Episode Details

Double-tap — or in some cases just tap — to like. Those little filled-in hearts and thumbs-up used to be the currency of marketing campaigns. How many did you get? Then bots disrupted, and the market for selling likes got out of control. Brands started wising up to the super high customer acquisition costs they were seeing in their marketing reports and they wanted to trim the fat, to know more about who was seeing what and for what reason? Passionate about intricate marketing details like these is Dave Fink the CEO & Founder of Postie. He’s seen a lot of change in the social media marketing landscape in his times on the scene. 

“We were starting from an authentic place, which was a need for more control over our growth - beyond the behemoths that are social and search. Watching those channels take more and more power, and marketers lose more and more power over their growth trajectory, but not wanting to acquiesce and give up all of the technology and tools and data and measurement and predictability that comes from those channels.”

The realization that social media marketing on Facebook was extremely volatile and based solely on large corporate algorithm decisions made by the tech giants sobered Dave into action to move away from relying on paid social media and into the physical mail sector. On Marketing Trends, hear more about how Dave built Postie into one of the most data-driven marketing platforms and how companies within the Fortune 500 are using Postie to level up its customer experience. All this next on Marketing Trends. 

Main Takeaways

• Advantages of Direct Mail to Marketers: There is so much data and 100% of the possible market to be reached, physically with direct mail marketing. So much focus has been spent in recent years on tracking clicks and cookies and other digital marketing metrics that the cost of direct mail marketing has gone down and the effectiveness of it remains high.
• Generating Data for Direct Mail Campaigns: To be effective in direct mail campaigns you need a lot of data that can support predictive modeling and auto-optimization. All of this data can be fed to computers thereby increasing the effectiveness of machine learning. Direct mail in the modern era is about using data to micro-target the best possible consumer.
• Invest in having good mentors: The difference between business owners that have and utilize the wisdom to be gained from mentors is significant. Be aggressive and seek out the mentorships and curate those relationships, as it will be of great advantage to you.

Key Quotes

“We were starting from an authentic place, which was a need for more control over our growth - beyond the behemoths that are social and search. Watching those channels take more and more power, and marketers lose more and more power over their growth trajectory, but not wanting to acquiesce and give up all of the technology and tools and data and measurement and predictability that comes from those channels.”

“We think about data and insights probably in two different buckets. The first bucket is direct mail. It’s a channel that can provide big data, both first-party data, and third-party data for all sorts of miraculous things —  predictive modeling, auto-optimization. The same kind of characteristics that social has. You get better with bigger data and you get better with testing and insights. A core focus of Postie is big data and machine learning, The biggest product focus that we spend our time on is thinking about how to give all advertisers access to the same data and mathematical advantage that they get from other channels.”

“We think about monster companies like Airbnb, Uber and L