Meet The Mailers: Elevating Direct Mail Pieces

In this episode, I talked with Dave Baird, President of Truly Engaging. Headquartered in Arden Hills, MN, Truly Engaging is a family-owned, online stationery company that helps people and businesses create personalized announcements and promotional products.

Showing numerous examples, we chatted about how the company has evolved from manufacturing magnets to printing personalized and now, embellished mailers and promotional products.

Among the many topics we covered:

• Truly Engaging’s start with magnets
• Why magnet & sticker mailers work
• The value of embellishments
• The story behind the company’s magnetic fresco photo tiles
• One of his favorite direct mail pieces

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

• Everybody has a journey to where they are today from where they were before. Why don’t you start by talking about what’s [your] family business and how the company changed from Magnet Street in response to market demand and becoming Truly Engaging?
  

[I]t started with my father who is now long since retired but still with us… he had this vision of creating this magnet company way back in the late 80s, having ideas of how he could be the first to do short runs and full color and thinking insurance agents and sports teams and all those kind of things. And he was putting that all together at the same time my wife and I were getting ready to have our first child and so… my wife Lisa had been a school social worker and so we were getting ready for her just to stay home and thought, hey we could make a few extra bucks if we kind of marketed some of these magnets to maybe realtors or something on the side.

We just caught this huge real estate wave about ‘95 and so our timing … we may not have been the greatest but our timing was the greatest, and our customers were very gracious. We caught on with Remax … we rode the wave and did calendars and schedules and all those kinds of things. That’s really how it all started and how I got involved in the business and I was kind of part time with it for a few years and then it just got too big to handle, and I went full time, I suppose around ‘99, 2000.

In ‘05 the internet really started to become a thing and we were doing a lot of search engine optimization and all of a sudden we started seeing all this “Save the Date” magnet and honestly we had no clue. I went and bought a few wedding magazines on my way home from work on a Friday. My family officially thought I was nuts, and within six months we launched. We became Magnet Street Weddings and I think we did 75,000 weddings our first full year doing “Save the Date”.

Yeah, short run digital, we were just so fortunate to be at the time and place that we were. We carried on Magnet Street Weddings as long as we could but as we got into invitations and programs and all that, I don’t think a lot of brides ran to their friends and were excited to tell them “Hey, I bought my invitations from a company called Magnet Street”. Truly Engaging had been our wedding blog for at least a decade and so we just made the merge from the blog and then covered the whole gamut of our markets and products and it’s been great.

• I think it certainly works better as Truly Engaging for that audience but speaking more broadly can you give us a brief rundown of the company’s products and services which I imagine still has all the wedding invitations but the other products and services you encompass?
  

Calendar magnets is still a massive business for us. So serving small businesses of all kinds – real estate was our original piece – but at the end of the day, it’s still a physical tangible thing, it’s relatively inexpensive. And people in this country, they get a magnet, they just kind of know what to do with it, you know? We got our magnets on Seinfeld, we got on a different show just by dumb luck. So magnets are just kind of Americana. You watch a sitcom and you still see magnets on the fridge. That product is still super important.

We literally print millions of magnets every week. So we do a lot of sports schedules and everything for small business with good content just to keep their name and number and whatnot in front of their prospects. And then “Save the Date” is still a core…[I]f you’re sending them out nine months, a year before your wedding, it’s still just a great product to keep that up and usually they never get taken down.

But we get back to the core, this is really the product – one of the original products – and it’s just come obviously a long way. We were the first ones to do like a photograph on a magnet. I remember doing Notre Dame/Ohio State for a Sports Illustrated photographer. We did a whole series and it really helped put us on the map with color magnets and so that’s early 90s. So we just keep taking something that was good and then hopefully making it a whole lot better, with all our varnishing and foils and all that.

We kind of figure out what markets are we strong in and how do we bring more products and just that we can kind of raise the bar of excellence.

• One of the great things about print products and direct mail as well is that it can stick around for days, weeks, months, and in the case of some of these for weddings they just become permanent …So part of what makes a brand unmissable is keeping yourself top of mind. Why is it that in our digital age that mail still works? And how is it that digital embellishments and finishes raise the bar even more?
  

Well, I think that there’s not as much mail in our mailbox, there’s just some breathing room in there. So if there’s something interesting and engaging, the chance of the consumer to find it and see it is a whole lot better but at the same time direct mail is competing with all the other mediums. Direct mail can’t live in the past, it has to keep raising the bar. You know, maybe we’re not doing the exact same thing but you have to keep showing excellence and why I want to engage with this piece. And that’s where for us, embellishments is massive. And we bring it to every corner of our company, that we can elevate our products, and direct mail in particular, is a big win. There’s something about that tactile nature that brings out the print. We compete with every medium and so this is just a great way to really stand out in the mailbox.

• I see a lot of, on your different pieces, spot UV and other really cool techniques that can make parts of a printed piece really shine, literally shine.
  

If you want another example, like for us Christmas cards is a big growing part of our business … many companies have added foil, but now we’ve added foil and varnish so those photos just really pop, right? It’s still a 4/4 piece, you tell a great story, so we’ll bring embellishment to any place that makes sense, we can do it economically, and it will really elevate the product.

• Why don’t we talk about the magnet mailers, which keep the mailing piece around for a while. I have a bunch of them sitting on my fridge and I move them around every once in a while … are there any special design or size considerations for either the magnet or the printed piece, the mailing piece that it is attached to?
  

We were one of the first ones to gain USPS approval, the way we use the removable glue to get to be able to stick the magnet on it. If you could notice [shows mailer] – see how the magnet is… the image on the postcard is screened behind it and the magnet sits perfectly over that image right?

That doesn’t happen by accident, it takes a little bit to get there but …this is just a 3-1/2×4 magnet on a 6×9 postcard and so it’s still pretty economical but powerful … this is a college Save-the-Date for an event, but it delivers really well, all the coatings protected in the mail and so you get scuffed up a little bit on some of the feeding equipment at the USPS. [A]gain like you said, something about a magnet when it goes up on the fridge, it rarely leaves … it’s got tremendous inertia and it’s just kind of there. I guess when people move is probably the one time they finally clean off the fridge but it does a lot of work long after that. How long does a postcard typically last, you know? Seconds, and if we can give them a compelling reason, if you really target them well and that magnet is of value to them – you’ve got a great shot of keeping that message around for a long long time.

• Looking back to another mailer, mail that sticks around, and that’s these sticker postcards. I see and feel a lot of embellishments at work here. Can you talk about this unique kind of mailpiece and the advantages in using them?
  

Yes, college, university, not-for-profits, corporate …it’s been super fun for us. This product that you’re referring to is our mailable full-color sticker. We’re the first to be able to do a full 4/4 where we can obviously custom do the printing, we can do variable printing on the side – this one isn’t [shows mailer] – but like if it was a football jersey, we can put every kid’s name on it. We know it was a hit when early on, our customers started doing their mailings and the people who received the mailing loved it so much they’re calling whoever sent it out saying “where did you get this?” and so we really grew very quickly as a result.

The whole product really exists because magnet material back during Covid became very hard to come by for about a 9-16 month period. We had all these customers who are used to doing mailings coming to us like “well what are we going to do, what’s our plan B here?” and that’s when we got to work with some incredible engineers. And we developed this product, we’re the only ones who have the material as far as I’m aware. We started testing it and building it.

Scodix is the equipment we use for our varnish and foil and all that and it’s been an amazing partnership and just a great company to work with. The president of Scodix was out in our plant early on when we were starting to just make this and we weren’t putting varnish on it or anything like that. And I asked him, “Do you think we could?” and he’s like “let’s try”. So it does a couple of things, it protects it in the mail but it really makes those stickers pop.

This protective coating may last forever, like it doesn’t eventually wear out and so it serves a lot of purposes, it looks incredible and now, the technology of all the patterns and so we’re not just slapping UV on there now… we’re just doing some really neat things with texture. [Y]ou can’t just buy the machine and expect it to do cool stuff. We’ve had to work to make it really interesting tactile, if that makes sense, and so we perfected that craft, because the volume is such but it’s been a wonderful product and really just kind of exploded right in front of us. Just really fun, once these customers can see what’s possible…

With QR codes, that’s another gift that came out of Covid. The QR code was kind of dying, like it just wasn’t that interesting. For a while you had to have a special app on your phone just to read it. And so once the QR code meant direct mail came alive again …our customers take advantage of that and then there’s a lot of obviously digital reporting, data reporting, we can include with that now to really let it be a really smart mailer.

• So on the company website I see that you list a lot of production equipment, HP indigo presses, all these different die cutters, with your production facilities in Chicagoland. What kind of flexibility does this give you for working on large direct mail campaigns?
  

[W]ith all our fleet of rotary die cutters in particular… those machines run twenty hours a day …they’re gold to us. And again, it’s a craft and it’s something that you gotta get the dies right and especially when you’re cutting stickers, right? [N]ot only are you cutting the product itself but you’re having to get each sticker just right.

So yeah, I mean direct mail, we got into it because of the university market. That’s really where we found our footing and because of that it’s just exploded since then. Scodix is, like i mentioned, it’s just been a huge partner because honestly, it’s just made everything we’ve done just a little more interesting. It is funny …what something tactile does to a mail piece. It wakes it up, it really does and to have a lot of fun with it too. We have a whole fleet of cut machines, Eskos and whatnot, where we’d rather prototype a few ideas for you. Let’s make it and show you what’s possible, because sometimes our customers come and it’s like “we want this” and we’ll show them that, but then we’ll show them what we think would be really cool, plus we can meet budgets and things like that.

Nine times out of ten it’s like “oh man that’s really cool”. So sometimes – oftentimes – the customer just doesn’t know what’s even possible.

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

Thank you very much, Dave, for sharing your perspective and your expertise! To learn more about Truly Engaging, visit their website at TrulyEngaging.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!