Meet The Mailers: Building Brands You Can Touch

In this episode, I chatted with Lisa Brooks, VP Operations and Director for Marketing Technologies at Brooks Litho & Digital Group. Brooks Litho is a full-service print and digital marketing solutions provider and is headquartered in Islandia, NY.

We talked about how to support your brand with physical and digital channels:

Among the many topics we covered:

• Lisa’s background in print and direct mail
• Quick rundown of Brooks Litho’s services
• Storytelling’s role in branding
• How mail works with other channels to create customer experience
• What kind of mail gets her attention

Here are some questions and answers from our conversation (edited for clarity and space):

• Everybody has their own unique origin story, where they started to where they are today. What has your journey been in your career to your role today?
  

Well, we are a family-owned-and-operated company. My father, David, started Brooks Litho & Digital Group back in 1998. We actually just celebrated our 37th year in business back in August, which is exciting.

And I’ve been fortunate enough to watch the company start. I mean, I was able to watch him, my dad begin the company. And I’ve really been involved in certain capacities, really since I was a teenager. That really made me want to be in this industry. I wasn’t sure I wanted to work for family. But as that happens, as fate would have it, it’s where I wound up.

Honestly, looking back at it now, I wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s a sense of pride I get, knowing that I’m working side-by-side with my dad for all these years. So it’s definitely been exciting.

I actually started as an entry level, but I was always anxious to learn more. And I would just try to involve myself, just sort of walk into each department, learn what was going on, how things worked. And that pretty much led to me now leading the day-to-day operations here.

The company is also interesting too, because we started in traditional digital and offset printing. But as we all know in this industry, as the world changes, the easier customers change. And that’s one thing I’ve always admired about my family and especially my dad is that he was always at the forefront of technology. You know, he saw variable data coming about.

He put the first digital press in in our area. We went totally filmless first. That was kind of really taught us, to make sure that you’re paying attention, that you’re keeping your pulse on what’s going on, making sure you’re implementing those strategies and resources that you think your clients need. And that helped us to dive into some other areas like large format, fulfillment, collateral management, which some people would know as web-to-print.

So it’s been great. And people don’t necessarily come to you just because they need something printed, which is kind of cool, too. I’ve had the opportunity to kind of see the business evolve, see the industry evolve and that transition from just being thought of as the printer that gets the printing done. We’re now partners with our customers. And that’s really been probably the most interesting part is to see that change.

• Can you give a quick rundown of what the company’s services are?
  

If you can put ink on it, we can do it. We can do everything. We’re still in the traditional offset and digital print realm. We do a lot of large format printing. We have gotten into promotional materials, swag, apparel. Fulfillment has really become a very big part of what we do. We’ve got a full warehouse of client-owned material. We’re able to manage their inventory, kit, drop ship nationally and internationally.

[I]t really kind of extends the full gamut of the industry. And it’s kind of cool to us. We love to take something that feels complicated to a client and manage it really as much as the process as we can. Really manage it from concept all the way through production and then to the final distribution, getting it into their customers’ or their recipients’ hands.

• So when a company comes to Brooks Litho and they’re looking to strengthen their brand, where do you start that conversation with them? What kind of questions do you ask before you recommend mail or another print type or marketing channel?
  

I think it’s important first off the bat to know what they’re actually trying to accomplish. Sort of, you don’t want that first sort of conversation to be, okay, give me your print specs. You kind of want to understand the overall goal of the campaign. What they’re trying to communicate, what action they want their customer or their audience to take, and then ultimately what success will look like to them.

So we start with those questions, sort of who is your audience? What’s your end goal? What are you trying to do? Acquire new customers, retain existing, generate leads, sort of what that looks like. And then really we ask also for some history, what they’ve done in the past, what’s worked for them, maybe what hasn’t. And then we can really from there start talking about the right combination of channels.

• Can you tell us about a client engagement, maybe where the request was basically starting off with “We just need to print this”. And then after asking the right questions, it turned into a bigger, broader customer experience type of solution…
  

Yeah, absolutely, this is one that we like to talk about a lot.

We had a client, they were coming to us. They really just wanted to do a basic direct mail postcard. They wanted to target new prospects and sort of kind of enhance their database. And at the time, they just wanted to offer a small gift for filling out a survey that was going to direct them… to a website. [T]hey would send out the gift for filling it out. We were able just in strategizing with them to kind of develop the project into something much bigger. We convinced them to offer maybe a higher-value item, which in this case was a backpack, to entice people to want to fill out a little bit more information.

They basically took that data obtained from the survey so we could leverage it even further. So what we did after the survey was filled out was before sending out that backpack, we created a secondary print piece that used the information that they obtained from that survey. And basically the client had taken that data, they had analyzed it on their end, determined which one of their products was going to work best for that particular individual.

They then provided us with an updated database, which we used to create a personalized print piece, which basically we took that information. It had a discount code on it for the piece of equipment that was best suited to that particular individual. And we mailed it out with the backpack. So it sat right on top of the backpack in the package that went out.

And the overall campaign resulted in over $400,000 of new business.

• Customers today, they move seamlessly between different types of touchpoints, digital and physical. We know that very well here at DirectMail2.0. and Who’s Mailing What! and DM20.ai. How do you see direct mail working with email and websites and social and other channels to create a consistent brand experience rather than silos or disconnected campaigns?
  

Well, I mean, I think that’s really where marketing is headed today. It’s not print versus digital. It’s about making all of the touchpoints work together. We’ve always heard that it takes 6 to 8 touchpoints to really generate a viable lead. And it’s important that customers use a variety of those different channels to target their audience. They can’t just use just one.

And they also need to make sure that overall message and the branding is consistent throughout those touchpoints. It needs to feel seamless. Also once a customer sees sort of the same consistency, they start to develop a little bit of trust with that brand. That’s when they tend to interact a little bit more, maybe on their social media or requesting more information.

But it’s also important on the mailer side to make sure that you’re measuring your responses. You can’t just send something out and sort of hope it works. You need to continue throughout to continue analyzing that data and just making sure that you’re making minor adjustments based on whether you get a response or not. It’s important to constantly be determining what’s working and what isn’t.

But I think the future is really making sure that print and digital work together in a way that feels natural.

• People often think that in brand, storytelling is something that just happens in video or digital content, but can a direct mail campaign tell a story as well? Have you worked with anybody where that was part of a larger story, the mail piece, and the customer journey?
  

Yes, this is actually a fun one because I believe that direct mail can be incredibly powerful when it comes to storytelling. As long as you’re working through that project the right way, you can reveal information in stages. You can use different sizes and shapes and textures, paper, finishes, even images, personalization. It all sort of kind of comes together.

And the mistake is really thinking of direct mail as just a brochure or postcard or some sort of bifold piece. You really do need to make it more of an experience. So dimensional mailers, special packaging, things of that nature will really make your piece sort of stand out. And that interaction of opening a piece sort of becomes a part of that experience. For us, we actually did a self promo for ourselves many years ago.

The main message was “Life is full of disappointments. Your printing shouldn’t be”. And it was a piece that went out each month for six months. But we didn’t just do a standard size piece. We created it as an 11 by 17 poster. And instead of just kind of mailing that as a folded piece, we rolled it into a tube. So now what happens is people are getting a tube in the mail. They’re wondering what this is because of course it’s sort of standing out.

Then the photos and the imagery we used were sort of these just outrageously funny situations that you would look at and be like, “oh, that’s a disappointment” or “that’s really awkward”. People just resonated with it so much that by month three, we had other people in offices calling us to be put on the mailing list because they were just so funny.

• [H]umor has a way of generating great word of mouth for your brand when it’s done well, of course, and that sometimes doesn’t happen, but…
  

Right. You have to be very careful. And that was one thing that we really, again, took the time to truly understand, made sure we were doing the right thing, using the right images. So it took some time to put together, but it was hugely successful for us, really got our name out there. I know we won a local advertising award, which as a printer, doesn’t really happen. And if memory serves, I think at the time, I believe we were the only printer to ever at that point had ever won an advertising award. It was local, but it was pretty neat.

• You’ve written about the importance of brand positioning. So how can direct mail reinforce what a campaign stands for and not just what it’s selling?
  

I think every interaction a customer has with a company is an opportunity to reinforce your brand. And direct mail shouldn’t really feel like something that exists outside of it. Everything that goes into it, the design, imagery, paper, sort of everything you use, the quality, it needs to communicate something. And for example, if you’re going to position yourself as a luxury or a premium band, your physical pieces should feel luxurious.

They should have certain characteristics that make it feel that premium, the brand is playful and approachable. What you use in terms of your content, your colors, your mail piece really needs to reflect that. And it goes back to what we were talking about with customers moving seamlessly through those channels. Everything that you do from your website and your social media to your sales materials to your direct mail, they all need to convey that same seamless identity.

• There’s so many forms of that available today with finishing and embellishments and all the format options, for self-mailers and envelopes. It’s really quite amazing all the possibilities there.
  

Absolutely. All those things play into it. Even the post office, they’ve got certain promotions that they run each year, the tactile promotion, integrating QR codes. So they’re really trying to get mailers on board, really doing some unique things.

• So we’ve got to talk about AI. As AI makes it easier than ever to create digital marketing, do you think that something tactile like direct mail becomes even more valuable for helping brands stand out?
  

Yes, absolutely yes. I’m actually a board member of our local PCC, Postal Customer Council, and I recently did a presentation for those members, and I shared a ton of statistics about why direct mail matters, especially in a digital world, especially with AI. And just to give you an idea of a couple of those statistics, Two Sides North America did a study that showed that print takes 21% less cognitive effort to process than digital.

Another one was Epsilon. They did a study where I believe it was 73% of American consumers say that they prefer being contacted by brands via direct mail. Then another one, which I think really, especially as we move into digital and AI even more, is that the postal service has shown in their studies that 90% of millennials believe that direct mail is more reliable than email. So I mean, just those 3 statistics alone, when it comes to having something tangible, having something in your hand, I think speaks to really the importance of integrating direct mail. I think they’re a vital part of a campaign’s success, especially in a world where we’re seeing digital fatigue and we’re seeing things become so automated. [B]eing able to generate just all of this AI content, I think it’s just important to still hold on to that physical piece.

• One question I always ask people is about their own experience with mail. I’m very keen on understanding what people get and what stands out to them. So has there been a recent mail piece that you received that made you stop and pay attention and maybe even respond to that offer or message?
  

I always love, again, going back to dimensional, I love pieces that come in the mail that are thick, that have some sort of an experience, an unboxing experience or anything, which is always really neat. The one piece that I saw recently, which I just thought was so cool and I wish that I had it, but it was more like a flip piece where every single time you open it, was almost like origami. You would flip it open on each side. So flip it top, bottom, right, left. And it was just revealing all these different panels as you moved along. It kind of brought me back to middle school and high school when you used to have those little fortune things that you used to fold and make out of paper.

• Yeah, I remember those.
  

Yeah, so it was more emotional. It exerted an emotional reaction, a nostalgic one. It was sort of really neat.

I just thought it was so brilliant. And then I also received a pop-up in the mail recently from a Broadway show, but it looked like a simple bifold postcard. And once you open it up, there was a pop-up that came out of it. I think when you’re used to seeing sort of, because I’m on those mailing lists, because I do live in New York, so I’m on the mailing list for some of those Broadway shows, you’re normally used to getting a certain type of piece.

So when this showed up and you open it and it sort of kind of came at you, it was perfect. It was a perfect theme for the show. It got me interested in wanting to learn more about the show, because I think it’s a new one. It’s a real treat to open.

• It’s interesting because I recall years ago getting from one of my panelists with Who’s Mailing What! a good amount of Broadway and off-Broadway-oriented mail. And a lot of it was just not all that special, but every so often there was something that really stood out.
  

Yeah, it makes your show kind of stand out. It makes you sort of want to see what makes that show maybe even different from some of the others that are out there. It’s neat when you see you’re so used to a routine from certain brands or certain industries when you see something different, it really, it stays with you.

Here is our conversation (with all questions and answers). We’ve added timecodes for your convenience.

Thank you very much, Lisa, for sharing your perspective and your expertise! To learn more about Brooks Litho, visit their website at BrooksLitho.com.

Your comments and ideas are very important to us in making your Who’s Mailing What! experience even better for you. Through these engaging talks, we hope you’ll take away practical tips, insights, and personal stories to inspire and build your own success.

If you have any feedback — or are interested in sharing your story and viewpoint with our wide and diverse audience on “Meet the Mailers” — please reach out to me. I’d love to hear from you!