Wine Enthusiast grosses $1.5 million from retargeted direct mail campaign

Retargeted direct mail is one of the latest technological feats that provide outsized results from campaigns. A third party identifies the IP addresses of people browsing any website and then matches them with physical addresses. From there, the publisher can send marketing postcards to the addresses.

The entire process, from address matching to printing and mailing postcards, can be handled by specialty printers such as Kodi Collective (now Sheridan).  The cost is about $1 per mailer.

Thomas Cousins, Business Development Director at Kodi, who presented a case study at the 2024 Niche Media Conference, said that campaigns work best when the product’s purchase price is higher end, which is why it typically doesn’t work well for subscription sales.

The end user must also be B2C since only home, not business addresses, are matched.

Campaigns can be used to re-engage customers who have abandoned a shopping cart, send an offer to a frequent visitor, or personalize offers for loyal customers.

One success story comes from the Wine Enthusiast, an e-commerce store for wine and all things wine related, which also publishes a digital magazine.   They wanted a campaign that would increase sales during the summer, an off-peak season for wine and used Kodi Collective to create the campaign.

How they did it

Kodi Collective, a full-service printer for catalogs and magazines, partners with a third party for the address matching.

Wine Enthusiast supplied the IP address and placed a tag in the areas on the website most likely to show purchase intent, taking into account time on site and views of  shopping cart pages.

About 60 to 70% of IP addresses were matched to physical addresses, reaching about 50,000 homes at around $50,000.

The physical addresses were forwarded to KoDI daily, who mailed out the postcards first class immediately “to strike while the iron’s hot.”

The postcard promoted wine coolers with an offer of 10% off.

“Imagine browsing Wine Enthusiast’s website for wine fridges on a Monday, only to receive a postcard featuring the same fridge and an enticing promotional offer by the following Friday,” the use case reports.

A dashboard allows the customer to track results, KPIs, and metrics.

Results

The Wine Enthusiasts sold $1.5 million in sales over six months against an investment of $50,000.

Conclusions

Media Advertising, a digital agency, has shown a 37% higher conversion rate for printed postcards than email; numerous other statistics show the same. These campaigns can be utilized or resold with the following criteria:

• Tags are placed on the right check-out pages to find addresses and re-target high-value goods and services.
• Online sales are more easily trackable, but higher-value goods such as competitive horses, laughs, and aviation equipment are not conducive to online sales.
• Do give a discount; otherwise, after the research, there is no incentive to use the promo code on the email.