of your marketing mix when done correctly, and we work with brands who spend eight figures a year in just shared mail, so there is plenty of scalability, but it’s not as easy as it used to be. You have to know how to do it right.
Eric Smith is the SVP of Growth at Incremental Media. He helps direct to consumer, lead generation, and senior marketers acquire new customers cost-effectively using niche, scalable channels like shared mail, package inserts, and podcasts. You can connect with Eric via email at esmith@incrementalmedia.com and on LinkedIn here.
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