Cataloging Cozy Earth’s Massive Direct Mail Success

TLDR:

• Cozy Earth switched to PostPilot from another direct mail vendor for a variety of needed functionalities and to build a (much) more efficient direct mail program.
• The team tested acquisition, retargeting, and retention mailers—including catalogs and postcards—last year. This year, they are substantially scaling up their program. Catalog lead time was shortened from 5–6 months to ~5 weeks.
• Results have been extraordinarily strong: across-the-board wins have driven millions in incremental revenue.

Background:

You know Cozy Earth. They sell beautiful, luxurious products. They’re scaling fast. They’re one of Oprah’s favorite brands. They’re ecomm goals.

And they’re no stranger to direct mail.

The team previously used another direct mail provider, but they switched to PostPilot for faster turnarounds, better targeting, easier testing, and real-time performance data. 

Now, following some full-funnel tests last year, they’re heavily scaling their direct mail program.

Here’s the story.

The Full-Funnel Strategy:

(Much) Easier, (Much) Faster Catalog Prospecting

“We were using a really archaic direct mail system. I’d have to create my own list, send it to the agency, and have them buy names from data houses. That was a 2–3 month process. Then, we’d submit a catalog design to our printer who worked with our marketing agency. That’s a 3-month process.” —Conner, Direct Mail Manager @ Cozy Earth

Conner’s story reflects a common experience for brands that want to send catalogs. It’s excruciating and takes somewhere between forever and five-ever.

Unless you work with PostPilot. 

To test catalog acquisition with us, Cozy Earth wanted to launch 200,000 catalogs a couple months prior to BFCM.

We cut their catalog lead time from 5–6 months to ~5 weeks. 

• We built the prospecting list using our lookalike builder, AcquisitionAI, in a matter of hours. 
• We handled printing and mailing via our in-house facilities, which saved 2+ months.

While Cozy Earth handles their own catalog design, our in-house design team creates catalogs for brands at no additional cost and still enables rapid launches.

The bottom line? Cozy Earth now has a supersonic catalog process and the ability to truly scale the program.

In fact, they’ve fully switched over their catalog ops to PostPilot. Translation: More large catalog drops incoming…

Granular Retargeting with Postcards

To get more out of their digital prospecting dollars, Cozy Earth is retargeting indecisive prospects with direct mail using MailMatch^TM, a feature that lets brands send direct mail campaigns to the homes of leads based on email addresses alone.

And once again, the story is “scale, baby, scale.”

Last year, Cozy Earth retargeted 12 segments of non-buying subs with catalogs—the same catalogs used in their prospecting—and postcards.

Postcards like this one:

After seeing incremental results, however, they’re now sending postcards to 3x+ as many non-buyers who subscribed up to 90 days ago, segmented into two week intervals.

Here’s an example of how that works: 

• On January 1, if someone subscribed <15 days ago but didn’t purchase, they’d receive a first retargeting postcard. 
• If they haven’t purchased by February 1, they'll receive a second postcard. 
• If they purchase after receiving the second postcard, they won’t receive a third. 

Plus, they’re refreshing the creative on a monthly basis.

• This ensures that leads will always receive postcards with fresh creatives.
• It follows the month-over-month data to optimize performance, exactly the same as in an email or SMS program.

Retaining Customers and Fighting Big Churn

“Winbacks are killing it. These are trigger-based and are proving to be very incremental. It’s even to the point that (since we started sending these postcards) that our churn rate was lower when we looked at year-over-year performance by month. Our Retention Manager said, ‘That’s never happened.’”

That’s what we love to hear.

And it’s why Cozy Earth is heavily scaling retention YoY, too.

• Last year, the team tested one-off winbacks on about a dozen segments.
• This year, they’re not only sending winback cards to 50% more segments, but they’re also A/B testing each of those segments. 

And they’re automating all of it.

So, as soon as a customer falls into a particular recency bracket (based on their last order date, e.g., 90 days ago), we automatically fire off a postcard. 

Plus, much like Cozy Earth’s retargeting funnel that targets a number of segments, customers will continue to receive postcards (up to 7 total) until after the 365-day mark. 

And the best part? 

Cozy Earth is reaching all previous customers: both customers who are still subscribed to email/SMS and those who unsubscribed. (Yep, direct mail can do that.)

Now that’s a plugged funnel.

But wait… One More Cool Thing: Using Direct Mail with Shared Sweeps

We’d like to highlight a special collaboration among Cozy Earth, our partners at Shared Sweeps, and PostPilot. 

Shared Sweeps is the only platform that allows ecommerce brands to drive revenue through sweepstakes without any risk (no upfront cost, only small %s of sales driven through the campaign), and Cozy Earth ran a $100k sweepstakes through their platform.

Although brands typically use email/SMS to drive sweepstakes sales through email/SMS, Cozy Earth brought direct mail into the picture, too:

In this campaign, every dollar that customers spent counted as an entry toward winning the massive prizes: a Range Rover Sport, an extraordinary European holiday, or $100k in cold, hard cash. 

Cozy Earth leveraged this campaign as a winback, targeting 7 segments, and saw some strong results—more on that below.

Results:

Simply put, Cozy Earth has seen extremely strong results with direct mail across the board. 

Let’s look at last year’s results, which drove millions in incremental revenue:

• Prospecting: 7.71x iROAS (incremental ROAS)
• Retargeting: Up to a 6.53x iROAS
• Retention: Up to a 15.58x iROAS
• Shared Sweeps (full campaign results): 3.7x iROAS

Two words: crazy strong.

Actually, three more words: and crazy incremental.

This is a brand showing the power of direct mail when taking a full-funnel approach. It drives volume. It drives serious results. It’s a reliable pillar of marketing. It can even scratch retargeting and retention itches that other channels can’t.

We couldn’t be happier for Cozy Earth, and we’re pumped to be partnering with them as they push the envelope on what direct mail can do.

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