Meet The Mailers: Tapping Website Visitor Data

In this episode, I talked with Maria Youth, Chief Revenue Officer of Path2Response. Headquartered in Broomfield, CO, Path2Response is a data co-op that helps brands, nonprofits, and agencies improve their marketing performance.

We focused mostly on how data can be leveraged to improve campaign performance.

Youth talked about how the company looks at site visitation data to identify and score browsers who can be reached with direct mail.

Among the many topics we covered:

• Maria’s background in media planning and direct response
• Path2Response’s data services
• How the company protects customer data privacy
• Mail trends she’s observed
• Her favorite recent direct mail campaign

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

• [W]here really the rubber meets the road is understanding how people are different from each other and speaking to that. For people who don’t know, can you give a brief rundown of the company’s products and services?
  

We have a database comprised of actual buying behavior. All of the data that we get is contributed from our clients. So we work with catalogers, retailers, nonprofits, magazine publishing, publishers, home food delivery services, home and personal services. Really anyone that’s transacting directly with consumers, whether it’s travel, financial, or anyone that’s looking to acquire new customers and/or retain them. And the other dynamic is that we’re the only company of its kind that actually has the actual buying behavior, but we also capture the browsing behavior. So we have first-party data coming into our database that really captures consumers while they’re in-market rather than after they’ve already made the purchase. We are essentially providing acquisition services, audience solutions, retention services, and really trying to market to those kinds of customers.

• And so these would be your different products, the Path2Acquisition, Path2Ignite, etc…
  

Correct, and the Path2Ignite actually is a unique product offering in the sense that we can output data on a daily basis. One of our key initiatives as an organization is speed to market. So whether you’re interested in mailing daily, weekly, monthly, whatever that looks like, we can actually build a model and deliver it within 24 hours so clients have that last minute need [and] they come up with some unique offering, we can get that data set out to them after the initial setup. It’s fantastic.

• What are the biggest challenges that are facing direct mail marketers today? And how does Path2Response help clients overcome them?
  

There’s so many challenges and unfortunately this industry has been hit in the last two years. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. For a while it was paper shortages, then it was postage increases.

All of these things are challenging to our clients. They’re facing increased costs and they’re coming to us and asking us how we can help and the way we answer that and address that is to actually help them mail smarter. There are companies out there that can target millions and millions of names or their mailing client site visitors, but they’re not qualifying them. Another company might be mailing every single site visitor that they can identify. Path2Response is going to take the people we identify and rank them, score them. So you’re actually going to mail less. But you’ll have a higher response rate overall, better performance from that mail piece. We’ve been tasked with how to mail smarter, what can we help our clients with. Path2Response is iterative in our modeling process. So we’re constantly analyzing results, making small tweaks, and further improving performance.

• I think that’s really the best way to because even in cases where you have a lot of behavioral data, if you’re not really modeling what your ideal customer profile is, you’re probably wasting some of that spending.
  

Yeah, and I think a lot of that is inferred data. You know, whether it’s survey data or compiled data. You know, we’re not inferring. It is deterministic. We know this consumer purchased this product. They didn’t just say they’re going to, we know that they did. We know that they’re browsing and can identify who’s actually purchasing.

• That anticipates my next question, how can marketers use site visitation data to learn more about who is shopping from them, who is browsing, buying, or giving to them?
  

We’re all about that, right? Let’s identify who’s on the site and then understand, are they an existing customer or donor or are they net new?

It’s really becoming more and more important for clients and companies to understand who is on their website and what are they not only doing, meaning, looking at, donating, researching, right, and then trying to communicate with them effectively because these people are raising their hands and they’re choosing YOU. There are millions of different websites out there and wouldn’t you love to know that this person was on yours? There’s obviously a propensity there like this, just an overall interest in your company. Why wouldn’t companies want to communicate with them?

• And so many channels too, which is also an area of opportunity if you’re present in those, to the same customers.
  

So it’s great to capture people while they’re online. It’s great to hit them up with the direct mail piece. Maybe follow up with a larger direct mail piece later … you know somewhere along the line, that consumer is going to respond.

And it’s a matter of understanding holistically, where are you spending your advertising efforts? What channels are you choosing and more importantly, where are they buying? And then it’s understanding overall attribution. Was it because they got hit 3 times, 2 times, and that’s a big challenge for companies.

You know, direct mail is unique in the sense that you can easily conduct a holdout panel. Especially on the site visitation data. That’s one thing we pride ourselves on is …we can identify site visitors, rank and score them.

We’re going to conduct a holdout panel, meaning that we’re going to mail 10,000 postcards, but we’re going to hold out 2000 of them and after that campaign period, after three months, let’s look at who responded. Did they get a postcard? Did they get a direct mail piece? Were they on the holdout panel? Because that is a direct correlation to the only difference between the holdout panel and the mail segment is that one piece of mail. It’s a fantastic opportunity to truly see “Is this moving the needle?”

• What other kinds of things can marketers do to increase the impact of their mail while at the same time keeping costs affordable and manageable?
  

I used to get 20 catalogs a day, and now a lot of those mailers have cut their formats…some of them have gone to simple postcards, many of them have gone to slimjims. Or rather than 8-1/2 X 11, they’ve cut down their trim size.

There’s some postal discounts to be had with some of those changes … I know in July that the ACMA was very instrumental in getting some opportunities for [the] fourth quarter holiday season. So a lot of companies are able to take advantage of that.

Not only is about the creative format, it’s again about the data and the people that you’re choosing to mail because you just have to overall mail smarter. There’s savings on formats, there’s different testing you could do with regard to offers to increase response rate. It’s all about A/B testing and going out with the new control, finding that next new thing that’s going to move that …move the needle and increase overall performance.

• With increasing concerns about data privacy, how does Path2Response ensure responsible data usage while still delivering what everybody wants?
  

We’re very compliant in that we work with our clients to make sure that they share with us their own privacy data, right? The people who have said “do not rent my name, do not share my name.” We want to make sure people are knowingly and ethically collecting their data, and not only that, we want to make sure that the mail pieces that they’re sending to data that comes out of Path2Response are genuine, not alarming in any sense. We do have practices in place to make sure we understand exactly how our data is being used and plus we follow all the best practices with regard to NCOA and CASS certification, things like that. So we work very, very hard and as a co-op with getting all of the data from our clients, it’s imperative that we maintain certain standards of not only just privacy and just data in general, but even security measures. We have such walled gardens up nobody can get into our database. It’s very, very secure.

• What trends are you seeing for direct mail in the next year or so? You talked about these catalogs and other pieces getting slimmed down but what other kinds of things?
  

So I think there’s been such uncertainty in the marketplace with regard to just consumer confidence and I think a lot of people have sort of paused on their direct mail campaigns especially for this first half of this year …winter and spring were very light from a direct mail perspective.

Fall/holiday we have high hopes, and mailers are realizing that they need to sustain their business. They need to grow their customer files, and plus I think consumer confidence has improved, right? There’s been a lot of issues with tariffs and stuff. So I foresee us having an upsurge in mailing overall. I don’t necessarily think it’s going to outgrow last year’s growth. I don’t know if the volumes are going to be as high, but consumers, once they get through the second half of the year, they’re going to realize that things will stabilize and people will come back in the mail. I think consumers will see more mail in the mailbox … a variety of formats. People are trying to stand out and mailboxes have been a little bit emptier. So those that can afford to mail, that mail is being treated with a little bit more respect and people are really looking at it.

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

Thank you very much, Maria, for sharing your perspective and your expertise! To learn more about Path2Response, visit their website at Path2Response.com.

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