Kim Courvoisier remembers the day she got a Slack message from her sales team who just got off an inbound call from a publishing giant. They had been reading the company blog for years before reaching out and eventually signed a $2 million deal. “Great content builds relationships like these and makes you a trusted thought leader. That’s everything to me.”
Kim has built an illustrious career in marketing, returning time and again to research as a cornerstone of her content program. Today, she’s the Director of Content & Customer Marketing at Lob, an intelligent direct mail automation company. I recently spoke with her about their 2022 State of Direct Mail Report, where they partnered with Comperemedia to survey 150+ marketing leaders about the approach, effectiveness, and best practices of modern direct mail.
How would you describe what Lob does?
For a long time, people thought that direct mail was dead, but it’s never been more alive and relevant than it is now. It’s the perfect part of any omnichannel strategy.
Sending direct mail in a manual way is really slow and complex. Lob’s platform automates printing, postage, delivery, and address verification – and gives our customers unlimited access to a print delivery network.
Let’s say you want to send out a campaign that’s going to a geo that’s surrounding Atlanta. We would send your job to a printer in that area so that it gets done quicker, faster, and gets out to market quickly. We automate all the complexity so you can send direct mail as often as you want at any scale. It’s a real game-changer because if you think about the old way of doing direct mail, it was complicated. It involved a ton of different players and maybe third-party agencies and printers. It could take months to get a direct mail campaign out the door. We have a one-week SLA.
Our research showed only 5% of marketers are using direct mail as a standalone tactic. That’s music to our ears because when you use direct mail on its own, it gets perhaps around a 6% response rate. But when you start to combine it with your other digital tactics, when you bring that offline and online world together, those results skyrocket into the 25-30% range.
We know when we send out emails, not everybody opens them. For a direct mail piece, you have to take it out of your mailbox. You are touching it. Is that an open? I’d like to think so, and the response rate definitely improves when you combine it with other things.
Tell us a bit about your role at Lob
I’m the Director of Content and Customer Marketing. My team and I create all of our external-facing content. We report to our CMO and are part of the larger marketing team. The content that we create helps us generate demand and helps our marketing and sales teams go out and attract new customers.
Tell us about the 2022 State of Direct Mail Report. What inspired you to create this?
I’ve seen time and again that proprietary data is the foundation of thought leadership.
The company that I was at before Lob did subscription billing and management. One of the things that attracted me to work there was that they had a research team. We were able to mine our customer data, anonymize it, and then turn it into robust research reports. To me, that was everything I’d always wanted. I saw the power in being a thought leader and being able to own that data.
As a content marketer myself, whenever I start writing anything I start researching and looking for data I can source. That’s the opportunity I see. If my company is a source of that data, we are trusted experts in our field and establish ourselves as thought leaders. And, others in our industry may want to cite us as a source in their content which is also excellent for thought leadership.
That’s why I pitched doing a research project during my interview process with Lob. They said, “We’ve done that before and it didn’t perform as well as we hoped.” I told them, “Let’s try it again and do it a little differently.”
We are the only company doing intelligent direct mail automation. I knew we could own that category, and that with strong research and solid data we could put together a compelling narrative and do a lot with it.
Walk us through how you approached the research project. Who did you collaborate with?
Before starting, I met with the sales team and asked, “What are the blockers in the sales process? What are the obstacles? What kind of proof points do we need?” I then asked my product marketing team, “What are the answers that we need when we’re talking to prospects?” Then, I worked with the marketing team and the demand gen team, asking what they would do with all this data. “What’s the format that we would put this out in? What are all the different ways we could promote it? What are the different ways we can get eyeballs on it?”
I was a team of one at the time so I knew that I couldn’t do this whole research project myself. Having a third party help us produce this – Comperemedia – was really helpful. I’ve worked with third-party research companies in the past, and know they’re worth their weight in gold if you’re a small team and need someone to help do the heavy lifting of running the research or analyzing the data.
We were really collaborative in the question writing process because we were benchmarking a report that had been done in 2019. We already had a base of questions, but wanted to level it up and cover some different areas. We were able to add those in and really leaned into the Comperemedia team to write the questions in a way that does all the branching because they’re the experts there.
Tell us about the data collection process.
It was a web-based survey. For this report, we surveyed about 170 people. They were all in our core, ideal customer profile: enterprise marketers who had a certain number of direct mail pieces, in certain industries.
Did anything stand out or surprise you about the survey results?
Absolutely. Since I worked in email marketing for about a decade before this, I was curious how enterprise marketers viewed direct mail and its place in their omnichannel strategy.
Here’s what we found: 67% of the respondents to the survey said that direct mail was the highest ROI of any channel they were using. That blew me away. There’s no better stat I could have gleaned from the survey than that.
Seeing that only 5% of marketers were using direct mail as a standalone tactic was also great to see because everything we preach from a strategy perspective is to not put all your eggs in one basket. Using direct mail as part of your omnichannel strategy is the smart way to do it because you can’t just rely on email. You can’t just rely on social media or digital ads. You really have to put together an omnichannel strategy with different touchpoints and different ways of communicating with consumers throughout their lifecycle in order to be effective.
How did you get your research findings out to your target market?
We created a full-length report and made it a downloadable PDF that our demand gen team could promote via a gated landing page. We also did a number of webinars in which we discussed the trends uncovered in the report. We promoted the report and webinars on our website, on organic and paid social media, and via email and newsletter communications.
We also published a press release for the research, as we have to continue to champion the channel. Our whole team had a link to the report in our email signatures. We’re using it at events. It was an all-hands on deck approach to promoting it.
All the content we create needs to be a value add. I’m a big fan of Jay Bayer who always talks about utility-based content. Be helping, not selling. I think this type of content that’s data-driven and results-driven is always going to add value.
What business results did you get from this project?
As we talked about, this report was created for thought leadership which is a cornerstone of content marketing. Between the gated report and the webinars, our demand generation team was also able to create over a dozen qualified opportunities with hundreds of thousands of dollars in pipeline in just the three months since we launched it. That’s what data like this can do for your marketing team.
The other less quantifiable aspect of the report was like we talked about earlier, having stats available for other people to cite in their articles, blogs, and other content, as well as for our marketing and sales teams to use in pitches with prospects. Now we have it and we own it which is powerful.
Any advice for those considering conducting their own research project?
I’m going to borrow Nike’s tagline: just do it.
Data is gold. When you have proprietary data that you own, it’s incredibly powerful. There are so many ways you can use it. Having proof points like “67% agree that direct mail delivers the highest ROI of any channel” is huge for our sales and marketing teams. It blows the roof off of the notion that direct mail is a thing of the past. It’s incredibly compelling because it’s coming from our ideal buyer persona.
Research is worth the investment. I think sometimes we poo poo things like bringing in a third party because it’s like, “Oh, am I going to spend a chunk of your budget to do a survey?” Yes. Do it.
That investment can return tenfold in pipeline if you do it well and you craft that narrative in a compelling way.
Connect with Kim Courvoisier on LinkedIn – and download the 2022 State of Direct Mail Report here.