Direct mail to your warm customers pulls four to five times the response of email, and most ecommerce brands aren't using it at all. This week Matt sits down with Daniel Dunn, CEO and co-founder of Paper Planes, to make the case that the letterbox is the reactivation channel hiding in plain sight.
Summary
Daniel Dunn spent years working on Tesco Clubcard data strategy before co-founding Paper Planes, a direct mail platform built for DTC ecommerce. (For anyone outside the UK, Tesco is the country's biggest supermarket and Clubcard is its loyalty scheme, one of the richest customer datasets in British retail.) His argument is simple. Most brands lean entirely on email and SMS to work their first-party data, yet a big chunk of that database never opens, clicks, or responds. Those people are prime for something tangible in the post.
Matt, who cut his teeth in direct marketing in the late '90s, digs into how the channel has changed. Dan explains why mail to warm customers outperforms email, how a single abandoned-cart postcard nudges buyers back, why hyper-personalisation lifts basket spend, and the second-purchase problem that has become the biggest challenge in DTC since COVID. There's also the Clubcard truth that one loyal customer is worth thirteen who just trial your brand once.
If you're planning your channel mix around email alone, this conversation will change how you think about where mail fits.
Why Mail to Warm Customers Beats Email
Dan's core point is about saturation. In the hour it takes to record the show, your inbox collects twenty or thirty emails. The postman, meanwhile, delivers three letters and won't be back for a couple of days. That scarcity is exactly why mail cuts through.
"In the hour it takes us to do this podcast, we'll have received 20 or 30 emails, whereas the postman came and delivered three letters, and I won't see that man again for another couple of days." — Daniel Dunn
The results follow. When you send physical mail to warm customers, such as postcard follow-ups for abandoned baskets or A4 mailers to win back lapsed buyers, Dan says the response is at least four to five times higher than email. Email should still sit at the front of your strategy because it's a high-ROAS channel, but complementing it with something physical is where the value compounds.
- Email first, because it's cheap and personalisable and works for certain segments
- Mail for the people who've gone quiet and stopped engaging with email
- A multichannel follow-up creates more value from the same customer than any single channel
The Abandoned-Cart Postcard That Lands on Day Seven
Dan walks through the mechanic. A customer fills a basket, then life gets in the way. The usual email flow fires at two hours, twenty-four hours, and seventy-two hours. If they still haven't come back, that's the moment to trigger a postcard, roughly on day three, so it lands around day seven.
The clever part is the tracking. Because Paper Planes tracks off the Shopify or Magento checkout, there's no need for a QR code, a discount code, or a microsite. You know who you triggered and roughly when they'll return, so the moment they hit the checkout you can see it. And if they come back via email first, they're stripped out of the postcard targeting, so you never waste the send.
"The beauty of tracking today off Shopify and Magento is you don't have to rely on a QR code, a discount code, or a microsite." — Daniel Dunn
This answers the two big objections to mail in one go. Cost, because you're mailing the handful of people who didn't complete checkout rather than your whole list. And relevance, because digital printing lets you hyper-personalise the card around the exact products the customer looked at. On average, Dan says getting the right product combinations in front of people lifts basket spend by 25 to 30 percent. His favourite example is a pet-supplier surprise-and-delight card featuring the customer's actual pet, "Stanley, it's your birthday," using an image already on file.
The Real Prize Is the Second Purchase
Abandoned-cart recovery is where most brands start, but Dan thinks the bigger opportunity is elsewhere. Since COVID, the hardest problem in DTC has been moving one-time buyers out of what he calls the "nursery programme" and onto a second purchase as quickly as possible.
"You'd be amazed how valuable direct mail is at bringing people back for that all-important second purchase." — Daniel Dunn
Mail recovers these second-purchase customers at rates you can't match through Meta, TikTok, or email. From there, Dan loves a loyalty play, trading people up into tiers and telling VIP cohorts about a launch first to build buzz. And it doesn't have to cost margin. Reminders and status messages, such as "here's how many points you have" or "thank you for being a valuable customer," can work as well as ten percent off. The rule throughout is test and learn.
That connects to the Clubcard truth Dan keeps coming back to. One loyal, committed customer is worth thirteen who trial your brand once and move on. So don't turn your back on your first-party data, and if you follow up on it, use personalisation, because that's where the extra sales come from.
You Don't Need Scale to Start
The old barriers, a list of 100,000 people and a couple of million in turnover, are gone. Dan's advice now is to plan mail into your channel mix from day one, the same way you'd plan SMS, so you understand how it works alongside email before you need it at scale. Paper Planes is releasing a Shopify app this summer that lets brands set up campaigns on templates with a small amount of free credit each month to dip a toe in the water.
Today's Guest
Daniel Dunn is the CEO and co-founder of Paper Planes, a direct mail and postal marketing platform built for DTC ecommerce brands. He's Vice Chairman of the DMA Print Council, previously worked on Tesco Clubcard data strategy, and runs a monthly newsletter on direct mail trends. He's based in East London, originally from Birmingham.
- Website — paperplanes.co.uk
- LinkedIn — Daniel Dunn (search "Daniel Dunn Paper Planes")
- Email — daniel.dunn@paperplanes.co.uk
About the eCommerce Podcast
The eCommerce Podcast with Matt Edmundson is a weekly show for anyone building an online business, whether you're just starting out or running a multi-million-pound brand. Every week Matt sits down with founders and experts to dig into what actually works, from marketing and tech to story, growth, and the day-to-day of running a store.
If you're part of the AI community, ask Sam to put you in touch with Dan and to help you think through direct mail ideas for your business.
Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/can-old-school-direct-mail-beat-email-marketing-in-ecommerce-with-daniel-dunn
