Direct Mail for Ecommerce Brands Whose Best Customers Stopped Opening Emails
Over half your customers will never open an email. That isn't a deliverability problem, it's natural channel behaviour.
Direct mail reaches close to 100% of the people it's sent to. We run it for 7-9 figure DTC brands alongside email & SMS.
Send unlimited emails, SMS, WhatsApp and Direct Mail for one flat fee each month.
We exist to drive as much revenue as possible for your store from these channels.
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Magnet Monster understands signals around the customer; what they’ve bought, what they’ve ignored and where digital channels have stopped doing the job. That means direct mail becomes part of the retention logic, rather than another channel bolted onto it.
That makes them a brilliant Paper Run partner. Our team works collaboratively with them to build out audiences & creative; then the Paper Run platform measures incrementality and uplift. This helps us refine and optimise audiences over time, rather than revisiting the channel every few months and incurring high costs.
50% of your customers are already outside your retention strategy.
Over half your customers will never open your emails, and you can't force them to with better subject lines, copy or deliverability.
Most people give up on these customers and accept they can't contact them again. This is where direct mail shines.
A postcard through the door gets seen by practically everyone. No algorithm can mark it under the promotions tab.
Pull this segment in your Klaviyo: customers who have purchased and haven't opened an email in 90 days. That number is what direct mail exists for.
These are the five plays we run for every brand.
- Abandoned Cart
- Win-back
- Subscription win-back by cancellation reason
- One-time buyer to subscriber
- Campaigns and new drops
Same offer you run everywhere else, with a QR code back to the cart. The postcard format gives you creative room email doesn't, so use it.
Start narrow: high historical LTV, last purchase 90 to 180 days. Measure the incrementality. If it's positive, widen to 180 to 365 days. Keep widening until it stops paying, then pull back to the last window that worked.
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Cancelled on taste, send the new flavours. Cancelled because they saw no results, address the formulation or how the product should actually be used. Cancelled on price, lead with a restructured offer.
The cancellation reason tells you precisely which objection lost that customer. A postcard answering that specific objection is the difference between a channel that breaks even and one that makes money.
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Target one-time buyers you can't reach on email or SMS, around day 30, calibrated to how quickly the product gets consumed. Leave it longer and they've quietly churned.
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These people haven't churned because they dislike you. They drifted out of your reachable audience.
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It costs between 50 cents and a dollar a send.
That decides everything else.
Direct mail can't be run like email. The cost per send means every decision about who, when and what offer has to be deliberate.
Here's the sequence we follow: email first, because it's the cheapest and reaches the broadest engaged segment. SMS second, where you have consent. Direct mail third, for the customers neither of those reached.
Every send then starts with the same question.
Which customers in this cohort have high historical LTV and cannot be reached on email or SMS?
That one question does two jobs. It aims the spend at the customers most likely to come back, and it stops you paying a dollar to reach someone you could have had for nothing.
Measurement is straightforward once it's set up properly.
audit
We size how many of your customers are unreachable on email and SMS, and what they've historically been worth.
Roadmap
Which of the five playbooks fits your category and file, and which segment to mail first.
Build
Design, copy and integration through Paper Run or PostPilot, both of whom we partner with. First flow live inside a week.
Measure & Report:
Holdouts, unique codes, and reporting on incremental revenue instead of raw response rate.
Post cards through the front door you simply can't ignore!
Designed by the Magnet Monster team with love for our clients (that print money).
PostPilot on how we run the channel.
"Email and SMS are essential, but they can't reach every customer or break through every time. Direct mail adds a high-impact touchpoint that complements those digital channels, reaches customers they miss, and creates truly incremental revenue.
What makes Magnet Monster particularly effective is their ability to connect all of those pieces. They bring the cohesive strategy, creative thinking, and attention to execution that turns direct mail into a scalable, measurable growth channel.
They're an incredible partner to PostPilot and, most importantly, to the brands we support together."
Direct mail questions, answered
Does direct mail still work?
This is a course for high-level DTC operators and email marketing agency owners who want to improve their understanding of how email & SMS can support businesses KPI's such as Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Repurchase Rates and Returning Customer Revenue while also improving Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Ultimately, this course is for marketers serious about using email to support wider business growth goals and not be siloed to channel-centric performance.
How much does a direct mailer cost for an ecommerce brand?
This course will not cover things such as adding a coupon code into an abandoned cart or how to inflate email-attributed revenue for screenshots on social media. You can get a taster of how in-depth this course is from our Klaviyo email marketing course summary.
Do not buy this course for basic things you can get from the FAQ documentation in Klaviyo. Buy it when you want to think like a business owner and learn advanced strategies that will move the needle as well as diagnose when your business is in trouble.
When should direct mail be used in an abandoned cart sequence?
The course is designed so that you can jump into any lesson and implement a strategy immediately upon watching it. You do not have to pass through the whole 4 hours in a linear format; you can pick and choose which strategies to implement from the get-go depending on where you're at with your business.
Does direct mail work for subscription brands?
The course is designed so that you can jump into any lesson and implement a strategy immediately upon watching it. You do not have to pass through the whole 4 hours in a linear format; you can pick and choose which strategies to implement from the get-go depending on where you're at with your business.
How do you measure whether direct mail is working?
The course is designed so that you can jump into any lesson and implement a strategy immediately upon watching it. You do not have to pass through the whole 4 hours in a linear format; you can pick and choose which strategies to implement from the get-go depending on where you're at with your business.
Is direct mail only for large ecommerce brands?
The course is designed so that you can jump into any lesson and implement a strategy immediately upon watching it. You do not have to pass through the whole 4 hours in a linear format; you can pick and choose which strategies to implement from the get-go depending on where you're at with your business.
How fast can I expect to get results from this course?
The course is designed so that you can jump into any lesson and implement a strategy immediately upon watching it. You do not have to pass through the whole 4 hours in a linear format; you can pick and choose which strategies to implement from the get-go depending on where you're at with your business.
Which platform do you use?
The course is designed so that you can jump into any lesson and implement a strategy immediately upon watching it. You do not have to pass through the whole 4 hours in a linear format; you can pick and choose which strategies to implement from the get-go depending on where you're at with your business.
How does direct mail fit alongside email, SMS and WhatsApp?
The course is designed so that you can jump into any lesson and implement a strategy immediately upon watching it. You do not have to pass through the whole 4 hours in a linear format; you can pick and choose which strategies to implement from the get-go depending on where you're at with your business.
Do you work with brands under seven figures?
The course is designed so that you can jump into any lesson and implement a strategy immediately upon watching it. You do not have to pass through the whole 4 hours in a linear format; you can pick and choose which strategies to implement from the get-go depending on where you're at with your business.
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