Cataloghi e DTC

DTC marketers, looking for a more diversified marketing mix, are focusing on direct mail. But for these digitally native brands that have grown up on a diet of Instagram and Facebook, adjusting to a medium with far fewer analytics is proving to be difficult.

Andy Prochazka, the CMO of online furniture brand Article, put together a plan to send out a product catalog as the company made an effort to look beyond digital channels to reach new customers.

“Digital has its limitations. It’s wonderful in some ways: You get instant feedback, you get very rapid reach and access to what sometimes feels like infinite scale. But you quickly realize once you look a little beyond that, there’s a whole world of other ways to reach more people,” said Prochazka. “At the same time, I’m always blown away by the limited infrastructure for testing most marketing channels. Digital was built with measurement capacity out of the gates. Television, out of home, print – these channels just don’t have that.”

As digitally native brands start spending in more channels, like TV, out of home and direct mail, tracking what’s actually working becomes trickier. When a marketing mix is 50% Facebook, 50% Google, it’s easy to tell how money is being spent and to what effect. But eventually, those channels get tapped out. Companies like Boll & Branch, Greats, Parachute, Harry’s, Quip, Glossier and Away have all started testing direct mail, from discount-code fliers to fancier product catalogs, in an attempt to cut through the clutter. Direct mail-specialized vendors have popped up in response, like Share Local Media and Mailjoy, to help brands target customers and track return.

“Digital is noisy and direct mail is calm,” said Ryan Babenzien, the founder and CEO of the sneaker brand Greats.

But without the instant feedback from Facebook that data-reliant brands are accustomed to, figuring out direct mail is performing doesn’t come easily. Brands like Quip use mailer-specific discount codes to monitor conversion. At Article, the in-house marketing team designed the catalogues (Prochazka said the company’s typical approach is to “poke around and see if there are any agencies we’d like to work with, before ultimately doing at least the first iteration in house”) and then, with the brand’s data science team, put together a plan to track traffic and conversions in response to the catalogues.

To do so, it set a time period of two months to watch for results (as opposed to the three hours Prochazka said it needs to see results from Facebook) and used a holdout group to track traffic and conversions from demographics that were sent the catalog, in comparison to ones that weren’t. What the brand watched for in terms of results was traffic to product pages featured in the catalog, engagement on social media in the regions that received the catalog, and primarily, sales – Article hasn’t raised any VC funding, and every marketing channel it tests needs to be profitable.

“We try to maintain a healthy channel mix, and we haven’t set a certain percentage of that mix that any one channel should be capped at,” said Prochazka. “So the more channels you add, the more difficult it is to have a clearer picture, but you’re also going to get a halo effect, where channels start to lift each other on their own. That’s the end goal.”

Hilary Milnes

retail editor, Digiday