Meet The Mailers: Forward-Thinking Solutions & Practices

In this episode, I talked with Katrina Shaw, Founder & CEO of Snowball Print Marketing. Snowball is a full-service direct mail agency based in San Luis Obispo, CA.

Much of our discussion focused on how the company is working with clients to use technology in advancing direct mail’s role in omnichannel communications.

Shaw noted that:

Among the many topics we covered:

• Katrina’s career journey leading to founding Snowball and her day-to-day role
• The company’s marketing services
• Snowball’s commitment to sustainability
• Creating opportunities for women in print
• Trends in direct mail
• Her favorite recent direct mail piece

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

• What was the “why” behind founding Snowball, and what have been some of the challenges that you’ve faced along the way?
  

Yeah. So I smashed pretty hard into the glass ceiling at my last big corporate role. The only place to go, really, for me was more of the same. I’d stopped learning and I knew that if I was going to continue to grow, I probably was going to need to create the opportunity for myself.

And people were like “you’re crazy and go and start a direct mail company in Silicon Valley. And is there even any call for that stuff out there? Isn’t it all tech, you know?”

And believe it or not, tech companies are huge users of direct mail, especially if they’re mostly selling products to other small businesses and medium-sized businesses, and the best way to talk to small and medium-sized businesses is direct mail. But there’s a huge learning curve. Huge. I didn’t even know what I didn’t know when I started, but I think one of the biggest challenges starting the business was getting the trust from our roster of vendors, but also: just sales. And then after that, infrastructure, and thinking the right way to build out processes and within the business was a challenge. But you know those are good problems to have. If you can find the work, you know?

• Talk about your job today. What does your job involve in all the different aspects?
  

So I’m CEO. That means I’m mostly in charge of sales. That’s the way I like to talk about it, now that the business is more established and we have a middle management layer. For a long time, I was very hands-on. It was pretty hard to shoehorn me out of being hands-on with projects because I love clients. I love that interaction and I love the print project stuff. I got shoehorned out of that about four years ago finally and really have been focused on sales and that process sort of started with a big brand refresh that we did recently just in October, we launched our new brand. So that was really exciting.

But I really felt like I wanted the new brand to represent the quality of the service we provide, but also the world-class team that we’ve got and the quality of the work that we’re doing. So I think that’s a big point, that when people go looking they would see us and feel like “Oh, these guys know what they’re talking about when it comes to direct mail.”

• What are your company values or your mission and how do you incorporate that into your daily life and culture, because I can see by looking at the website it is really infused with that.
  

Well, thank you! Thank you for noticing that, a lot of hard work went into that. Shout out to our creative team who are absolutely amazing. Our vision at Snowball, we have a vision statement – to be the most trusted solution in direct marketing and set the standard for innovation in the industry.

So those are big shoes to fill right there. But I think part of that is about operating with integrity. We have 6 core values at Snowball. The top one for me is integrity and humility and so in our approach with clients, it’s about operating in a transparent way. But also being humble enough to come in to clients and say “you might not want everything that we provide, but you might want some of the things that we can provide.” I think that’s a humble place that comes in to that approach, of being a solutions-based service provider to our clients. And then I think another one of our values is amplification, but this really speaks about spreading the sorts of practice and the approach that we have. But I really would hope that if you asked any of our clients they would say Snowball are transparent, and they are humble and they work really hard …I think those things come through really strongly in the relationships that we’ve built.

• Let’s just jump into it and talk more broadly about Snowball. And in your services, can you just give an overview of all the different things that you do there?
  

So we’re a full service strategic direct marketing agency, soup to nuts, you know, so that means we start with strategy, we license data through our key partner. We provide creative, we do print management, we execute the print campaigns and then we also provide some reporting and analytics services on the back end. And like I was mentioning, we really allow our clients to pick a mix because a lot of clients, especially the big tech companies, they have in-house creative teams.

So they don’t always want creative support. And we provide support with templates and format ideas and we take that really consultative approach that allows them to plug us in where they need us most and not where they don’t. That flexibility, I think, is key.

• We all know that to be more successful, direct mail really works better when it operates alongside other channels. In what way are all these digital channels that are available now to marketers being incorporated into your direct mail strategies?
  

So this is like one of my favorite topics, Paul, because I really think direct mail is the most exciting area of print. I think that because it’s where offline and online meet. You know there’s no other place where the physical world and the digital world really intersect. It’s where that gap is bridged …the biggest question that we’re going to have to figure out in our industry is attribution. Like how do we prove DM’s impact, and that’s hard in a digital world …there’s always this question of was it really the direct mail that had the impact.

And so harnessing tools like Informed Delivery, personalized QR codes… one thing we’re doing at Snowball too is offline retargeting. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the NaviStone product but it’s awesome. It basically means that people that visit your website will get sent a postcard.

[I]t’s like drawing those digital interactions together and then bringing a physical marketing message with it. I think there’s real power in that. And then with our dashboard, we’re providing some campaign metrics to report on the interactivity around the QR codes, the Informed Delivery, and we’ve got some secret sauce in our approach, but suffice to say the metrics we are reporting on aim to prove that interaction with the mail and and also help our clients who are really focused on driving income and revenue understand when they should have that direct mail campaign in-home in order to maximise and optimise on the revenue it drives. These are key things that marketers are interested in. And if we can put that picture together for them and we can say “well here in a digital dashboard is the impact of your campaign” you know, I think this is where the power is and this is what is going to keep customers buying direct mail.

• I want to move the focus to something else interesting about Snowball: your business practices which set you apart from some of the other companies in the marketplace. We’ll start with how the company is responding to environmental pressures, what clients and their customers want, and moving towards greater sustainability.
  

We have a sustainable business practice at Snowball. We’re partnered with Print Releaf to plant trees to offset carbon. But our model really is designed to minimise the carbon footprint because we have 45 printers on our roster globally, so we can target the production points of those campaigns close to the geographical areas where it’s going to drop, and minimise that carbon footprint. We prioritise working with SGP-accredited printers specifically and we like those because they have more DEI focus as well. But I’m gonna say something controversial here about sustainability, which is that I really wish we were responding to more pressures around sustainability.

Yes, I really wish it was harder than it currently is. I think a lot of large companies are ticking boxes when it comes to DEI and sustainability and that’s disappointing and sad. But the fact is being more sustainable for any business at any level requires significant investment and until that point that we can make the sustainable choices – the cost of making those sustainable choices – in line with the cost of making the non sustainable choice – online is often going to win.

So I think that’s a real challenge in our industry specifically, how do we get more printers making higher content post-consumer waste stock. Pre-pandemic, we could get a 30% FSC. We could get PCW, we could get 100% PCW. It’s hard to find a 10% PCW at the moment and this is because during the pandemic, a lot of mills switched from making paper for direct mail and making those environmental stocks to making board and packaging, because of the explosion of DTC.

Companies like New Leaf, Mohawk – they still are producing high content PCW stocks, but those need to be more readily available and the price for those needs to be in line with the cheaper virgin stocks out there. So those are my thoughts really on sustainability. We need to help our clients be able to afford it. And although that’s sad, I think that’s the hard truth. That’s the challenge.

• Another exciting thing to talk about is your commitment to creating opportunities for women in mail and print. Can you talk about some of the initiatives that are underway?
  

My own experience has been central to that tenet, really. Growing up in print, I started my first job in print when I was 18. It’s a pretty male-dominated industry and I struggled to have female mentors. There weren’t many women more senior than me for me to look up to. [T]here were plenty of great male role models for me, and I definitely credit several strong men, allies that helped me, supported me and educated me. But, to see a woman doing something herself, that’s really what creates that vision in younger women that they can do the same thing.

[T]here’s really a distinct lack of women in strategic leadership positions, traditionally those roles have been filled by men. So Snowball has an all-female team, which is, I think, pretty unique in our industry.

We have our WBENC women-owned business… since 2020. We’re also huge supporters of the GRC program at Cal Poly University …We currently have 5 Cal Poly alum on the team and we also support Girls Who Print and I’m sure you know Deborah Corn. She’s really terrific.

[O]ur own practices around the mentorship that we’re providing to the women that are coming through our business is really to identify what their goals are, what heights are they trying to reach and what are the pieces in the puzzle that are going to enable them to get there.

And in our business, often it’s like “well, do you want to be more client-focused? Do you want to be more operation-focused, you want to be creative-focused, you want to be technical-focused”
But figuring that out, and then just putting in a roadmap for these women. [W]omen tend to need more reassurance than men… we need to build that confidence in really practical ways and so it’s only through the process of doing it, achieving it, and getting the credit for doing it – which is really important – that builds that confidence. So those are the sorts of practices that I’m driving through the leadership roles in our company and helping and supporting these women and to do whatever there is that they want to do in print, so that’s really exciting. And that’s something that’s really close to my heart.

• Given all the direct mail work you do, what kind of trends do you see for direct mail marketing in the next year or so?
  

[T]here are some old friends that are coming back around like hyper-personalization and sustainability. And you know they’re getting fancy with it. The guys that are talking about NFC and voice activated stuff … and talks to your Alexa and those things have been around for a while. [T]he other big thing at the moment is AI and everyone’s on the AI bandwagon, I like to call it. And I don’t think we really know yet quite what the impact of that’s gonna be in direct mail. But obviously the big thing is AI-driven data targeting and that’s the process of having the AI review large data sets at scale in order to bring out specific insights that might speak to specific interest behaviour or demographics. Helping them to target more effective messaging to those leads compared to traditional targeting methods.

[O]ne of the trends that we’re seeing a lot with our clients at the moment is something I’m calling right-time marketing, which is to try and use data at scale to give us those signals of when a customer is ready to buy, and hit them with that message at the right time or at the right cadence in order to have them make a purchase. [T]his right-time marketing thing is something that we’re talking to a lot of clients about.

But direct mail continues to evolve, and those marketers that can combine their creativity with the technology and deliver effective messaging at the right time, and they’re the ones who are going to win. And obviously omnichannel is king. You can’t have all your bets on one horse. You’ve got to spread those bets and incorporate those digital strategies and find out which ones are gonna resonate with your audience specifically. So some testing and learning to do in those areas to figure out what the right secret sauce is for your particular target base, but you know as always, I’m excited about what’s going on in direct mail and what the advancement of technology is going to mean for us. I don’t think we know quite yet, but I think we’re starting to get some glimpses and that’s exciting.

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

Thank you very much, Kat, for sharing your perspective and your expertise! To learn more about Snowball Print Marketing, visit their website at SnowballPM.com.

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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!