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In this episode of the Custom Apparel Startups Podcast, host Marc Vila is joined by Michael Palme and Austin Gordon from Taylor to discuss how direct mail can be a game-changer for custom apparel, sign, and promotional product businesses. While digital marketing gets a lot of attention, direct mail remains a powerful and underutilized tool for targeting new customers, retaining existing clients, and cutting through the clutter of online ads.
Michael and Austin break down how direct mail works, how to effectively use data to reach the right audience, and how you can integrate it with digital advertising for even greater results. Whether you’re a startup looking to establish your brand or an established business aiming for the next level, this episode will give you practical strategies to expand your reach and increase sales.
Topics Covered in This Episode:
✅ Why direct mail still works in a digital world
Listen now and learn how to use direct mail to take your business to the next level!
✉ Have questions or want to connect? email us at [email protected].
Marc Vila:
Just as we’re starting off 2025 and this is our first podcast of the year, so we’re trying to adjust the format a little bit and really get to a higher level of business. So previously we were the Custom Apparel Startups Podcast, CAS, and I’ve been saying CAS a little bit more because we’re trying to move not just for the startups, but actually moving and growing into folks who are really trying to grow their business and potentially have an established business, too, that are really trying to take it to the next level.
So with that in mind, if you are a startup or you’ve been in business for 10 years, this episode is going to be amazing for you because we’re going to have some great education from two fantastic gentlemen from Taylor. So today, we’re going to be talking about growing your business with direct mail, and we’ve got Michael Palme and Austin Gordon from Taylor. So why don’t you guys say hello and tell us a little bit about Taylor.
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
Austin Gordon:
Marc Vila:
So I run marketing here at ColDesi. What’s the hot topics and the fancy and shiny thing nowadays is should I do influencer marketing? Should I be advertising on Instagram? Is TikTok a good place? What about LinkedIn? All these digital online places and even Google Ads, this is the hot stuff that’s talked about over and over again. And it is a great way to reach audiences and it is an important way to do advertising, but we forget that there are tried and true methods that are still great and one of them potentially could be direct mail. And we wanted to talk about how to get started with that if you’re currently not, what potential impacts that could have on your business, and how it could be a different way to reach out to your customers, especially if you have a large existing customer database that you want to get repeat business from, or you’re trying to reach a new niche group of people that you can get your branding and your image and your message in front of their face in a different way, especially with the digital space being incredibly crowded.
So what I’ll do is I have a series of questions that I put together. So we’ll do a little Q&A style. And I think a good format would be I’ll just back and forth or if I feel one of you can answer it better, I’ll start with one of you and then if the second person has somebody to add, this way we’re not talking over each other. So I’ll do like Michael and then Austin and Michael and Austin. And then once you’re done with what you have to say, finish and I’ll give a brief moment for the other one to jump in if they want to add something. And then if I have any comments, I’ll add it at the end. So that’ll be the format today, and let’s just get right into business.
The first thing that I wanted to talk about, and Michael, we’ll start with you as I mentioned, why would direct mail work for a sign or a t-shirt shop?
Michael Palme:
Austin Gordon:
Secondly, what I think it does well for a sign shop or a t-shirt shop is it does really good at local targeting. In my eyes, I see sign shops and t-shirt shops probably operating in a specific area, and direct mail allows for precise geographical targeting.
Marc Vila:
So when we survey out our customers and we do interviews on folks that are in this t-shirt space or sign space and other promotional goods, as you said, most of them are working within a targeted area. So within a city or within a state are going to be the two most popular, or they may specifically be working with schools, so therefore they’re working within a certain school board or whatever it might be. Government, they may be working with local government agencies. And the way to expand that is typically just to either spread out that map or get deeper into that map that you work in. And the first one is within the area that I work with, are there more customers? And you can really target well as you mentioned in a less crowded space.
And we get… Everyone will joke how much junk mail you get or don’t get, right? But when you talk about your mobile device or YouTube, we’re almost more trained to skip those ads because what are you doing? You’re flipping through Instagram. You’re there to have fun. And then the fifth thing you get is somebody telling you to do your taxes and just get out of here. And direct mail though is mail is business. That’s how I think about it. Mail is business. It’s not fun. So when you open your mail, you’re saying, “What’s a bill? What’s an important letter? What’s an invitation to do something? Is there something of value in here for me?” So there’s actually you’re actually searching for value where on social media or YouTube, you may be searching for value. You may just be literally rotting your brain in the bathroom. And there’s a reality.
So it’s something that I think is very cool about doing direct mail that if you operate in Orlando, Florida and you work with a particular niche business, you can identify all of those businesses through a company like Taylor. You’ll identify all those potential businesses and you can send them something physical, which is, Michael, you had said that’s great. That actually is designs with your physical product. If you’re selling promotional goods or t-shirts or signs, you’re handing them a physical good. It’s not a piece of software. It’s not a digital download. So you have the opportunity to show, like you said, show past work, show something that’s vibrant and eye-catching. And if you’re trying to sell signs or t-shirts that are vibrant and eye-catching to businesses, what better way to do it than to impress them immediately with something vibrant and eye-catching in their hands. So there’s a bit of subconscious, I think, to it as well.
Austin Gordon:
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
Austin Gordon:
So for the sake of can you operate in a local area, the answer to that is yes. And for how big or small it can be is we can do a mailing as small as 500 people if that’s what your budget calls and that’s what your data is telling you. But we can also do as large as a million, just throwing out numbers there just to give background for how big or small we can do.
Michael Palme:
I’m just making that up. But I do think that the data portion of that, especially in a local area, is so critical to having success with direct mail.
Marc Vila:
If you’re able to get that data for your local area, which potentially you could, now you potentially have a mailing list of a certain size. Well, at this point in time, the size, it might be huge. You’re like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t think I want to send to that many people.” So now you want to tighten it down. “Well, I just want to do certain zip codes. I really just want to focus on these three high schools.” And there’s something about doing print advertising that can be brought directly to the high school, but there’s also something about potentially getting a database of people that would be of a certain age, more than likely to have children that are in within these certain zip codes, which are within those high schools. And you could direct mail out to those. And these campaigns can really be done beautifully if you have the right data. And like you said, the data has to be of a certain size. It has to be of certain accuracy.
And then the last little bit of it is on the commercial side of direct mail, you mentioned 500, a thousand or a million. Well, you may find that you want to do something with local dentist offices. Maybe that’s a niche thing you want to jump into, but there’s only 40 in your area. Well, this is not as big for Taylor, but it’s a toe dip into it. If you have printing equipment because a lot of folks here do, and you want to print 40 things, you can print 40 signs and just mail them directly to those 40 dentists. So direct mail can start on your own, especially being in our industry. You can start by printing 40 t-shirts and mailing them to 40 dentists.
But this is a way to really expand and grow the business, and that’s what the conversation is about today. So how do you grow from that small niche of 40? What is a larger niche that you can get into where previously you had one salesperson that would take 40 t-shirts or 40 signs and they would drive around town and drop them off and hand off a business card. And that’s great as you get started, but if you’re trying to scale and you’re trying to move up to another level, well, now I’m not interested in advertising to 40 people. I’m interested in advertising to 4,000 people, like potential parents of graduates. And that’s what we’re talking about is scaling the business. So data is a really great way to do it. And if you talk to folks like the people at Taylor, they can really dive into that data with you.
So another thing I wanted to cover is just cost. Everyone wants to know how much everything costs. We sell printers. Everyone wants to know what does it cost to print, how fast can it print and all that. So what does it cost to mail something? I know, Austin, you had mentioned that you had done a little bit of math on that, so could you just give us some bookend numbers? Let’s say that you wanted to mail a thousand postcards in Orlando. What’s something like that going to cost about?
Austin Gordon:
Marc Vila:
Austin Gordon:
Marc Vila:
Austin Gordon:
Marc Vila:
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
And I’ll give… I had an extreme example come to my head, but if you want to operate in the state of Florida and the niche you have is you do Latino style, anime manga style art that’s in Spanish, you could go through and you could potentially buy an audience of people who are Spanish speaking, interested in anime, manga and other types of animation like that. And you could potentially buy that target audience, people who are 25 to 45 years old, males, Spanish-speaking, that’s an audience you could potentially purchase. Then you could put together a digital and a direct mail piece selling the t-shirts that you sell that are very specific to that audience. Who else is advertising that product? Minimal.
So the gold is really in do you have a niche that you work in? Do you have something that you’re passionate about? The audience is obtainable. And then once you have that audience, how do you get to them? And getting a physical piece in their hand is one of the closest ways you can get outside of literally shaking their hand or having a phone call. It’s the next level down on physical touch to be able to actually capture that audience.
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
And the reason why I bring this up is all the time I have folks come up to me and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about advertising on Facebook. I had a few hundred bucks. I was just going to drop it in on an ad.” And I would just say, “Just spend the few hundred dollars on something else. Print samples and just mail them to people or just print samples and drive in your car around town and drop them off, because a few hundred dollars is not necessarily going to be that impactful on something like Instagram or Facebook.” And I’d find direct mail is probably the same thing. Just dropping one 4 x 6 postcard in your area is not necessarily going to make you a million dollars. So what do you think is a starting budget for a six or 12-month period that you should have in your mind before you want to go down this journey?
Michael Palme:
And one of the things also that I would highlight just as it relates to direct mail, it’s typically, it can be a long game in that depending on what your call to action is and the piece and ultimately who you’re targeting, what your product or service is. It could take a while. So if you’re able to pair that direct mail with an omnichannel type approach, including direct mail marketing ads and email, all of that going to that one person, we typically see the fastest conversion rates with those. So again, yeah, it’s got to be more than a couple grand a month to make it effective.
Austin Gordon:
I think, Marc, we were talking earlier, when you’re targeting people on Instagram or Facebook, it’s not you’re sending ads to 500 people and one of them’s going to buy. It’s you sending 500 ads to 500 people or an ad to 500 people five times hoping that one of them is going to buy from that multiple touch points. So yeah, like Michael said, I think it’s a long game with direct mail and you want to have multiple touch points with the customer to see the ROI in the end.
Marc Vila:
That’s a long tail one for you. You have to continuously show them value that you provide this and then just wait for the right opportunity. Maybe you have a specific holiday offer that they’re interested in. Maybe you have a new idea they haven’t done before. Their previous provider dropped the ball too many times and now they decided, “You know what? It’s time to change.” And you’re the one that they recognize next. All right, so that’s a long tail.
Now, that’s going to be expensive to get that client. It may take eight months worth of direct mail and digital advertising and such to get that client. However, now you’ve got five stores doing seasonal advertising changing in their signage every 30, 60 days or less. It’s a serious big money account for you. So it could have cost you $2,000 in regards to how much it costs to actually get that client to place their first order, but they’d maybe worth a hundred thousand dollars a year. And that’s a great long tail game where you’re saying, “I’m going to invest in direct mail to this specific niche, these retail stores in my area because that’s what I want to go after.” The chances of one of those retail stores just coincidentally at the day they got the mail is when their current vendor just failed and they’re just like, “I’m…” And they just hate call you. They’re so mad at their other vendor, they just call you. That happens, and that type of luck happens in direct mail or email advertising, but most of the time it’s a long tail.
Now, there is a short tail side of this too. If you wanted to try to experiment with something a little shorter, like a 90-day plan where you can look for some activity. That needs to be a tight offer that’s an easy decision to make immediately. So you have one product potentially you’re trying to sell. If we just go down the sign route, maybe you have a particular style of sign you’re going to sell. It’s a particular idea. You’re going to have a very low price for it. Where a business owner may get that thing and say, “You know what? I’m going to order one of these and try it out.” Or if it’s a t-shirt offer, it’s got to be maybe a very aggressive deal to get that first conversion, potentially not a moneymaker if you want to try to convert fast.
So convert fast is going to be, “You can get 20 shirts at this price, get 10 hats for free.” And then someone’s like, “Oh my gosh, that’s freaking… I’m going to lose the money on that.” Well, but you’re trying to get a quick conversion. You’re trying to immediately get into those shops in a short period of time. You’ve got to have something aggressive to go after.
So there’s some short and long-term. The short one also might be the example of the graduation science, the Coroplast signs that people put in their yard. That’s going to be something that somebody is going to make a decision to buy that probably within the month that they’re graduating. So if you’re hitting them with direct mail pieces in April, May, June, or whatever those three-month period is, that’s when you’re going to make those sales. And then that campaign’s over because chances are somebody is not going to hold on to that flyer, that brochure, or that email until two years from now when their other kid graduates. They’re going to already have forgotten who you are. So those are short-term things where you’re trying to sell a product now at a very particular opportunity, and you look for results then too.
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
The additional piece that everyone listening needs to get is that you also have to deal with the post office. So you have to deal with the government to get them to help you finish this last leg of it. So it’s important that if you’re thinking about doing advertising for the holiday season, if you’re thinking about doing Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, that type of stuff, I would start having those conversations now. At least open the book now and have the conversation now because you’re going to want to have all the pieces in your timing just right, because if you start to have the conversation in October about sending something out for Christmas or New Year’s, we’re not saying that can’t happen but you’ve got a tough road of everything’s got to line up. So it’s just important. Planning is really important for this more than anything else.
And if you’re used to doing digital advertising or cold calling or selling, which are all things I’m used to doing, we can execute that stuff immediately. So my team and how we handle any type of print type of stuff. We recently put together a magazine as you can see right there if you’re looking on camera, and that took months of building out the content, getting it approved, printing it. All that took months to do and that’s not something we normally were doing. So for us, it was a learning experience. And I think as we go into more print type of things, like additional copies of that Customize Now magazine, we’re still learning lessons. So no matter how dedicated our team is and experienced our team is, when you move into a new media, it’s going to take you some time to learn. And we’re still learning doing print. Just a small pitch on that.
If you are in the direct-to-film business or screen printing business, if you’re thinking about direct-to-film printing and you’re still in that decision-making phase, be sure to go to coldesi.com and you could just live chat or fill out a form and let them know that you’d like us to mail you a copy of that Customize Now DTF edition, and we’ve got a bunch of articles and a bunch of great information that’s in there. It’s completely free. So just a little pitch for that.
Okay, there’s one other thing I’d like to ask and then we can wrap it up today. So maybe Austin, if you would kick this one off, what are the steps to getting started? So let’s just use somebody wants to start sending direct mail out for the summer, something going on the summer camp type of stuff, and how do they get started today? What are just some of the steps to they’re going to be able to get their first piece in somebody’s hands?
Austin Gordon:
Secondly, after you know who that audience is, let’s work to collect the data to see how many people are out there. Once we figure that out, we’ll determine, all right, now what’s the budget that we can work with to how many pieces we can mail out and target to that specific audience.
After that, it’s designing the mail piece and coming up with a call to action. We work hard to deliver to the right people at the right time using the data, but it’s almost most important to have the right message, that call to action that’s going to say, “I actually should do this.” Marc, you touched on it earlier, is that call to action, if you want those instant results or those quick wins, it’s probably the most important piece.
And then after you have your audience and your design and your call to action figured out, then it’s as simple as getting an artwork to a printer, getting the mailing list to a printer. If you weren’t working with them before that for the designing piece and the data, getting that to a printer and getting it to a press. It’s a lot simpler than you think once you get the planning done on who’s going to be receiving the piece.
Marc Vila:
Now, you could say, “Well, I got busy,” and that is one indicator, but also were you doing anything else that could have gotten you busy? Were you making cold calls and knocking on doors and going to… you join the local chamber of commerce or something like that? So how do you directly do that? And one of the things you could do is you can… Just a couple little tips and tricks. Whoever does your phone service, you could probably get a secondary phone number. And everything’s digital now, so you could put a different phone number on that postcard. And then when somebody dials that phone number, they’re dialing the specific phone number, which just goes to you anyway.
Your business size, it may even still ring cell phones of a couple of people if you’re doing forwarding like that, but you could probably get a report from that phone company on how many times that phone number rang. So you put that phone number on mailers. You put that on for a year, then at the end of the year, you could physically say how many times did people call the phone number on that mail? And that gives you a nice piece of data.
You can also do it with a specific website. You can literally just, you can… And this is if you don’t know how to do this, whoever handles your website can do this. You have a different web address. It’s a name of your business, may be shorter or slightly different. And then whoever handles your web property can set up that URL. And then every time somebody typed that in somewhere, that you can get a report on how many people typed that in.
Also, very specific offers are important too, a very specific coupon, a very specific deal that people will mention. And I recommend doing two or three or four of these very specific things because you want to add them all up together because not everybody’s going to call. Not everybody’s going to use the coupon. It’s a surprising piece of data on how many coupons go out that people end up doing business with the company and do not use the coupon that they got. It’s less than 50% of people. So if you send out a coupon and you got five people who used it, chances are you had 10 people who actually bought from you because of that piece of advertising, but only half of them use the coupon.
So it’s important to stack these things together, a specific website, a specific QR code, a specific video you tell them to watch, a specific phone number or a specific action. So being very specific, so it’s trackable is really important. So that’s an important part of that center sliver there, Gordon, on where you mentioned. Like when you’re picking your plan and your message, make sure you stick in their ways to be able to track that.
And then just going back a bit to what Michael talked about earlier with data, you are more likely to get business if you say, “Okay, I want to expand to my area.” So I’m actually going to break it down into medical field, restaurants, finance, mortgage, investment type of firms. Maybe you break it down into five categories. And when you buy the data or you rent the data, you’re going to say, “All right, I want all these five different types of businesses in these five different areas. Okay, it’s a thousand a piece.” Now, I want to do the mailing for the signs for dental or medical. It’s going to be all medical themed. You’re going to have doctors stethoscope, the sign is going to say, “Free vaccines here,” stuff like that.
And then the thing for the finance people, you’re going to show people in suits, shaking hands, computers with charts with arrows going up, whatever. So when that person gets that message, it directly relates to them versus the doctor getting a message of a chart with an arrow going up. That doesn’t mean anything to them. But to the finance person, they really see that as impactful. So naturally that’s all possible, right, if somebody wanted to do that?
Austin Gordon:
One example I want to give, Marc, when you were talking about tracking and how different ways that people that we’ve worked with have tracked is I was walking around one of our facility floors with a general manager of one of our facilities, and there was this cool piece of direct mail and he’s like, “Hey.” But nobody can take their phones out and take a picture of that because they have these QR codes that are specific to the person that receives it. So when someone takes out their phone and scans the mail piece that they get, the company that was doing this campaign would get notified saying, “Hey, Marc scanned the QR code on this mail piece. They’re interested in XYZ. You should email them. You should hit them with a digital ad.” It’s really cool what customization and personalization can do in the direct mail space that can really give you a lot of answers and really track how well campaign is performing and how are people interacting with the piece.
Marc Vila:
And honestly, if you talk to a company like Taylor, they may even just say, “You should probably just do that on your own.” It’s not worth it for all the trouble. But if you’re going to go into, “I want to try out a 90-day campaign or I want an annual budget. I really want to dive into this,” then you want to work with people who will help to guide you in the right direction, give you some good advice, have a little bit of strategy phone call, and ultimately send out a piece that you’re going to be proud to have sent out that hopefully works. That’s the ultimate goal, is that it works.
Well, we covered a good amount of stuff today. I think it’s probably time to wrap up this episode. But do either of you have anything else you wanted to add or anything that we missed in regards to direct mail and growing your business?
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
But it’s been around so long that it’s a challenge for somebody to come and feed you a bunch of lies that you can’t verify like it is with brand new stuff like influencer marketing. You could be fed a bunch of information with nothing to back it up or a bunch of information that’s not tried and true. But when it comes to pieces like print and direct mail, this is stuff that the data has been there for decades. Not only has direct mail been happening for hundreds of years or however long, but good data has been around for, I don’t know, 50 years probably of when people really started marketing and collecting data. So there’s really good data on this, meaning what works, what doesn’t work, how to do it, bringing the cost down. There’s a lot of great, solid good information that you can get. So it’s a good tried and true piece of marketing that can help grow your business.
So if it sounds right for you, of course you can feel free to reach out to the folks over at Taylor. Gracious that they came on here. So if you wanted to chat with any of them, we’ll make sure that you’re able to reach them in the podcast notes. So if you go to customapparelstartups.com or just ColDesi and just reach out to anybody on the team, you can also send an email to marketing at coldesi.com. That’s going to go to our marketing team. And people do this all the time, but literally just write an email and say, “Hey, Marc, I listened to the episode about direct mail. Can you help get me an introduction?” And I’ll just pass it along. It’s really no big deal at all. The fact that we got some of this education to help you guys out is really important to me, and I know it is to the folks over at Taylor. So thanks for joining us, and thanks everybody listening, and have a good business.
Austin Gordon:
Marc Vila:
Michael Palme:
The post Episode 201 – Grow Your Business with Direct Mail – Featuring Taylor appeared first on Custom Apparel Startups.
By Custom Apparel StartupsIn this episode of the Custom Apparel Startups Podcast, host Marc Vila is joined by Michael Palme and Austin Gordon from Taylor to discuss how direct mail can be a game-changer for custom apparel, sign, and promotional product businesses. While digital marketing gets a lot of attention, direct mail remains a powerful and underutilized tool for targeting new customers, retaining existing clients, and cutting through the clutter of online ads.
Michael and Austin break down how direct mail works, how to effectively use data to reach the right audience, and how you can integrate it with digital advertising for even greater results. Whether you’re a startup looking to establish your brand or an established business aiming for the next level, this episode will give you practical strategies to expand your reach and increase sales.
Topics Covered in This Episode:
✅ Why direct mail still works in a digital world
Listen now and learn how to use direct mail to take your business to the next level!
✉ Have questions or want to connect? email us at [email protected].
Marc Vila:
Just as we’re starting off 2025 and this is our first podcast of the year, so we’re trying to adjust the format a little bit and really get to a higher level of business. So previously we were the Custom Apparel Startups Podcast, CAS, and I’ve been saying CAS a little bit more because we’re trying to move not just for the startups, but actually moving and growing into folks who are really trying to grow their business and potentially have an established business, too, that are really trying to take it to the next level.
So with that in mind, if you are a startup or you’ve been in business for 10 years, this episode is going to be amazing for you because we’re going to have some great education from two fantastic gentlemen from Taylor. So today, we’re going to be talking about growing your business with direct mail, and we’ve got Michael Palme and Austin Gordon from Taylor. So why don’t you guys say hello and tell us a little bit about Taylor.
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
Austin Gordon:
Marc Vila:
So I run marketing here at ColDesi. What’s the hot topics and the fancy and shiny thing nowadays is should I do influencer marketing? Should I be advertising on Instagram? Is TikTok a good place? What about LinkedIn? All these digital online places and even Google Ads, this is the hot stuff that’s talked about over and over again. And it is a great way to reach audiences and it is an important way to do advertising, but we forget that there are tried and true methods that are still great and one of them potentially could be direct mail. And we wanted to talk about how to get started with that if you’re currently not, what potential impacts that could have on your business, and how it could be a different way to reach out to your customers, especially if you have a large existing customer database that you want to get repeat business from, or you’re trying to reach a new niche group of people that you can get your branding and your image and your message in front of their face in a different way, especially with the digital space being incredibly crowded.
So what I’ll do is I have a series of questions that I put together. So we’ll do a little Q&A style. And I think a good format would be I’ll just back and forth or if I feel one of you can answer it better, I’ll start with one of you and then if the second person has somebody to add, this way we’re not talking over each other. So I’ll do like Michael and then Austin and Michael and Austin. And then once you’re done with what you have to say, finish and I’ll give a brief moment for the other one to jump in if they want to add something. And then if I have any comments, I’ll add it at the end. So that’ll be the format today, and let’s just get right into business.
The first thing that I wanted to talk about, and Michael, we’ll start with you as I mentioned, why would direct mail work for a sign or a t-shirt shop?
Michael Palme:
Austin Gordon:
Secondly, what I think it does well for a sign shop or a t-shirt shop is it does really good at local targeting. In my eyes, I see sign shops and t-shirt shops probably operating in a specific area, and direct mail allows for precise geographical targeting.
Marc Vila:
So when we survey out our customers and we do interviews on folks that are in this t-shirt space or sign space and other promotional goods, as you said, most of them are working within a targeted area. So within a city or within a state are going to be the two most popular, or they may specifically be working with schools, so therefore they’re working within a certain school board or whatever it might be. Government, they may be working with local government agencies. And the way to expand that is typically just to either spread out that map or get deeper into that map that you work in. And the first one is within the area that I work with, are there more customers? And you can really target well as you mentioned in a less crowded space.
And we get… Everyone will joke how much junk mail you get or don’t get, right? But when you talk about your mobile device or YouTube, we’re almost more trained to skip those ads because what are you doing? You’re flipping through Instagram. You’re there to have fun. And then the fifth thing you get is somebody telling you to do your taxes and just get out of here. And direct mail though is mail is business. That’s how I think about it. Mail is business. It’s not fun. So when you open your mail, you’re saying, “What’s a bill? What’s an important letter? What’s an invitation to do something? Is there something of value in here for me?” So there’s actually you’re actually searching for value where on social media or YouTube, you may be searching for value. You may just be literally rotting your brain in the bathroom. And there’s a reality.
So it’s something that I think is very cool about doing direct mail that if you operate in Orlando, Florida and you work with a particular niche business, you can identify all of those businesses through a company like Taylor. You’ll identify all those potential businesses and you can send them something physical, which is, Michael, you had said that’s great. That actually is designs with your physical product. If you’re selling promotional goods or t-shirts or signs, you’re handing them a physical good. It’s not a piece of software. It’s not a digital download. So you have the opportunity to show, like you said, show past work, show something that’s vibrant and eye-catching. And if you’re trying to sell signs or t-shirts that are vibrant and eye-catching to businesses, what better way to do it than to impress them immediately with something vibrant and eye-catching in their hands. So there’s a bit of subconscious, I think, to it as well.
Austin Gordon:
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
Austin Gordon:
So for the sake of can you operate in a local area, the answer to that is yes. And for how big or small it can be is we can do a mailing as small as 500 people if that’s what your budget calls and that’s what your data is telling you. But we can also do as large as a million, just throwing out numbers there just to give background for how big or small we can do.
Michael Palme:
I’m just making that up. But I do think that the data portion of that, especially in a local area, is so critical to having success with direct mail.
Marc Vila:
If you’re able to get that data for your local area, which potentially you could, now you potentially have a mailing list of a certain size. Well, at this point in time, the size, it might be huge. You’re like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t think I want to send to that many people.” So now you want to tighten it down. “Well, I just want to do certain zip codes. I really just want to focus on these three high schools.” And there’s something about doing print advertising that can be brought directly to the high school, but there’s also something about potentially getting a database of people that would be of a certain age, more than likely to have children that are in within these certain zip codes, which are within those high schools. And you could direct mail out to those. And these campaigns can really be done beautifully if you have the right data. And like you said, the data has to be of a certain size. It has to be of certain accuracy.
And then the last little bit of it is on the commercial side of direct mail, you mentioned 500, a thousand or a million. Well, you may find that you want to do something with local dentist offices. Maybe that’s a niche thing you want to jump into, but there’s only 40 in your area. Well, this is not as big for Taylor, but it’s a toe dip into it. If you have printing equipment because a lot of folks here do, and you want to print 40 things, you can print 40 signs and just mail them directly to those 40 dentists. So direct mail can start on your own, especially being in our industry. You can start by printing 40 t-shirts and mailing them to 40 dentists.
But this is a way to really expand and grow the business, and that’s what the conversation is about today. So how do you grow from that small niche of 40? What is a larger niche that you can get into where previously you had one salesperson that would take 40 t-shirts or 40 signs and they would drive around town and drop them off and hand off a business card. And that’s great as you get started, but if you’re trying to scale and you’re trying to move up to another level, well, now I’m not interested in advertising to 40 people. I’m interested in advertising to 4,000 people, like potential parents of graduates. And that’s what we’re talking about is scaling the business. So data is a really great way to do it. And if you talk to folks like the people at Taylor, they can really dive into that data with you.
So another thing I wanted to cover is just cost. Everyone wants to know how much everything costs. We sell printers. Everyone wants to know what does it cost to print, how fast can it print and all that. So what does it cost to mail something? I know, Austin, you had mentioned that you had done a little bit of math on that, so could you just give us some bookend numbers? Let’s say that you wanted to mail a thousand postcards in Orlando. What’s something like that going to cost about?
Austin Gordon:
Marc Vila:
Austin Gordon:
Marc Vila:
Austin Gordon:
Marc Vila:
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
And I’ll give… I had an extreme example come to my head, but if you want to operate in the state of Florida and the niche you have is you do Latino style, anime manga style art that’s in Spanish, you could go through and you could potentially buy an audience of people who are Spanish speaking, interested in anime, manga and other types of animation like that. And you could potentially buy that target audience, people who are 25 to 45 years old, males, Spanish-speaking, that’s an audience you could potentially purchase. Then you could put together a digital and a direct mail piece selling the t-shirts that you sell that are very specific to that audience. Who else is advertising that product? Minimal.
So the gold is really in do you have a niche that you work in? Do you have something that you’re passionate about? The audience is obtainable. And then once you have that audience, how do you get to them? And getting a physical piece in their hand is one of the closest ways you can get outside of literally shaking their hand or having a phone call. It’s the next level down on physical touch to be able to actually capture that audience.
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
And the reason why I bring this up is all the time I have folks come up to me and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about advertising on Facebook. I had a few hundred bucks. I was just going to drop it in on an ad.” And I would just say, “Just spend the few hundred dollars on something else. Print samples and just mail them to people or just print samples and drive in your car around town and drop them off, because a few hundred dollars is not necessarily going to be that impactful on something like Instagram or Facebook.” And I’d find direct mail is probably the same thing. Just dropping one 4 x 6 postcard in your area is not necessarily going to make you a million dollars. So what do you think is a starting budget for a six or 12-month period that you should have in your mind before you want to go down this journey?
Michael Palme:
And one of the things also that I would highlight just as it relates to direct mail, it’s typically, it can be a long game in that depending on what your call to action is and the piece and ultimately who you’re targeting, what your product or service is. It could take a while. So if you’re able to pair that direct mail with an omnichannel type approach, including direct mail marketing ads and email, all of that going to that one person, we typically see the fastest conversion rates with those. So again, yeah, it’s got to be more than a couple grand a month to make it effective.
Austin Gordon:
I think, Marc, we were talking earlier, when you’re targeting people on Instagram or Facebook, it’s not you’re sending ads to 500 people and one of them’s going to buy. It’s you sending 500 ads to 500 people or an ad to 500 people five times hoping that one of them is going to buy from that multiple touch points. So yeah, like Michael said, I think it’s a long game with direct mail and you want to have multiple touch points with the customer to see the ROI in the end.
Marc Vila:
That’s a long tail one for you. You have to continuously show them value that you provide this and then just wait for the right opportunity. Maybe you have a specific holiday offer that they’re interested in. Maybe you have a new idea they haven’t done before. Their previous provider dropped the ball too many times and now they decided, “You know what? It’s time to change.” And you’re the one that they recognize next. All right, so that’s a long tail.
Now, that’s going to be expensive to get that client. It may take eight months worth of direct mail and digital advertising and such to get that client. However, now you’ve got five stores doing seasonal advertising changing in their signage every 30, 60 days or less. It’s a serious big money account for you. So it could have cost you $2,000 in regards to how much it costs to actually get that client to place their first order, but they’d maybe worth a hundred thousand dollars a year. And that’s a great long tail game where you’re saying, “I’m going to invest in direct mail to this specific niche, these retail stores in my area because that’s what I want to go after.” The chances of one of those retail stores just coincidentally at the day they got the mail is when their current vendor just failed and they’re just like, “I’m…” And they just hate call you. They’re so mad at their other vendor, they just call you. That happens, and that type of luck happens in direct mail or email advertising, but most of the time it’s a long tail.
Now, there is a short tail side of this too. If you wanted to try to experiment with something a little shorter, like a 90-day plan where you can look for some activity. That needs to be a tight offer that’s an easy decision to make immediately. So you have one product potentially you’re trying to sell. If we just go down the sign route, maybe you have a particular style of sign you’re going to sell. It’s a particular idea. You’re going to have a very low price for it. Where a business owner may get that thing and say, “You know what? I’m going to order one of these and try it out.” Or if it’s a t-shirt offer, it’s got to be maybe a very aggressive deal to get that first conversion, potentially not a moneymaker if you want to try to convert fast.
So convert fast is going to be, “You can get 20 shirts at this price, get 10 hats for free.” And then someone’s like, “Oh my gosh, that’s freaking… I’m going to lose the money on that.” Well, but you’re trying to get a quick conversion. You’re trying to immediately get into those shops in a short period of time. You’ve got to have something aggressive to go after.
So there’s some short and long-term. The short one also might be the example of the graduation science, the Coroplast signs that people put in their yard. That’s going to be something that somebody is going to make a decision to buy that probably within the month that they’re graduating. So if you’re hitting them with direct mail pieces in April, May, June, or whatever those three-month period is, that’s when you’re going to make those sales. And then that campaign’s over because chances are somebody is not going to hold on to that flyer, that brochure, or that email until two years from now when their other kid graduates. They’re going to already have forgotten who you are. So those are short-term things where you’re trying to sell a product now at a very particular opportunity, and you look for results then too.
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
The additional piece that everyone listening needs to get is that you also have to deal with the post office. So you have to deal with the government to get them to help you finish this last leg of it. So it’s important that if you’re thinking about doing advertising for the holiday season, if you’re thinking about doing Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, that type of stuff, I would start having those conversations now. At least open the book now and have the conversation now because you’re going to want to have all the pieces in your timing just right, because if you start to have the conversation in October about sending something out for Christmas or New Year’s, we’re not saying that can’t happen but you’ve got a tough road of everything’s got to line up. So it’s just important. Planning is really important for this more than anything else.
And if you’re used to doing digital advertising or cold calling or selling, which are all things I’m used to doing, we can execute that stuff immediately. So my team and how we handle any type of print type of stuff. We recently put together a magazine as you can see right there if you’re looking on camera, and that took months of building out the content, getting it approved, printing it. All that took months to do and that’s not something we normally were doing. So for us, it was a learning experience. And I think as we go into more print type of things, like additional copies of that Customize Now magazine, we’re still learning lessons. So no matter how dedicated our team is and experienced our team is, when you move into a new media, it’s going to take you some time to learn. And we’re still learning doing print. Just a small pitch on that.
If you are in the direct-to-film business or screen printing business, if you’re thinking about direct-to-film printing and you’re still in that decision-making phase, be sure to go to coldesi.com and you could just live chat or fill out a form and let them know that you’d like us to mail you a copy of that Customize Now DTF edition, and we’ve got a bunch of articles and a bunch of great information that’s in there. It’s completely free. So just a little pitch for that.
Okay, there’s one other thing I’d like to ask and then we can wrap it up today. So maybe Austin, if you would kick this one off, what are the steps to getting started? So let’s just use somebody wants to start sending direct mail out for the summer, something going on the summer camp type of stuff, and how do they get started today? What are just some of the steps to they’re going to be able to get their first piece in somebody’s hands?
Austin Gordon:
Secondly, after you know who that audience is, let’s work to collect the data to see how many people are out there. Once we figure that out, we’ll determine, all right, now what’s the budget that we can work with to how many pieces we can mail out and target to that specific audience.
After that, it’s designing the mail piece and coming up with a call to action. We work hard to deliver to the right people at the right time using the data, but it’s almost most important to have the right message, that call to action that’s going to say, “I actually should do this.” Marc, you touched on it earlier, is that call to action, if you want those instant results or those quick wins, it’s probably the most important piece.
And then after you have your audience and your design and your call to action figured out, then it’s as simple as getting an artwork to a printer, getting the mailing list to a printer. If you weren’t working with them before that for the designing piece and the data, getting that to a printer and getting it to a press. It’s a lot simpler than you think once you get the planning done on who’s going to be receiving the piece.
Marc Vila:
Now, you could say, “Well, I got busy,” and that is one indicator, but also were you doing anything else that could have gotten you busy? Were you making cold calls and knocking on doors and going to… you join the local chamber of commerce or something like that? So how do you directly do that? And one of the things you could do is you can… Just a couple little tips and tricks. Whoever does your phone service, you could probably get a secondary phone number. And everything’s digital now, so you could put a different phone number on that postcard. And then when somebody dials that phone number, they’re dialing the specific phone number, which just goes to you anyway.
Your business size, it may even still ring cell phones of a couple of people if you’re doing forwarding like that, but you could probably get a report from that phone company on how many times that phone number rang. So you put that phone number on mailers. You put that on for a year, then at the end of the year, you could physically say how many times did people call the phone number on that mail? And that gives you a nice piece of data.
You can also do it with a specific website. You can literally just, you can… And this is if you don’t know how to do this, whoever handles your website can do this. You have a different web address. It’s a name of your business, may be shorter or slightly different. And then whoever handles your web property can set up that URL. And then every time somebody typed that in somewhere, that you can get a report on how many people typed that in.
Also, very specific offers are important too, a very specific coupon, a very specific deal that people will mention. And I recommend doing two or three or four of these very specific things because you want to add them all up together because not everybody’s going to call. Not everybody’s going to use the coupon. It’s a surprising piece of data on how many coupons go out that people end up doing business with the company and do not use the coupon that they got. It’s less than 50% of people. So if you send out a coupon and you got five people who used it, chances are you had 10 people who actually bought from you because of that piece of advertising, but only half of them use the coupon.
So it’s important to stack these things together, a specific website, a specific QR code, a specific video you tell them to watch, a specific phone number or a specific action. So being very specific, so it’s trackable is really important. So that’s an important part of that center sliver there, Gordon, on where you mentioned. Like when you’re picking your plan and your message, make sure you stick in their ways to be able to track that.
And then just going back a bit to what Michael talked about earlier with data, you are more likely to get business if you say, “Okay, I want to expand to my area.” So I’m actually going to break it down into medical field, restaurants, finance, mortgage, investment type of firms. Maybe you break it down into five categories. And when you buy the data or you rent the data, you’re going to say, “All right, I want all these five different types of businesses in these five different areas. Okay, it’s a thousand a piece.” Now, I want to do the mailing for the signs for dental or medical. It’s going to be all medical themed. You’re going to have doctors stethoscope, the sign is going to say, “Free vaccines here,” stuff like that.
And then the thing for the finance people, you’re going to show people in suits, shaking hands, computers with charts with arrows going up, whatever. So when that person gets that message, it directly relates to them versus the doctor getting a message of a chart with an arrow going up. That doesn’t mean anything to them. But to the finance person, they really see that as impactful. So naturally that’s all possible, right, if somebody wanted to do that?
Austin Gordon:
One example I want to give, Marc, when you were talking about tracking and how different ways that people that we’ve worked with have tracked is I was walking around one of our facility floors with a general manager of one of our facilities, and there was this cool piece of direct mail and he’s like, “Hey.” But nobody can take their phones out and take a picture of that because they have these QR codes that are specific to the person that receives it. So when someone takes out their phone and scans the mail piece that they get, the company that was doing this campaign would get notified saying, “Hey, Marc scanned the QR code on this mail piece. They’re interested in XYZ. You should email them. You should hit them with a digital ad.” It’s really cool what customization and personalization can do in the direct mail space that can really give you a lot of answers and really track how well campaign is performing and how are people interacting with the piece.
Marc Vila:
And honestly, if you talk to a company like Taylor, they may even just say, “You should probably just do that on your own.” It’s not worth it for all the trouble. But if you’re going to go into, “I want to try out a 90-day campaign or I want an annual budget. I really want to dive into this,” then you want to work with people who will help to guide you in the right direction, give you some good advice, have a little bit of strategy phone call, and ultimately send out a piece that you’re going to be proud to have sent out that hopefully works. That’s the ultimate goal, is that it works.
Well, we covered a good amount of stuff today. I think it’s probably time to wrap up this episode. But do either of you have anything else you wanted to add or anything that we missed in regards to direct mail and growing your business?
Michael Palme:
Marc Vila:
But it’s been around so long that it’s a challenge for somebody to come and feed you a bunch of lies that you can’t verify like it is with brand new stuff like influencer marketing. You could be fed a bunch of information with nothing to back it up or a bunch of information that’s not tried and true. But when it comes to pieces like print and direct mail, this is stuff that the data has been there for decades. Not only has direct mail been happening for hundreds of years or however long, but good data has been around for, I don’t know, 50 years probably of when people really started marketing and collecting data. So there’s really good data on this, meaning what works, what doesn’t work, how to do it, bringing the cost down. There’s a lot of great, solid good information that you can get. So it’s a good tried and true piece of marketing that can help grow your business.
So if it sounds right for you, of course you can feel free to reach out to the folks over at Taylor. Gracious that they came on here. So if you wanted to chat with any of them, we’ll make sure that you’re able to reach them in the podcast notes. So if you go to customapparelstartups.com or just ColDesi and just reach out to anybody on the team, you can also send an email to marketing at coldesi.com. That’s going to go to our marketing team. And people do this all the time, but literally just write an email and say, “Hey, Marc, I listened to the episode about direct mail. Can you help get me an introduction?” And I’ll just pass it along. It’s really no big deal at all. The fact that we got some of this education to help you guys out is really important to me, and I know it is to the folks over at Taylor. So thanks for joining us, and thanks everybody listening, and have a good business.
Austin Gordon:
Marc Vila:
Michael Palme:
The post Episode 201 – Grow Your Business with Direct Mail – Featuring Taylor appeared first on Custom Apparel Startups.