1185: Zairmail: Direct Mail Marketing Success, ROI, Strategy, and Digital Integration with Founder and CEO Wilson Zehr

Robert Plank 0:00 Music. Welcome back. It's the marketer of the day podcast, Wilson Zehr is here, and Wilson is an experienced technology entrepreneur and an academic. He's the founder of sendix, but their front end service is called zair mail. You can send postcards, letters, snack packs, zair. Mail is the fastest, easiest and least expensive way to grow your business, using the US postal mail. And Wilson has also been around the block, you say a few times, but like 1020 times, right? He's seen some stuff going back to the beginning of the internet, he's launched six tech startups. He's raised over $60 million in venture capital. He teaches, he goes on podcasts. He builds companies. He accomplishes so many amazing things that we're going to find out from Wilson himself about the secrets to his success, how he has so much time and energy to continually get educated and make these business accomplishments and what we can learn from him, as far as using direct mail, as far as growing companies, as far as avoiding mistakes, achieving greatness, so many other things. So Wilson, glad to be speaking with you.

Wilson Zehr 1:12 Well. Thank you, Robert, it's great to see you. Thanks for having me on. Looking forward to sharing more

Robert Plank 1:19 And I look forward to it as well. So we introduce you, but in your own words, what are you currently passionate, excited, fired up about?

Wilson Zehr 1:27 Today, I'm running a company called zairmail. Zairmail is the fastest, easiest and most reliable way to send direct mail and direct mail, even though, I mean, for a lot of entrepreneurs, there's more focus on digital tools these days, which is, which is great. Direct Mail still has a place, a very powerful place, in the ecosystem. It does some things that the digital tools we might use aren't able to do, and so the combination of those things is really powerful.

Robert Plank 1:59 And I agree completely that that it's some people write it off or discount it because it's like an old technique, but it's, it's been around for decades. Some say old, others say established. And I what I like about what you just said there is how it's useful with a combination of other techniques. And I'm always at the mindset of, well, I don't really care if it's a popular technique or not. Like, what gets attention, what gets some results, what gets customers reactivated, what makes my sequence even better? And so just what do you hear these days about direct mail? Like, what? Why don't people do it? What are the the best ways? What's the exciting happenings in direct mail lately?

Wilson Zehr 2:40 Well, I think that. I mean, this is a big question. Maybe I'll slice it into pieces. You know that the if we look at mail today, the volume of mail is actually declined over the last 10 years or so, for sure, and that, but mail is not all homogenous. I mean, we have transactional mail, which is like billing statements, things like that. And obviously, lots of people are going online to pay bills these days, which makes sense if you've got a relationship with your you know, electricity provider, then paying your bill monthly online makes a lot of sense. It saves a lot of money for for both people and it also it's better for the environment. If you look at marketing mail, though, it's been relatively steady, and one of the reasons for that is that it works. I mean, direct mail is traditionally driven by return on investment, ROI. And as the Marketing Association, American Marketing Association, points out, on average, returns $13 for every dollar spent. You know, if we look at the industry average overall. So if you, if you know how to use the tool, it tends to be very effective. Now, if they, when we think about direct mail, well, the backup, think about the problem and the word marketing to people, there's an old saying that if all you have as a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. You know, there's, I mean, the solution to every problem can't be a web page or an email. I mean, instead, if we look at the problem first, and you know this from software engineering, right? We don't, we don't necessarily pick the language first. We look at the problem we're trying to solve and say, what tools do I have available to solve that problem. The same is true in marketing. Direct Mail does some things that no other medium does. One is the idea that I can reach every consumer and business in America seven days a week. So I have that kind of ability to reach people. Secondly it's it's proactive. I don't have to wait for people to find me. I can reach out and I can touch them. I can interrupt them, give them a message, save them time. Save them money. I you know, I can have an impact on people when, when I want to have an impact, not necessarily when they want to come find me. Thirdly, the. Lists are, are very well developed. If I wanted to market to Jewish dentists in New Jersey who bought a car in the last six months, I could probably find that list. Not so with with any other with a lot of other mediums. You know, the targeting is very limited. I think the other thing that that is powerful as it's just kind of built into the American psyche. I don't know if you've tried to do any telemarketing recently, but if you call consumers, they're just angry, right? They don't want to talk. They don't they don't want somebody to interrupt their day, especially if it's on their smartphone. And only 30% of households in America even have a landline anymore. So if you're calling somebody, you're likely to get them on their smartphone and mag, maximize the frustration. But not so in direct mail. I mean, you come home, or mail in general, people come home, they get the mail out of the mailbox, they sort through it, so they keep some of the set aside for later, and then they move on with their evening. The Postal Service likes to call that the mail moment that the, you know, the family looks forward to. And I think they, they romanticize it a little bit, but I think it's, it's true in my household that when I come home, the first thing I do is I get the mail sorted through it. I mean, it's just part of my daily ritual. And I think that's true for millions of other Americans as well, certainly as a consumer businesses takes a little different path. But same thing, most businesses are set up to receive and deal with mail. So that's a lot, I mean. But to give you an example of this, we did a campaign for a local school bond initiative in Eastern Oregon. And so the question is, how do we you know, the the school, local school board, done a very good job of managing the finances refinance the debt when the interest rates were low, but they have an opportunity to get matching funds from the state and bait using those matching funds, they could do a local bond, and they could get a replace, replace an athletic facility, an aging athletic facility, and but the last bond was really close, so they, they brought us in to help with that. And so basically what we did is we, you know, like a lot of other programs, we, we created a website. The website explained the bond and how it worked. We got videos of people who used to go to the school, but generations of people who went to school with those videos online. We did, you know, we, we went out and met. Did parent teacher meetings? We had coffee meetings, and of course, did all traditional stuff, door hangers, Milan signs, things of that nature. But we also brought in social media, got people to reach out to their friends and talk to their friends. And then when we come to the direct mail, you say, how does that fit? Well, you know, in this in this county, what we can do, like a lot of counties, is we can buy the voter file. So we buy a file of everybody who can, who can vote. We sliced that into four pieces. We looked at homeowners versus non homeowners, because homeowners have to pay the tax non homeowners don't. And then we divided those two into households with children, households who didn't have children, the households who have children, we have a very special pitch for them, because they may pay additional money on the bond, but their kids are going to enjoy the benefits of that. For the folks at OMA homes that don't have children in school, it's more about community. You know, bringing a community together, doing things, you know, for the greater good. And then for those folks who aren't homeowners, they still get the benefits. And we can, you know, we can tune the message to what works best for them. We went out with a first postcard early in the campaign in Oregon, we've been doing vote by mail the last 25 years. I mean, you can't even find a polling place, but that actually works out good in this case, because we can we know from the state when the ballots will be measured, when they be mailed, excuse me, and so we can target our mail so that the postcard arrives just when people are going to vote, because some people get their ballot in the mail. Some people vote right away, and just to get it off their table or their desk, some people hang on to it till the due date. So we will go out with one postcard just before the ballot is delivered. We go out with a second one just before the date to vote, and it was an overwhelming success. I mean that while the earlier bond measure was just barely passed, we passed with overwhelming support. And so it's a, you know, there were other elements as well, but an example of looking at the problem and, you know, understanding. The demographic and the offer, and then using the right tool to reach the, you know, the people we're trying to persuade.

Robert Plank 10:07 I love that this is an amazing thought process you have. Like, you say, well, here's this big, scary problem, but then here's kind of these, these, the shape of which our solution will fit into it, right? You say, well, here, like the marketing channels, and then here's like, how we'll slice and dice our mailer lists. And then here's like, these customized messages we'll send for each like subset. And then here's the follow up sequence. I mean, this is amazing, and you're reminding me that, just the other day, me and my wife remarked that some postcard came in the mail because, you know, as we're recording this, it is kind of election day just passed. But then there's a lot of things to vote on an election day. And, and you and I both know, in America, people are uninformed, right? And we just, even if you get the little postcard in the mail about, especially, like, the local stuff, right? And so there was, like, some city measure that needed to, like, you know, tax an extra half a penny to pay for such and such. And the postcard came in the mail, like, a week before the election. And me and my wife, we got our mail in ballots send them back the same day. We were like, they missed it. And so by hearing you it's like, it's like, in that situation, if they'd set a postcard at the beginning, like, right before we got the ballots. And then, like you said, maybe some people vote. I mean, in other places, we vote in person too, but then if we waited until, like just before to mail it back, I mean, just that small little tweak could have made such a difference. And I have no idea what their effectiveness is, but just our impression was, I don't care about this postcard. It's too late. And so do you sometimes see this, like, when you, I mean, you, you just laid out, like, a really great way to do it, but I'm sure you, you see it being done incorrectly. And so is there, are there, like, these little tweaks? Are some people, like, so close to the gold, as far as making their marketing campaigns work?

Wilson Zehr 12:01 Yeah, no, timing does turn out to be important. I mean, that's why the speed around the platforms. zair Mail platform is a key, you know, key benefit. I mean, so if you for us, I mean, if you you just upload a document, upload a diff, a list, you see a proof in real time, and you're in the mail tomorrow and and if it's first class mail, we're seeing, you know, three days delivery nationwide, wide, next day delivery, about 94% of time in the local area. So it's very fast. The turnaround is very fast, especially using this platform, because it's done in a commercial production facility. We do a lot of mail. Everything's properly addressed, properly bar coded, packaged and pre sorted and sent to the Postal Service, and so it can be delivered as sufficiently as possible. The other thing is that xeromil is a software solution. We're software company, and we do production and mailing through a network of production partners nationwide. So we route the piece electronically as far as it can go, and then turn it into paper. So you know, the portion of the trip that it makes electronically is going to be a lot faster and a lot better for the environment. Frankly,

Robert Plank 13:13 that is cool that it it's not like they're all mailing out from one single location. You're saying like, hey, if, if we're on the the East Coast, and someone on the West Coast needs, needs this, then we'll route it electronically and then mail it from somewhere closer. So it seems like the the timing is very important when it comes to this whole direct mail thing. And what also interests me as far as some of these systems, because I sometimes use them in my business, how they can, they have APIs, right? You can hook up with your existing CRM, so you say, you can kind of run your existing data and say, Hey, here's my list. I'll blast this to this group. Or, even better, if they click on this link or open this email, then I'll fire off something like that. And so what kind of amazing, like use cases have you seen with the Air Rail. As far as people doing that, like connecting it to their existing systems,

Wilson Zehr 14:06 we do have APIs in place, and we have a number of, you know, we have some response portals, so Indian solutions that people use for mortgage marketing. You could we've had, in the past, we've had some mortgage brokers use, you know, connect our system to their CRM and use it both for outbound and inbound fulfillment. So we have a lot of applications like that. The interesting, that's one of the things that's interesting about zair mail, not only the speed. I mean, traditionally, if you're thinking about direct mail, people plan seven to 10 days. I mean, you know, they're thinking way out for us. You could, you could come up with an idea this afternoon, be in the mail tomorrow. And so that, you know, it gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of planning. It gets a lot more precision in terms of timing. And then, as you say, you can tie that to other applications as needed. It using something like an API. We could do more that, but, but the advantages that we because we're a digital platform, we have we it's really easy for us to tie applications into it. We can do all kinds of interesting things, like, for example, if you, if you uploaded a very large mailing we could slice it. We can cut it into pieces and put do pieces at different production facilities, everything it's we we mails tracked so you get tracking links, and we don't charge anything extra for that. You get email confirmation when things have been delivered. We do, I don't know. We have all kinds of interesting applications, because we have, because we, you know, we have software, and we have our content, and, you know, the the mail piece you upload is digital, so we have a lot of flexibility with how we format it, how we deliver it, and what kind of transformations we can make.

Robert Plank 15:58 So we thought of a lot of cool things.

Wilson Zehr 16:00 Yeah, I saw an application the other day. We've we've worked on a couple times that each each postcard that goes out has a personalized QR code, and that QR code, when you scan it, will go to a specific website, but because the information is encoded in the URL, in the QR code, the person, when the person goes to the website, that website content is personalized to the recipient, that is

Robert Plank 16:25 and a lot easier to do these days. And it was maybe 1520, years ago, right? There's all these systems where you can perform this kind of personalization, and it's sometimes fun to do like I remember I used to do a thing. I have to have a sequence where, when someone bought we would look them up on social media and, like, send them a postcard with their picture on it, and it's like, they're going to look at that, right? Who would throw that in the garbage? So it's like, it's cool to think about the possibilities as far as the hyper personalization there, including the link tracking the scan a QR code, and you know that they the post card or the letter ended up there. And so, you know, since it's a podcast, it's always fun to talk about mistakes. And so when, like, what kind of mistakes have you made, or have you seen in all your travels, right? You've built this amazing company with send Dick since zair Mail, you've done startups, you you've taught, you've been around for decades. Like, is there, like, a number one mistake that you see business owners, entrepreneurs make all the time, repeatedly?

Wilson Zehr 17:29 Well, if you're talking particularly about direct mail, I mean, there's the there's a formula we use. You know, basically, if you think about what makes a direct mail campaign effective, it's about 70% lists, 70% list, you know, 20% offer and 10% creative. So the creative, especially in a postcard, helps get people's attention. But if you want people to actually buy something, you know, either go to a website or pick up the phone and call then you have to have the right offer, and that offer has to be the right offer for the person you're reaching out to. So, you know, just like any, any kind of sales, I mean, you need to identify the right prospect and then figure out what you know, what benefit you're going to provide, what benefit you you can provide that they can't do without. And if you do that, good things happen. So sometimes we see people with the you know, that aren't targeting the right audience, or if they are targeting the right audience, the what they're asking for is either not attractive or not feasible. And then, of course, I've seen some some really wild stuff where there's actually no response mechanism. So either the phone number doesn't, nobody put a phone number on it, or the phone number is wrong, or though the Earl that's on the piece doesn't go to a live page. So I mean, we have to make sure that people can respond to it as if we're asking for them to respond. I actually had one high profile thing years and years ago, and when we first started zair mail and 1999 where we had a very large Association based in Washington DC, send out a direct mail campaign to 1000s of people, and they put the wrong phone number on it. And unfortunately for the marketing manager who sent this out, he actually put his boss's phone number on it, so everybody that called back called his boss. And needless to say, he wasn't very happy with that. But I mean, we can only produce what you give us. So that was unfortunate

Robert Plank 19:46 due to the permanency of physical mail. I'm sure that happens a lot, right? You make a mistake, you don't check it, and then 1000s of letters postcards go out that way.

Wilson Zehr 19:59 It can happen. I mean, I think we try, we try to check everything we see come through. So, I mean, we try to do our best to mitigate that. And in fact, we'll prove things, we read things and try to help our customers everywhere we can. But I mean, there are some cases where, well, let me say this, so a lot of times, one of the questions that comes up is, how do you track your email campaigns or your direct mail campaigns? Maybe you're sending out multiple campaigns, and the way a lot of people do that is they'll use a pool of toll free numbers and to put a different toll free number on each piece. So that way you can attribute, you know, you can do the attribution, you know, from the response to the piece. But I've seen people a number of times where they'll have a list in Excel, and they'll grab the top cell, you know, grab the corner of it, and just pull down like they're going to copy and all those cells, of course, what the default in Excel when you do that is what it doesn't it just it just increments every cell. So you start with a number, do you get? The next one and the next one, next one, and so every record but the first one is wrong. That's the kind of thing we usually catch for customers, too.

Robert Plank 21:18 Well, funny, well, and I had a friend once where, decades ago, he sent out postcards, and he got the the mail merging wrong, and he sent 1000s to one person, and every day, the mailman was bringing in, like, bags of the same postcard. He's like, okay, fine, I'll buy I get the hit. It's like, no, like, you're supposed to get one. They're supposed to got the 1000s and so. But so, yeah, it's and it seems like it's just important to have common sense, right? You mentioned some of the mentioned some of these things, like marketing copywriting fundamentals. Make sure there's a call to action. Make sure that it kind of explains what the offer is. Make sure that what the link or the QR code, website, phone number, whatever it is, actually exists, like basic testing and that can, it's not, doesn't solve all your problems, but it sure takes down a lot of the headaches that may exist. And so, you know, we don't have a lot of time here. We're just here on a podcast to have a blip on our radar, to give people some awareness about you and direct mail and their mail. So in our final here minutes, here, Wilson, is there a missing, hidden question that I should be asking you.

Wilson Zehr 22:26 There's probably a lot of time limited. You mentioned something before about a tip, or some, you know, maybe piece of advice, and I was thinking about that. And I think, you know, this comes up a lot. We talk about entrepreneurship. There's always this idea of or a distinction between working on the business and working in the business. And so often we get consumed with working in the business, and we we forget to work on the business. But, you know, time moves on, and technology, especially if we're not moving forward, we're sliding backwards. I mean, there's no stay there's no staying in one place. So the trick, but for us becomes, you know, executing in the moment, but still planning for the future. But you know, because the stuff that we're going to do tomorrow. Oftentimes we have to build it today. It's not we can't just wait until tomorrow and react so but they have the same tendency. You get so focused on this customer, this list, that's paying this bill, that that it's hard sometimes to to remain, you know, focused on the future as well, and planning or building for the future. And you have to be in order to be successful. I think you have to be able to do both.

Robert Plank 23:50 And is there a secret to doing both? Is it a matter of discipline to have those dual mindsets, or like building a team that way there's enough horsepower to get it all done. How do we do the present, putting out the fires, to the clients, but also build for the future?

Wilson Zehr 24:07 That's a great question. I and I wish I had all the answers. I don't think I do yet. I mean, I work on it every day, but it reminds me of, you know, I coach football, fields football for years and years and and one of the things I you know, I know, is that when you, when you run a play and you're like, you're passing the ball, you can't pass it to where the player is. You have to pass it to where they're going to be. And if, if that's well orchestrated, the player is going to be there to catch the ball, but sometimes they won't. So a lot of stuff we do for the future, too, is we make our best guess at what that's going to look like and what's important, and try to put the right pieces out there that we can use, knowing that some of those pieces we won't use. I mean, they, you know, some stuff, sometimes we guess wrong, right? But that's okay, because, you know, if we didn't guess at all, then we'd be totally flat footed. So I. I think that's, I mean, it has to be okay to sometimes, to to, you know, to be close once in a while, but certainly we'd like to maximize the amount of time where we get it right. And I think the more time you spend in your industry, the more time you're thinking about these problems and your customers, I think the more frequently you get it right.

Robert Plank 25:22 I that's very reasonable, that it's important to stay educated all the time, and you know this with all your education, teaching degrees and to listen to podcasts, read books, talk to people and the soak up the intuitiveness that way when it comes time to make that best guess to figure out, well, what what company will I build, what feature or what software we try to market of what people will want soon? Then you are doing it based not just on random chance or not just on emotion, but based on data and also your own intuition that you have soaked up. So this, like you said, there's not an easy answer, but it's a deep question for us to think about, and it's good just to have this awareness on this kind of problem that we have and what we need to have on our minds. And speaking of the future, what are you excited about? What's up and coming with you in your business adventures with xermale? What's on the horizon?

Wilson Zehr 26:24 That's a great question we have. We're working on a number of enhancements for Xero mail, where, if the newest product we just rolled out is something called speedy, you can download it on the website at WWW dot zair mail. So that's our service. Is zair mail with a Z on the front. So www, dot zair mail.com/spedy, S, P, E, D, Y, and there you can download the application for free. Basically, what it does is it gives you a desktop icon, and then, if you want us, you know, if you have a document, you can drop it on that icon. It'll ask you for an address, and you can address it, it'll send it out as mail, as you as post mail, even one piece, so it makes it faster, easier, less expensive, but, you know, just completely convenient. You don't have to find a stamp, you don't have to find an envelope, and if you download it, try right now, the first two letters are free, so it doesn't cost anything, either. So I think that's a really powerful tool today, and I know for most consumers, they never see something. There's something called a postal meter, and it's used in a lot of businesses, especially larger businesses. And you slide, when you have a letter to mail, you slide your letter through it, and it puts postage on it. But with, you know, in the industry, a lot of people despise those machines because they have a lot of they they cost money. And then this is another piece of hardware to maintain. You need to have space for it. You need to maintain it, etc. But with a tool like speedy, you don't need to do that anymore. You can just drop a letter or a series of letters on this desktop icon, and out they go and and we just, when we get them, we, you know, we commingle them, we barcode them, we ship them. We're going to give you tracking on it, and we'll send you an email confirmation when it's actually delivered. So complete, end to end, the solution, we're also looking at different ways of pulling a list, getting additional list and demographics so we can target more precisely, and we're always looking to speed the process through automation. I mean, a lot of if you're a consumer today and you want to send out direct mail. You had 500 postcards. It's actually not easy to do that. I mean, you have to. You would have to print the postcards, put labels on and put a stamp on it, maybe take it to post office. They probably charge you full retail on that with a tool like sermon, because we're automated. It's really easy for us. I mean, we just, you just upload the postcard in the list, and we take care of it everything. You get advantages as long as 500 piece or more, you get the advantage of the pre sort and the speed of delivery and the tracking. So we continue to refine that solution. And then, as you talked out, there's other applications that we can integrate external applications. So we do that with customers. And in particular, we've been looking at the international market too, because there's still a lot of countries where people are send mail to the US, US. And you know, if you're buying international postage from Europe and sending to send a letter to us, that's expensive, and that letter, when you send it, you know it may make it on a plane or it might make it on a boat. It may show up in two weeks, but if you're sending it with their mail, it'll be there this week. You know, yeah.

Robert Plank 29:49 I mean, so they're on that's a cool innovation that, like, you kind of like, teleport most of the way there and then send the letter the remainder. It's a cool idea. Yeah.

Wilson Zehr 30:00 Yeah, super fast, and once again, it's better for the environment too.

Robert Plank 30:04 Well, you definitely are an innovator. You're a creator. And you just have me thinking about all these possibilities, right, all these things that could be done. And what I'm getting also near the end here is just this idea that you know you you could waste time, or you could do a lot of the DIY yourself, but it gets so old and you make mistakes, it wastes time. And if you say, Oh, well, it's just a few postcards, but it's like, how many hours to print it and mess it up and reprint it? Oh, it's just going to the post office. Well, how many more hours is that? There's definitely this value in saying, Hey, I run this kind of business, and I want to send some postcards. I want to send some letters. Let me just click a button and have the people at zair mail do it. Let me just drop that, that document into the speedy icon on my desktop and go about my day and go back to my business and do what I do, well, what I excel at, and then let the people at zarem do what they do so you're definitely, uh, this person that has created this amazing service and this amazing desktop app. We said that the website is Z, A, I R, M, A, I L.com/speedy, just send those first two letters free to check out speedy and then zair mail.com to use this service where you can send your postal mail. You can integrate it with your systems. It's really cool to have this awareness of this marketing channel, which at the at the beginning here of our discussion, here, Wilson, you were kind of saying that mail is on the decline, right? Some people do the paper lists, and you know, you definitely don't get the same amount of like junk and catalogs you used to in the mail. So it seems like this is something worth pursuing when people are always bragging about this, like omnichannel marketing idea, right? Market on different platforms. What about one of the oldest platforms that predates TV, predates everything else? Right? The postal mail and send that marketing message, wake some people up, make it a part of your overall campaign, and you can get enthused and excited about all the possibilities, like you mentioned about like, cutting up the list to different demographics, and unless the follow ups so many amazing possibilities and opportunities zair mail.com and as we're closing the door in our conversation here, Wilson, do you have any final parting words of advice, anything to encourage people to go to zair mail or just inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs?

Wilson Zehr 32:31 I would say, if you've got an idea, you know, get off the couch and make it real. I mean, that's the only difference between successful entrepreneurs and everybody else is entrepreneurs get in the game, and then they put some points on the board. I mean, so I would encourage everybody, you got a great idea, you know, just pursue it and make it real 100%

Robert Plank 32:53 just do it. Take some action. Take that calculated risk, and the very first step in you pursuing it and marketing your idea. Go to zair, mail.com, watch the video. Start now. Create an account, start using it. Make it a part of your business, your marketing, your customer, follow up, your awareness, whatever you have as far as a marketing problem to solve, Z, A, I R, M, A, I L.com, zair mail.com, and Mr. Wilson Zehr. It's been fabulous and enjoyable speaking with you.

Wilson Zehr 33:23 No, it's been great. Thank you, Robert, thank you so much for having me on. It's gonna it's been a blast. Do

Robert Plank 33:32 you wish you had a podcast just like this one? Do you wish you did more with your podcast, like getting more traffic, being active on social media, getting more guests, better guests, or you being a guest on other podcasts, or maybe you just want your podcast to say the same, but you don't want the time commitment you currently put into your podcast. If any or all of that sounds great to you, go right now to D, F, y, podcast.com/free to claim your 12 podcast boosters. You. Transcribed by https://otter.ai