The Challenge

How to connect with email non responders?

The current trend in the food service industry is to capitalize on healthy eating trends by drawing attention to and offering meal delivery and catering specials on seasonal menu items. Catering and meal delivery companies are bombarding office managers and consumers with weekly and monthly specials via email. How can a company that is offering high quality, healthy made to order seasonal items stand out from the noise? How can they convey the value of their high end options, when their emails look & feel exactly like their lower end competitors? Pete Minich, CEO of Fresh City, faced these challenges prior to his team’s adoption of Postalytics.

“We didn’t have a clear way to separate ourselves from the multitude of high volume, lower quality takeout operations. We were leaving orders on the table each month from our biggest opportunities.”

The Solution

Compliment email with striking imagery on a physical piece

Automated, colorful and tracked Postalytics postcards targeting email non openers helped Fresh City give it the upper hand in the minds of the busy parents and professionals ordering meals at home and the meeting planners, office managers and executive assistants who place most of their catering orders. Pulling the list of non responders from the email marketing platform was easy. The star of the campaign was of course, the food.

“Our product is beautiful, and it photographs like a supermodel” said Minich. “By making direct mail as easy as email, Postalytics gives us a foolproof way to connect much more deeply with our email non responders with large, high quality images of the seasonal specials that set us apart. By delivering something physical and attractive, we are making a much more memorable impact in the minds of our clients than email alone.”

What convinced Minich to give Postalytics a try though, was the fact that every piece of mail, and every online response was tracked in real time. Just like every other digital channel that Fresh City deploys.

“We had tried a direct mail campaign years before. It took a lot of work, and we had no clue what the ROI looked like. With Postalytics, we just dropped the tracking code in our WordPress landing page and in our online ordering platform. That’s all we had to do to track everyone who went online using their pURL. Combined with the piece by piece tracking of the postal delivery process, we knew we’d understand the impact of each campaign, in real time. Based on the client’s behavior, we can tailor a segmented follow up plan.”

The Results

The long tail of orders keeps growing

Within 72 hours of the postcards hitting the mailboxes, Fresh City saw several orders roll in from the target audience of email non responders.

“The campaign more than paid for itself within the first couple of days”, according to Minich. “What we were shocked to learn was that new orders, directly attributable to the mail piece, continued to roll in throughout the month. While our email only campaigns provide temporary jolts in orders, the Postalytics campaigns generate a steady stream, or longer tail of orders.”

The Fresh City sales and delivery teams learned that many of the companies that ordered due to the campaign kept the postcards, either in a folder dedicated for events, or were tacked up on a bulletin board. The customers ended up visiting their pURLs and placing orders for weeks after the mailing went out.

All told, the initial Postalytics campaign to email non responders generated a +113% ROI, as measured by target audience members who responded to their pURL within 30 days of the mail delivery date, and who followed through to the “Goal Conversion URL” in the online ordering platform. Several other orders were picked up by salespeople targeting responders that went online but didn’t complete the sales process.

What’s Next?

Reactivating dormant accounts

Minich and his team are continuing the non responder series for each seasonal special that is offered. They consider it a “no brainer” strategy after their initial results. Their next focus is to use Postalytics to re-engage with large clients who’ve gone dormant. “We’re planning a multi-drop campaign to reach out and touch a smaller list of high value targets within large companies, who’ve previously made large orders. We’ll highlight our gorgeous food with beautiful photography to open the door for our account teams to re-establish our position as a premium caterer.”