370: 15 Ways to Boost Your Direct Mail with Brad Kugler
Bradley Kugler, Founder and CEO of DirectMail2.0, helps marketers uncover 15 Ways to Boost Your Direct Mail by combining physical campaigns with digital tracking, targeting, and attribution technologies. Driven by a desire to help others, Bradley shares the experience and lessons he has gained from building businesses, navigating disruption, and reinventing his career. His goal is to help marketers achieve stronger results while ensuring that traditional direct mail remains relevant in a digital-first world.
In this conversation, Bradley introduces The Direct Mail Edge Framework—Tactile Makes Memorable, Use for $1000+ Offerings, No Privacy Regulations, and Access Multiple Readers. He explains why direct mail is most effective when customer value justifies the cost, how a physical piece can reach multiple household members, and why less mailbox competition makes mail more memorable than digital advertising. Bradley also discusses combining direct mail with email, social media, programmatic advertising, QR codes, and call tracking to create eight to twelve impressions per target. He shares how his AI platform analyzes more than 80,000 campaigns, 2.1 billion mail pieces, and 18 creative attributes to predict engagement and improve campaigns before they are mailed.
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15 Ways to Boost Your Direct Mail with Brad Kugler
Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with Management Blueprint. And my guest today is Bradley Kugler, the Founder and CEO of DirectMail2.0, an omnichannel marketing system designed to seamlessly track direct mail campaigns and enhance overall results by integrating 15 digital technologies in one user-friendly platform. Brad, welcome to the show.
Steve, thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here and spread the word on something that is old that is new again.
Well, I’ve been a big fan of direct mail for my entrepreneurial life, and I’m very curious about the state of the art and whether it’s still alive and in what areas it’s still alive and whether it’s thriving, so we can dive into that. But before we go there, I want to ask my favorite question. What is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your business?
I would say my personal why, I always like helping other people. I get the most satisfaction about taking the experience, wisdom, and knowledge I’ve gained over the years, as I’m not a young man anymore. Tried a lot of things. A lot of things haven’t worked. And I’m able to impart this, and I really love to share and help other people, which is the main reason I do this podcast. I feel that I do have some valuable things to share, and I’m very proud of what I’ve done and my family and my children.
And if I can help one person, even if I have to talk to 10,000, then I feel it was worth it.
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I love it. I mean, ultimately, that’s what’s behind the best advice that people have, and I’ve heard a lot, is helping other people and how do you contribute to human flourishing, as Eric Kreitz says in his latest book. So let’s talk about direct mail because I built my first business on the back of direct mail. I was part of Dan Kennedy’s subscribers of his newsletter, and then he was a big copywriter.
You probably heard of him. I copied some of his techniques and that of some other copywriters, and it worked really well. And when I moved here, it kind of stopped working, and I thought this was because I was doing something wrong, which probably was the case. So tell me about the state of direct mail and how it works and how it has changed over the past 10 years or so.
Absolutely, and if you don’t mind, I’m going to just tell a quick story of how I arrived here. For 23 years, me and my brother and my father had a business distributing packaged media. Packaged media is DVDs, CDs, VHS, things that nobody uses anymore. One of our most successful marketing actions is we would send postcards of black-and-white 1930s disasters, ships turning over in a harbor, a train crash, a plane crash, and we would send these things to video stores and companies as a kind of an impingement-type photograph and tell them, “We’re here to solve your problems. If you had a disaster with inventory or managing your inventory, this is what we’re here to do.”
And it worked phenomenally for almost two decades. All right? It stopped working. It stopped working because there were less and less video stores, and people weren’t selling packaged media. It wasn’t for the fact that the marketing stopped working. The market changed, and we were facing impending doom. There was no way around it, and that isn’t really what triggered me, “I want to get in the direct mail business.” It wasn’t. It was the thought of knowing that I’m in a business that’s disrupted by technology. Everything was going streaming. Packaged media was no longer to be, and there was nothing I could do about it.
So I spent about a year researching. I never finished college, so I read all of the latest business books that MBAs read on their studies, and I sort of brought myself up to speed, and I came upon something. Number one,
I wanted to be a disruptor and not a disruptee. I want to be on the other side of this technology curve.
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I want to find something that is in danger, and I want to do something with it. That was number one. The other issue was the revenue model. I wanted a recurring revenue model, like everybody does, okay? So I was able to, through my connections, a very good family friend had a printing business that specialized in direct mail, who we had used for years, and she always asked, “Why aren’t you doing your postcards anymore?” I’m like, “Ah, they don’t work.” “Ah, nonsense.”
Obviously, I realized the industry, what didn’t work. The things are, direct mail is expensive, and if not done right, you can have a bad result, and it’s much more painful. Sending 5,000 postcards or letters is much more expensive than sending half a million emails, so this is what’s happened to this industry. So this friend of mine in the direct mail business said, “Hey, we have this little burgeoning idea of technology. We want to spin it off and sell it to other direct mail producers.” Took me almost a couple weeks to understand it because I didn’t really know anything about direct mail other than I used it, and I didn’t know anything about digital marketing or the technology behind direct mail.
So I forced myself to get over that hump as a 50-year-old man with three kids in college facing a new career, and I did that, and here we are seven, eight, nine years later and still growing. We have two other brands, and it’s all focused around technology that improves the chances of success with direct mail. That’s the overall story. We can get into the details as you ask for them.
Yeah, so what I’m curious about is how has this industry changed? So what is it about direct mail that worked really well in the past that doesn’t work anymore? And what is the area that perhaps was neglected in the past and evolved to be more successful right now?
So that’s a good and more difficult question than it appears to be. I’m sure you remember us being the same age some 20, 30, 40 years ago, our mailboxes were full in the United States of advertisements, a stack of them. As the digital revolution in marketing came upon, direct mail has waned. There were cheaper ways to get quicker attribution and more verified results. Direct mail was expensive, it wasn’t trackable, it wasn’t attributable, it was hard to measure the success. So as digital marketing was going like this, direct mail was going like this.
That’s not to say there aren’t still millions and millions of pieces going a day, but it had its pressures. As digital marketing became almost a background noise, everybody in the United States gets 10,000 digital messages a day. All right? How many messages do you get in your mailbox? Two? Maybe three? So
it's now become a point that it's less crowded, which is bringing new interest to it.
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Still very expensive, more expensive than ever, but you can now do things like you can track the arrival, you can have QR codes, text-back numbers, call tracking numbers to see the number of calls.
You have identity resolution pixels you can put on the website to see if the person got the mail, went to the website, and then you can identify the address they live at and match back. You can also use digital programmatic marketing to target the homes or the people going into certain businesses by geography, by drawing polygons around digital programmatic marketing. So we offer all of these as partners, our 15 technologies, so that now direct mail is as attributable as an email click or a digital ad click. So this is how it’s evolved over the last 10 or 15 years.
That’s fascinating. Yeah, that’s very deep. I like the 15 digital approaches. That’s probably not something we can cover on this podcast, but it’s something maybe the listeners can explore after the show. So let’s switch gears here a little bit because this podcast is all about frameworks, business frameworks. So what’s the right framework for direct mail? If someone wants to use direct mail for their marketing, what should they be thinking about? What are three to five things that if they nail, they’re going to have a successful campaign? I’m probably oversimplifying.
Great question. Great question. And I’ll put it to you this way. The ROI has to be commensurate with the spend. All right? So if you are literally spending $1 per target and you’re mailing to 5,000 or 10,000 people, that’s an expensive campaign to hit somebody one time, right? Now, if you’re going to send 10,000 emails, they’re a fraction of a penny each. So you’re having to sort of fit this type of marketing into a box where the ROI justifies the expense. Does that make sense? There are certain industries that direct mail excels in, and you probably know them by visiting your own mailbox. Financial offers. Retirement.
If you’ve had a kid in college, all the offers from universities. Nonprofits. We have found that an average order size of $1,000 or more justifies the expense of a direct mail campaign. So I’ve mentioned some that fall into that category. I’ll tell you some that usually do not. A pizza place, a donut shop, probably a dry cleaner, unless they use them every week. There are certain industries. A car wash. It’s very hard to get the individual lifetime value when your average order volume is below 1,000 bucks, unless it’s a weekly thing that you’re going to do, or you eat a lot of pizza, let’s say, for 25 bucks each.
Yeah.
So you need that high average order volume to justify the expense of direct mail. And
if you can justify that expense, the conversion rate on direct mail is, and studies will show this everywhere, is higher than email or banner ads or digital targeting.
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If you can justify the expense And the difference about us is we combine those worlds together to get the best possible lift, and it brings us to the value proposition. If you’re doing direct mail, and for an additional 10% or 15% higher cost, I can get you a 15% lift in your ROI or your engagement, that’s a no-brainer. I mean, there’s no guarantees in marketing, but we see anywhere from a 25% to 50% lift from only a 10% to 15% increase in cost.
Okay. So that’s great. So I think as a rule of thumb, it has to be an order value of $1,000 or more on average.
Or a lifetime customer value of over $1,000. So if it were pizzas, you’d have to be selling about four a week to the same guy.
Yeah. I understand. So that’s one element. What other elements are there for a successful direct mail campaign?
So we’ve all heard about the CCPA and all of the government regulations on digital advertising. I’ll tell you an industry that has no privacy or security regulations. It’s direct mail. You can send anybody anything without getting in trouble with anybody, any regulatory body. And there’s a lot of industries that are highly regulated online. The cannabis industry, anything health or medical, financial that targets certain types of demographics.
You can’t legally target these people online without getting pushback from Google or Meta or any of these large carriers. That is completely avoided in the direct mail industry. So you can send those sensitive things directly into the homes of people with no privacy, security, or regulatory reduction in that.
Okay. So that’s the second one. Are there others? Are there a couple others?
Yes, there are. The other issue is when you’re targeting an individual online, you’re targeting the one individual. When you mail to a household, you’re most—I think there’s a—I don’t remember the stats, so don’t quote me, but I think it’s 60% of the people in the household see that same advertisement even though it’s directed to one person. Yes. So you have mom and dad and the kids all flushing through the mail every day. When you’re sending a digital ad, an email or a banner ad to one person, that’s it. They’re the only ones that see that if they’ve targeted right.
Now, some people can look at that as a plus or minus. They’re getting more impressions for other people either in the household or they’re not. But sometimes those impressions aren’t targeted ones, and you’re paying for them. You are absolutely paying for them. You don’t pay a cent extra to have the other people in the household see that piece of mail. All right? There are also big-time studies as far as retention in terms of memory. Having a tactile ad that’s a piece of mail, you are going to remember that. And again, I’m not up to date on the latest studies, but it is known that tactical advertising—tactile, not tactical, touch—is remembered much more than a digital ad. Of course, there’s the big one. There’s three or four pieces of competing ads in your mailbox. Go on your computer, you’re probably seeing thousands per day. Thousands.
Yeah.
What are you going to remember from that?
Yeah. That’s great. That’s great. So what I always wondered about is consumer versus B2B. The big challenge for me when I came here was that in Europe it was easy to mail to business owners and CEOs because there were regulatory requirements for them to file their accounts, and you could actually find their home addresses, you could mail to them and reach them. And when they are behind gatekeepers, it becomes a much lower proposition for them to actually see the mail piece. So is there a way to overcome this?
With the mail, yeah, just like you said, we can go and we use a data company and get their home address, send the mail direct to their house. 100%, we do have customers who do it all the time. It is difficult. We recommend doing both. I know that’s an additional cost of data and an additional piece, but you can get the person at their home. I don’t care what kind of email address you have. Most CEOs or decision-makers in any sort of company doing more than a million, $2 million are getting 300 to 500 pieces of email a day.
So again, it’s a fight for the eyeballs. And I’m not saying that our product doesn’t do this. It does this in conjunction with direct mail. It’s perfectly timed. We start doing follow-on ads four days after the mail is delivered. Then we start doing targeted ads for the next 30 days. So the premise of our platform, because we’re combining digital with direct mail, is we’re taking that one piece of mail and we’re multiplying the impressions through multiple digital channels: email, social, programmatic. So you’re getting that message, we’re shooting for eight to 12 times.
And
most studies say what you get told eight to 12 times, you will remember.
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Now, that doesn’t mean everybody sees it eight to 12 times, but we take the number of pieces of mail, divide it by the number of impressions, and yeah, sometimes some people might have seen it 20 times and some people might have seen it two times. But we do average that eight to 12 times per mail piece, per target.
Yeah. Love it. That’s very cool. All right. So let’s talk about growth. We talked about the framework. I’m curious about what drives growth in your business?
Our growth is driven, I’m going to say, a lot by economics. The first thing that businesses tend to cut back on in times of economic thinning, as I call it, we have right now, is marketing. It’s the easiest controllable expense. Nobody likes to lay people off. That’s sort of a last-ditch effort. They can’t change their rent. But what can they change on a moment’s notice? They can change their marketing spend. So you get some, I’d say most, that pull back the reins a little bit on marketing. It’s the smart people that actually pour the coals on the marketing, and I’ll tell you why.
You’ve got a lessening of messages from a multitude of people. It is the best and cheapest time to increase your marketing budget because the competition is not as much.
More successful businesses break out and grab their beachhead in times of leaner economics than in boom times.
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All right? So this is where a business can get a beachhead or expand its beachhead on growth by spending more money on marketing. This is what we started doing. We’ve been taking our own medicine. We have doubled our marketing budget this past summer. We have now tripled our lead flow in the last two or three weeks.
Because I tell people to do this, I tell people to do this sort of like, “Listen, we’ve got money in the bank. Why don’t I do my own case study?” We’ve doubled our marketing budget, and we’ve doubled or tripled our lead inflow. Sometimes doubling your marketing budget, you’re lucky to get a 15%, 20% increase in your lead inflow. Well, we’ve more than doubled our lead inflow, and I have to believe it’s because most marketing agencies, most companies are cutting marketing expenses. We have less noise going to the same audience.
Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. It’s difficult to do, but it makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, especially if you’re spending more money and you’re not making as much money. That’s one thing that keeps business owners up at night. What’s the best way to sleep at night? A strong cash flow. So I’m going a little bit against the grain. We are increasing our spending on marketing, not only as an experiment, but to prove what I’ve been preaching. So far, so good. Ask me in six months, and then I’ll have a better idea.
I love it. I love it. So Brad, what is one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business right now?
It’s the thing I mentioned right now. We are doing a lot of A/B testing in trying to drive new top-of-the-funnel activities, new leads in. I did something I don’t normally do. I’ve always had a fear of hiring a consultant, okay? And I paid a gentleman who sold me on marketing and told me some things that we should be doing, and I paid him a five-figure number to guide us through this sort of jungle, okay?
So we’re doing a very specific funnel, socially targeting a certain type of business with a certain type of offer to get our product in front of more people. And it is working. Again, our sales cycle is 45 to 60 days, so this just happened in the last two or three weeks. So I don’t have dollars to share on this, only what I mentioned, that our lead flow and top of the funnel is wide open, the widest it’s been open in a year.
So that’s the major constraint, to increase the lead flow.
For us, because we’re in such a narrow TAM, we’re basically talking to commercial printers that specialize in direct mail or direct mail advertising agencies. This is a niche within a niche. Because our TAM is so narrow, we’re opening that up a little bit, and we’re kind of giving ourselves to a wider market than we have normally done. And will they convert into paying customers? That’s an experiment that’s mid-route. But yes, we’ve opened the top of the market significantly. The top of the funnel, I should say.
That’s very interesting. So what do you think of how AI is disrupting digital marketing, and how it might help or how it’s going to impact direct mail?
That’s something that I’ve been working on for the last 18 months. Having been a previous disruptee for packaged media, this was not something I was going to allow. I can tell you that we’ve built our own platform. You can see it at DM20.ai. And basically what it does, it takes, we have tracked results of over 80,000 direct mail campaigns. That’s 2.1 billion pieces of marketing mail.
We have the attribution results, meaning I know by industry and by address what consumers and businesses have responded to, okay? That’s one half of the data modeling equation. The other is, I have all the creative pieces. So we have digitized them. We’ve mapped every pixel. We’ve identified 18 different attributes in the creative, and I’ll give you examples: QR code, size and color of the phone number, size and color of the URL, the image-to-text ratio, the use of colors and what type of color palettes.
We’ve mapped the keywords and the headline and the call to action. So we’ve got all these campaign results. We’ve got all of this creative that’s been mapped. And when I say campaign results, we also know the number of pieces, when it was mailed, how many times it was mailed, and it’s a lot of data. So we hash all this together by industry so that it’s correlatable. You can’t correlate a mortgage offering to a landscaping offering. So we put all of these into 150 different buckets, and then we’ve looked at what is the average engagement rate per bucket.
And then we further break it down by size of mailing, type of mailing, time of year. And we’ve established a benchmark for every vertical called engagement rate. So based on the number of pieces of mail, what was the percentage of people that engaged with that piece of mail by that vertical, by that timing, by all the things I just mentioned, and then we’ve got a benchmark. So now somebody comes in, and they upload their mail piece. Before they mail it, they upload, I think it’s 11 questions on their targeting that correlates to our data schema, and it digitizes that mail, looks for all the things they have, and it plots, based on that information, where it would rank.
So if the average engagement rate for financial offers is 2.3%, and this comes in at 2.1%, we now look at what creative or what things were different that could raise that to at least be on par, if not above par. And then we have all three frontier models that take our algorithm and our data, and then we use Gemini to feed it to one, we use Chat to feed it to the other, and then we have Claude take both of those responses and compare and contrast them and normalize the response, eliminate hallucinations and outliers, and give a cohesive summarization of how they can raise their engagement rate based on our data.
This is a product that we came out with just in April, by the way. People are raving about it. I don’t have any case studies yet. It’s pretty new. We allow people to retest. It costs anywhere from $25 to $99 to test your mailing, and again, the value prop is simple. If you’re going to spend $3,000 or $4,000 on doing a direct mail campaign, why not spend $25 to $100 to see how it’s going to perform and take those recommendations, execute on them, and retest again, no additional fee, and see if you get the desired result?
So we are going to market with that, and we are doing guerrilla marketing on that to people we found that do direct mail. So that’s, again, very early in the life cycle of this. This is a product that’s never existed, nobody has ever developed. We have the largest database of direct mail, I believe, at least in the United States. I even acquired a company two years ago called Who’s Mailing What, that had been collecting samples of direct mail since 1984. So we’ve incorporated aspects of that database into the modeling as well, and are providing users that say, “Here’s what other people are doing in your similar targeting and similar industry, and this is what they’re doing.” So we’re offering a competitive intelligence tool along with it.
So that’s what we’re doing in AI. All of our platforms have been retooled to get away from filters and searches to plain-language AI-type question and answer. So we’re staying on top of this. I’m not getting disrupted again.
Yeah. I love it. This is fascinating. I mean, sounds like you have the data, which is the most valuable thing these days. Yeah. Because AI can work with it, and you got your frontier models processing it too.
Yes.
That is fascinating. How do you handle the evolution of copywriting over the years? When you compare mailing pieces from 1984 and the 2020s, how has that changed? I mean, has that even changed at all?
Very little. The messaging and the offering and the creatives, the only things that are different are you’ve got QR codes and text-back numbers. Obviously, URLs didn’t exist in the ’80s and early ’90s. Those things are must-haves. Thirty, forty years ago, you didn’t have any of that. Sometimes you didn’t even have a phone number. People would just be given a little coupon code and told to walk in. So obviously, with the advent of technology and these different things being immediately, in real time, attributable and trackable, you’re able to do that.
Plus, now you can track mail delivery into a home like you can track a package, so you can predict exactly when that mail is going to arrive. And with things like that, you know when to do follow-up, you know when to man your phones or man your stores if it’s a brick-and-mortar. So there’s a lot more technology that has gone into this over the years, and direct mail is not the same, as much as it looks the same as it was in the ’80s and ’90s. But it’s just a matter of using these technologies. And I’m not trying to be all things to all people, but any of these technologies, you can go and do them yourself or find multiple vendors to bring them together.
We bring them together all in one place, so that’s part of our value proposition. We don’t expect you to go to a telephonic company and then a company that tracks AI or QR codes, and then work out with the post office how you’re going to track the mail, and then trigger emails based on when the mail arrives, and target social campaigns at the same time the mail’s arriving. That’s a lot of work. We do it all on the back end, and it’s all automated.
Love it. Okay, well, final questions. I’m a junkie for direct mail, so I can’t resist asking this. Is lumpy mail still a thing?
Lumpy mail? You’re talking about the little packages with bubbly enclosures that things get.
Yeah, putting, yeah, bubbly, probably bubbly, and putting something in the mail. Is it seen as a gimmick, or does it still work?
Yes. In fact, it works fantastically, but the price goes up three-, four-, fivefold when you get above two ounces. All right? So people remember it. I’ll give you an example. We did a bubbly mailing for customers last year where it was a puzzle, where you had to move the ball into a hole. You’ve all seen that, right? And if you get it in the right hole, the puzzle unlocks, and on the inside of the puzzle, we had one half of a $100 bill, currency.
And obviously, somebody could just smash it or whatever, but we wanted to make a game of it. And they said, “Okay, well, you get your demo, and we’ll send you the other half of the $100 bill, and you go to your bank, and you unlock it.” It was a very successful campaign. I think we got a 50% or more response rate. But again, if you include everything, I was $100 and some dollars into that investment. And if I don’t get that other half hundred back, guess what? It still was over $100 per investment. It gets very expensive to scale something like that. But those bubbly packs absolutely work. Quantities are low, so you have to be very targeted on those.
Yeah. Yeah. Love it. All right. So probably we could have another episode on the intricacies of direct mail, but we can’t do that. However, if you are listening to this and you are thinking about up-leveling your marketing in this very noisy digital marketing time, then definitely don’t neglect looking at direct mail, especially since it’s attributable, trackable. It can be part of a campaign.
You can keep the costs low by staying under two ounces, and if you have an offering of $1,000 or more, this is a real viable thing. So if people would like to explore more, where should they go? Where can they find out more? You mentioned your data model. Where can they use that application? How can they connect with you?
The easiest thing is go to dm20.com. That’s dm20.com. You can find me. You’ll be able to find all of our other direct mail performance stack that we’ve been discussing here. And you can find me on LinkedIn if you want to communicate with me directly.
Awesome. Well, Brad, thanks for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom. You’re definitely at the cutting edge on this topic. And if you enjoyed this conversation, stay tuned. I have a couple of entrepreneurs every week sharing their frameworks with you. Thanks, Brad, for coming, and thanks for listening.
Thank you, Steve. It’s been great. Thanks for the time.