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Frequently Asked Questions

Questions Before Starting

Is this better than other marketing/retargeting?
We believe it augments other programs and has a different purpose. Postcards have a 100% Open Rate, and these are geared to drive response. Other digital retargeting usually drives users to a landing page or another form or website. This is a more direct, physical touch, with a more direct action and outcome.

Can I just test this out first, or do I have to commit to a certain amount or timeframe?
We recommend firstly that you and your client think of it as ongoing marketing. Most SEO contracts or Digital Marketing program are expected to go for at least 6 months, and this is no different. That being noted, if you do want to set up a test, we advise you go for time versus budget. We’ve found that when clients opt for a 90-day test (versus a $10,000 budget), they then see the results and keep it as an ongoing program.

What are the steps and timeframe to get set up?
All-in, we can get you up and running in about two weeks. This depends on how quickly you want to put the tag on and how the creative is developed.

What do you recommend to make the program successful at the start?
First, have a great offer. Remember, these are visitors to your site that have already expressed an interest in your product and services. Most retargeting Facebook ads have an offer that hooks, and this should be no different. A great offer and strong call to action that makes it easy to respond is key.

Do you have examples of other companies that are in my space/category?
While we can’t share actual results from other clients, we can speak to examples on most every business category, from Direct-to-Consumer Retail and Services, B2B, and Organizations. And, we have experience in dozens of industries within those categories, from roofing, FinTech, community colleges, software, eCommerce, CBD, you name it.

Tag and Traffic

How do you get the mailing addresses? Is this done by IP Address matching?
Our methodology to match mailable addresses is actually more reliable than using IP matching. Ours is a sophisticated, proprietary, cookie-based approach that tags individual devices to a network of online subscription data.

Gobbledegook, Huzzah, and Excelsior!

How many cards/day are actually mailed?
This absolutely depends on the traffic and actual match rate to mailable addresses, which averages about 30% up to 50%. For example, if you average about 10,000 unique visits/month, it’s a max volume of about 100 to 150 cards/day. The actual amount per day will be less than your max volume, because targeting paramaters will refine and focus the card volume on the most intent visitors.

What if my traffic and mailing volume changes?
If the daily flow fluctuates up or down, that’s no problem. We designed this for optimum flexibility: you control the budget. It’s up to you how many cards you want to send, and how you want to ramp up or down the weekly volume. You can start with 25, 50, 100 cards/day, etc., and then adjust as you see the program perform.

Why can’t you match all of my website visitors?
Based on the available data and network, there simply might be website visitors who don’t have some kind of online subscription that matches up to collect a mailable address. However, each mailable address we do find is incremental to what’s been possible before.

Daily Mailings and Caps

What is the minimum number of cards you can send?
Technically, there are no minimums. We’ve done programs where clients are sending 5 cards per day. For your clients, we would recommend self-regulating who would benefit from the program. Your threshold should be about 25 cards per day, which is probably a minimum of 5,000 unique visitors a month. You can read more about that in Best Fit Opportunities

Can I set a cap on how many cards I send?
You bet. Like Google AdWords or Facebook Ads, you can set a cap on the weekly budget. In those cases, we have a ‘not to exceed’ limit with the daily or monthly mailings. Some clients who set a monthly cap might hit that limit before the 30-days, and for those programs, we don’t send any cards the last several days until the next month comes up. The problem with that approach is that they miss the opportunities for those days.

What if my traffic and mail volume goes up and down seasonally?
That’s fine. As an agency you have a set price per piece for the cards, so we will mail what’s available based on the traffic and targeting. Some days we might send 25 cards, others 40 cards. If you need to adjust any caps put in place, we can do that, too. You might have a limit during the summer months, and move that limit up during the holidays, and that’s fine. We’re flexible and just need a week’s notice to re-set the system and parameters.

Targeting

What do you mean by a “reasonable targeting approach”?
This is a phrase we use to help guide agencies and clients on what targeting parameters to include. Over-complicating a program with too many creatives often don’t yield material results, and conversely, a single card going to all visitors of every page might not be the ideal solution, either. We take into consideration the addressable opportunity, your business, and the variety of products or messages that would work and be helpful.

Are you matching and targeting only CRM leads coming to the website?
The program is designed to remarket to website visitors who leave have never filled out any forms. These are your unknown web visitors. Studies indicate that about 97% of web visitors don’t convert. This program is ideal to reach those visitors. So all these mailable addresses and subsequent conversions are incremental touches. These might be your CRM leads, but we don’t distinguish those leads or existing customers from new visitors, unless you want to submit a suppression list.

Can I block the mailing from going to my CRM leads or existing customer list?
You bet. It’s a suppression list. If you have a database you’d like to suppress from, just send it to us and we’ll suppress against your existing customer/lead list.

Can you supress a mailing someone who visited the site last week?
You bet. That’s another suppression list. We can set a threshold of what you want to shield – visitors who came 2 weeks ago, one month ago, etc. Typically, customers ask to not mail to visitors who came within the past 30 days. But it’s up to you.

Can I filter on Demographic parameters such as age, income, and gender?
We cannot target on those attributes. However, if your website has men’s or women’s lines of products, and the URL structure supports those, we can set up targeting based on those URL pages. Example: if you have /womens-shoes/womens-shorts, etc., we can target anyone going to /womens as the parameter, meaning any page that has /womens in its structure would trigger a card.

Can I send a card to people who go to multiple pages as a pattern?
We cannot send to specific targets who visit one page AND another. The targeting logic is best described as an OR model. We can distinguish a visitor visiting one page OR another, and assign a specific creative that way. This gets into assigning priorities for the creative and the pages visited.

Can I target by time on site?
No, and that’s a good thing. Many visitors will open up many tabs on their browser, and so ‘time on site’ can be misleading. In addition, there are too many options and targeting issues if we capped time on site or pages. That would overcomplicate the program without producing proportionate results.

Can I target different locations with my franchise and have different phone numbers based on where visitors are?
That’s not really a good idea. The reason is we cannot assume that a single visitor will only go to a specific area. In addition, the over-complication of creative results in delays and possible mis-targeting. Our recommendation is to have a single creative for multiple locations, and use Zip Code based Geographic Targeting for where you want the mailings to land.

Do I need multiple tags for different sites, landing pages, or domains?
If your client has different sites, domains or landing pages, please contact us. These are usually more complex scenarios and require very custom solutions.

Creative and Response Rates

Can I send different creative based on the page my visitor goes to?
Yep. We have clients with a campaign of 4-5 card designs, each one specific to a page on the website. If you have a couple of product lines or brands you market, we recommend that you have different creative for those pages.

When does it make sense to do multiple creatives?
It makes sense when there is a definite benefit to the business to have materially different messages based on the pages visited. The best example is usually when eCommerce businesses choose an Abandoned Cart card and a best-selling product card. For B2B, we usually don’t recommend different creative, since so often the message is going to be similar enough. This is tied into the Reasonable Targeting Approach, and finding the right balance of setting specific paramaters while not over-complicating a program.

So I have different pages my customers visit. Can I prioritize which card is sent so they don’t get two different cards or a card representing the last page they visited?
Of course! You decide the priority of the page and related creative. So if you sell ties, socks and belts, and you want to push the ties, then that’s the card your user receives, even if they visit all three pages.

What response rate will I get?
Each campaign and business type is different, and a lot of the response rates relies on the offer, call to action, and messaging. We’ve seen response rates range from 2% to as high as 4% and 5%, and ROAS around 2x to 3x, with some programs garnering an even higher return. You can learn more in Selling for Long Term Success.

How are you tracking response rates?
We track return-to-site visitors and conversions via our online dashboard, and we also perform matchback analysis for you 45 and 90 days from the launch of the program. Learn all about our Measurement Techniques.

Regulations and Privacy

Are there any sites or businesses that are prohibited from this program? 
The rules around medical device, health, and related sites are a grey area, pending the business and the conditions. Copy should focus on generalities of the condition, not specific to a recipient’s specific medical issue –  we can’t insinuate that someone has a specific medical condition. In addition, we can also replace the actual name on the postcard with “Current Resident” if that concerns your client. For businesses like CBD, normal USPS regulations apply.

Who owns the actual list of website visitors?
No one actually can keep and own that list. Due to privacy and compliance best-practices, neither we or you can actually own the list. We match the data to the creative and mail out the cards, but the list is never stored, housed, or kept. Nor can we send it back to you.

Can I get a copy of the mailing list?
Unfortunately, privacy laws prevent us from giving you the actual mailing address. We at Modern are passing the data through and not keeping the data ourselves. No one keeps the data. However, naturally, all responders become your leads and customers and help build to your House List.

Do you use my visitor data beyond this mailing?
Nope. Your visitors’ data isn’t shared, and its only use and purpose are to mail the actual cards.

Are my visitors’ mailing addresses shared with other data networks?
Nope. This is a one-way data stream. The matched mailing addresses flow into the cards to be mailed, and that’s it.

Are there any other privacy concerns I should worry about?
There aren’t privacy concerns, since no one actually owns and keeps the data. However, we send you a privacy statement that we recommend you put on your privacy policy. It just notifies your web visitors that they might be remarketed to via mailing. This is commonplace now for sites to have privacy statements about their cookies and the like.

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