Direct Mail Thought Leadership Series Interview: Tod Cordill

Tod Cordill of Moderno Strategies is a marketer who engages with small to mid sized B2B firms and rolls up his sleeves to assist them build scalable, growing demand and revenue generation programs.

Tod has a deep understanding of how direct mail can be deployed to work with marketing automation, which made him a perfect candidate to participate in our thought leadership interview series.

From NASA To B2B Marketing, Tod Cordill Brings Unique Perspectives

One of the really cool things about how Tod approaches marketing problems is that he can look at ways of solving them from many different angles, including that of an engineer as well as a product manager of a major software company. It’s not often that we get to speak with an expert in direct mail that has such a range of experiences.

Connect With Tod

If you’d like to speak with Tod or connect with him online, here are his coordinates:

• Website – Moderno Strategies
• Twitter – @todcordill
• LinkedIn – Tod Cordill

Watch or Read The Interview To Learn More

Interview Transcript

Dennis Kelly:
Hi, everyone. This is Dennis Kelly of Postalytics, and this is the latest installment of our Postalytics Direct Mail Thought Leadership Series.

My guest today runs a marketing advisory firm called Moderno Strategies. This guy attacks marketing problems from a wide variety of perspectives. He’s done everything from starting a landscape company, before he finished high school, to working at NASA. He’s owned full P&L responsibilities at a couple of different businesses. He’s worked as an engineer at a major software company and now he runs Moderno Strategies.

I’ve known our guest for a few years now. He’s a whole lot of fun and I’m super excited to have him join us today. A warm welcome to Tod Cordill. Tod, thanks for joining me today.

Tod Cordill:
Dennis, it’s great to be here. It’s good to finally see your face in animation. I think I’ve looked at your LinkedIn profile and we’ve spoken on the phone before, but this is great. Great to see you as we’re talking. Glad to be here.

Dennis Kelly:
That’s right. We’ve had this East Coast, West Coast phone relationship for a few years now and have had a lot of fun talking. So this is our first chance to chat face-to-face. You’re out in Oregon, is that correct?

Tod Cordill:
I’m in southwest Portland, just a few miles from downtown.

Dennis Kelly:
Gorgeous. Love it out there. I think of Portland as sort of the Boston of the West Coast.

Tod Cordill:
I think people in Austin kind of think we’re kind of a sister city too. I haven’t been out to Boston in years, but I love that city as long as I don’t have to drive around too much.

Dennis Kelly:
Exactly! As long as you just wear a Red Socks hat, you’re in good shape. Why don’t we kick it off, and why don’t we just start by having you tell us a little bit about Moderno Strategies? What markets are you focused on? What services do you provide? Tell us about what you do.

Moderno Strategies And Tod’s Background

Tod Cordill:
I started Moderno Strategies five years ago now just about to this month. I help B2B companies primarily under $30 million, although that keeps bumping up a little bit every year as my largest client kind of keeps continuing to grow. Last year I was saying $25 million. But I help them troubleshoot their demand and revenue generation programs. I figure out or help them figure out what’s working, what isn’t working.

Tod Cordill:
For some clients, they get very tactical and I run their email marketing programs, their newsletters or their marketing automation. For others, I work at more of a strategy level and help them set the direction of what they should do next.

Tod Cordill:
I do everything. I have done websites in the past. I do PPC, do some SEO. Anything a company might need in the digital realm, I’ll either take care of it if their problems are something I feel like I can handle or help them bring in somebody else to handle that.

Dennis Kelly:
That’s great. Well said. Always a good testament to the capability of the marketing person when they keep having to raise the top limit of the types of companies that they work with.

Dennis Kelly:
What led you to start Moderno? Your background is, we might say a little nontraditional in the marketing space. Tell us a little about your background and how you got here.

Tod Cordill:
I did not come out of college with a marketing degree and get a job at a project management agency and move on in the traditional sense at all. I actually got an engineering degree, mechanical engineering, and kind of determined before, I figured out before I finished my degree that I was not going to be an engineer forever, but I wanted to go on that career path for a while.

I took a couple of business classes in undergrad degree and after a year out of college, I started an MBA program and did that in night school for six years … five years and right at the end of that I quit and went to work for a completely different kind of company in an engineering role and quickly transitioned into manufacturing and engineering management. I had machine operators, assembly workers, QA personnel, all on my team and that’s where I first had P&L experience.

I did that and loved it, but then I got the chance to work at a major software company who was creating a new ground up software program for engineers, Autodesk Inventor was the product. I did that. Worked there for three years designing software, learned tons about user interface, and user experience. Then I spent three years as a product manager who got much closer with sales and marketing.

Then a pretty crazy thing happened. I was traveling way too much. My wife was telling me, “You know, the household runs smoother when you’re gone, when you’re on the road than it does when you’re home.” And she said, “Why don’t you quit your job?” I just laughed. We were going on vacation, and she got out the spreadsheet over vacation, figured out we could do it financially because she was working. I came back on Monday and turned in my resignation after vacation. Of course it took me six months to actually leave the company.

But after that, three months after I’d finally left the company, my wife said “Let’s do that dream you always had of buying a sailboat and sailing across the ocean.” Then my job became shopping for a sailboat, finding a sailboat, getting it fixed up, learning how to forecast weather, because when you’re out in middle of the ocean, that’s a good skill to have. Then we did that with the family for a couple of years.

We came back, and I went to work as general manager for a company that was tanking that made photo books for photographers. They were one of the first companies out there doing that. So then I got involved in eCommerce, web applications, and really got heavily involved in marketing because it was a really small company. I did sales, marketing, management, kind of ran the whole the whole thing. After two years, we decided it’s just not worth trying to turn it around. That’s when I went to work for the printing company. Then I started my company.

So I’ve worked in all aspects of business in one role or another.

How Does Direct Mail Play In The Modern Marketing Stack?

Dennis Kelly:
A lot of your content that you publish really focuses on direct mail, and it’s clear that you’ve got a lot of experience in implementing direct mail along with a lot of other areas of marketing focus. What’s your take on the direct mail channel today? Do you see it playing well with the other channels and where do you see it going? Where’s direct mail heading over the next five years or so?

Tod Cordill:
I think direct mail is a great secret. I think a lot of people over the next five years are going to figure that out. No marketing channel works alone. About the only thing could work alone is outbound sales. Somebody makes a phone call, if they can collect the credit card number and make a sale on the phone call, maybe that channel works alone.

But somebody gets to your website somehow. Whether it’s an email, in which case you already knew them. Whether they do a Google search, it’s a Google search channel coming in, PPC advertising. It’s always at least two, and usually for more complex sales, three or four or more channels that always work together. I would never say, “Do direct mail and you’re going to be okay.” I’d never say, “Just do email marketing. It’s all you got to do, you’ll be okay.” You’ve got to have many, mix up your channels and direct mail plays really well into that.

Dennis Kelly:
That’s a theme that we really are focusing on here at Postalytics as well is this idea that email and direct mail, the web, outbound sales, digital marketing, they all ought to be working together off of a common dataset. That’s why we really focus hard on CRM integrations, marketing automation integrations. I think we’re very much aligned in that regard. Have you had a chance to kind of work with a lot of CRM systems and implement direct mail strategies as part of that?

Tod Cordill:
You know, the funny thing is as a solopreneur, I guess, as I run my own company, I’ve always got just a handful of clients. Right now, I’m kind of maxed out. I have four that I’m dividing, splitting my time through. I usually have two or three at any one time. They’re small businesses and I’ve never been able to get them to do as much direct mail as I’d like to do. But yes, I’ve got experience with, I’ve worked a lot with Salesforce, Zoho, CRM, Nimble, and a few others as I’ve needed to. As well as marketing automation platforms like Act-On and Drip and yet integrating … so integrating all these different things together is great. And in your idea with what you’re doing with Postalytics I think is just spot on.

Better Printing Tech = Better Marketing With Personalization

You roll back about five, six, seven, eight years ago digital printers were coming into the play, allowed huge amounts of personalization. There’s all kinds of, if you get a little postcard in the mail from your … not so much your doctor, but from your veterinarian, you know, if you go to a big chain that has very good data, or from your auto dealer, there might be over 20 different pieces of variable data that go into that single postcard that you’re looking at. So it’s very customized, very personalized.

And as that technology came on, that ability came on, there was a number of cross media platforms out there, I think your Boingnet tool played in that space. It really had a good idea to tie that together and tie landing pages with direct mail. Direct mail sends somebody to a landing page and you’ll send them automated emails. They had great ideas. The issues that those systems, that I saw they had, is they were competing in the marketing automation space with companies like Marketo that had tens of millions of dollars, or hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, and they just couldn’t compete. So they were kind of, in my mind, pigeonholed in a single campaign type thing and really were not full fledged marketing automation.

How Direct Mail Automation Changes The Equation

Tod Cordill:
I created a slide share five years ago on how to integrate digital printing, personalized direct mail, into those marketing automation systems. Wasn’t rocket science, but it did take some dedication and some FTP transfers, automated FTP transfers, to send the data to the printer to do the direct mail piece. And it just never really caught on, because you have the email marketing and the market automation people in one house. You’ve got the commercial printers with huge amounts of personalization capability in the other, and nobody was really, could kind of meld those two worlds. And what you’re doing right with Postalytics, from what I can tell, is exactly that.

Dennis Kelly:
That’s definitely the idea: let’s take all the data, and all the personalization that lives in a CRM and a marketing automation tool, and let’s unleash the capabilities of these great printer mailer, commercial print shops, and pool all together the software. And so that’s really what we’re trying to do here.

B2B Uses Direct Mail To Boost Email Marketing Programs

Dennis Kelly:
You know, with direct mail, it’s often considered kind of a B2C acquisition or lead generation channel. You know, you’re focused on a small to midsize businesses on the B2B side. What are the top couple of things that you think B2B companies should be focused on when they’re thinking about adding direct mail as a channel?

Tod Cordill:
Well, the first thing is if email marketing is working for you, and you’re meeting all your marketing goals and your business goals, your growth goals, you don’t really need to worry about direct mail. But for most companies I’ve come across email’s getting really wonky out there. Deliverability is a problem. Email fatigue, people might open your first few emails and kind of get bored after a while and they quit opening them. They may want to open your email, but by the time they open up their email program in the morning, you’re below the fold and they never see it. I don’t know how many of my Gmail application, I don’t know how many emails I’ve never even seen that are down there.

And then you have unsubscribers that you really can’t market to anymore from emails. And you’ve got the problem getting people on your list in the first place. So there’s just tons of different problems that people may be having with their email marketing. And if that’s the case, direct mail could be a really good solution to move the needle and solve those problems all across the board.

Mid Funnel And Email Unsubscribers Are Low Hanging Fruit

For a B2B company, you can buy a direct mail list, you can send a direct mail. You don’t have to worry about privacy issues, like maybe a little bit, but not about online privacy issues. You don’t have to worry about people opting into your email. They’re not going to click any spam buttons so that direct mail can be, that first touch would be the first awareness touched that they ever have and learn about your company. It can be great for that.

You can drip out a few of them and just kind of help build that awareness over time. The other thing, middle funnel, you’ve got the ability to just kind of drip out emails to them and you can mix in direct mails into the mix.

One major marketing automation provider I know of, when they have clients that fit their ideal customer profile and they’re not engaging with emails anymore, they’ll send a direct mail. They’ll just kind of transition that into a direct mail campaign and try to reengage in that way.

Dennis Kelly:
That’s perfect. We’re seeing a lot of that similar kind of mid funnel, lower funnel activity in the B2B space. And some of the newer capabilities in direct mail automation tools like Postalytics enable drip campaigns to come out on a sequence. Similar to the types of drip campaigns that have traditionally been done with email.

Direct Mail Builds Brand Awareness

Dennis Kelly
So one of the other things that we see a lot of, as we focus on the small to mid size market as well here at Postalytics, both on the B2B and the B2C side, we see our clients struggling with brand awareness. You know, by definition you’re a smaller company, you’re not a huge brand. And so companies struggle really trying to help their audiences understand who they are, what they’re all about. And so do you think direct mail can help with brand awareness? Do you have any ideas for the folks out there that could assist them with their brand awareness activities?

Tod Cordill:
Oh, it totally can. So one I mentioned earlier, you can purchase a mailing list and direct mail to people that never … that likely could benefit from your products, but they’ve never heard of you. So that’s one touch you can send out a drip campaign. Back when I was getting … back in the old marketing classes, it was the rule of thumb is it took seven touches. Somebody had to see your name, your brand, and your logo seven times before they would recall it. I think today in today’s noisy marketing universe, it’s probably more than seven touches these days. But the direct mail is a piece that they’re going to remember.

It might take seven direct mails … it probably would take seven direct mail touches. You know, a lot of people retarget with banner ads and things after they visit your website. Because just because they come to your website doesn’t mean they’re going to remember you three months later. So following it up with digital advertising is great, but those are getting ignored more and more. So if you can follow, mix in direct mail into the mix, that’s going to be an awareness touch that is remembered. You’re actually literally in the hands of that prospect.

Tod Cordill:
Direct mail can be used in many different ways to increase awareness. And it’s awareness for the brand, it’s awareness for the products, and it’s awareness for products even for customers, as I mentioned, just awareness for products that they’re not buying from you yet.

See “How To Build Brand Awareness While Generating Leads With Direct Mail” for more on brand awareness campaigns using direct mail.

Multi-touch Campaigns Build The Most Awareness

Dennis Kelly:
I completely agree. And it’s one of the things I think we’re really starting to focus on with a lot of our early customers is the idea of creating multi touch marketing campaigns so that you can schedule out in advance touches over, you know, two, three, four month period and have direct mail touches, have email touches, have digital touches that are hitting their audience all in a very concentrated way on the same message, similar calls to action, and really reinforcing each other across all those different channels.

Dennis Kelly:
And so that’s really one of the advantages that automation can bring to the table is that you can set these campaigns up, and schedule them out, and then they just go, and so it’s sort of a next level that we’re trying to bring our audience toward. And that brand awareness is such a challenge for small businesses.

Physical Ads Impact The Brain Differently

Dennis Kelly:
And what is interesting is that there’s a lot of research out there, that’s been published in the last couple of years by neuroscientists, that talk about how when you deal with something physical, you’re actually using a different part of your brain to process it than when you’re reading off of a phone or dealing with a digital type of advertisement. And that the ability to recall the information is higher when you’re touching something and reading it, a physical thing. So it just makes sense that you’d want to combine your digital reach with direct mail to juice your brand awareness.

Tod Cordill:
There’s been many studies around just that, and recall, retention is so much better when you’re reading something that’s physical in your hand as opposed to digital. And it’s just logical. You send a direct mail piece, they pick it up, and even if they don’t read it, they’re holding it in their hand for a few seconds and they’ll see your logo. That main headline you have there will register, even if it’s subconsciously, much more than just a passing digital ad that they might come across.

One Touch Didn’t Work…Shocking!

Tod Cordill:
Now the other day … I was just, along these lines, I was talking to a sales rep for, that was in charge of this business area in a company that didn’t have strong marketing so he was kind of, not really a marketing role, but truly a demand generation role he was fulfilling as part of his sales responsibilities, and they had tried one direct mail piece and before they were acquired by another company that I was working with. And to a marketer this would be very obvious, but he said, “Yeah, we sent it out and it didn’t … You know, we got hardly any activity from it and we figured out that people aren’t going to buy unless they’re ready to buy, unless they have a need today.”

Dennis Kelly:
[Laughter]

I was just kind of holding it in. I had the same reaction you did, but I held it in a little better than you are, Dennis. It’s true they may get some information from you, whether it’s an email, whether it’s a direct mail, however they get the information, they come across and they’re going to think, “You know what, that looks really interesting.” We’re going to need to upgrade our equipment. We’re going to need to upgrade things next year. I’m going to, you know, remember them. This is a company I’m going to definitely put on my short list.

Stay In Front Of Your Audience

Tod Cordill:
Well, if it’s the direct mail piece, they might file it away. They might put it some place and actually come across it. Most likely it will be in a place where they’re going to be able to find it. If it’s an email or digital ad, obviously they’re probably not going to be able to find it. And so when it comes time to start researching, making a decision, they will likely forget about you unless they’ve really had your brand drilled in. So going back to something being at the right time at the right place, that your drip campaign idea is just spot on with that direct mail, because you get it to them every now and then, the more likelihood of recalling you even if it is much later. But if you just keep dripping it out, and it’s a decision they’re going to make, maybe next year you’re going to definitely be top of mind and they’re going to remember you. And they’re going to remember your persistence.

Dennis Kelly:
That’s right! It’s like a sales person who picks up the phone once and leaves a voicemail. They’re never going to get a sale. But when they’re continually calling, checking in, sending emails, sending letters, making a continued effort, those are the people that, the sales people that always win are those that are really persistent.

Tod Cordill:
Right. You just got to be there at the right time. And they’re going to be, your future customer’s going to appreciate it when you do call at the right time. Every sales person has heard it, sometimes rather it’s somebody they haven’t talked to in quite some time and they go, “Oh, I’m glad you called. I’ve got this need that just came across my desk last week,” or yesterday, or this morning. And so that persistence is, it’s so much easier to be persistent with direct mail than it is with the phone.

Dennis Kelly:
Exactly. Well this is great, Tod. It’s been great chatting today. If our folks wanted to get in touch with you, to dig in and learn more about what you’re doing, or talk about some ideas maybe for helping them out, how would they get in touch with you?

Tod Cordill:
Well, probably the easiest way to get ahold of me these days is actually on Twitter. My handle is, @TodCordill. That’s my name, but that’s Tod with one D., Cordill, C-O-R-D-I-L-L. My website, Moderno Strategies, which is modern with an O. and strategies.com is another easy way to get a hold of me or just reach out on LinkedIn.

Dennis Kelly:
Great, and what we’ll do is when we publish this video, we’ll include your contact information in the header, so that everybody can get in touch with you.

As always, it’s been great talking today, Tod, and we thank you very much and everybody out there, if you’ve got any questions about B2B marketing, small to mid size businesses, this is your guy.

Everybody have a great day. We thank you all for joining us and we look forward to connecting again very soon.