Lobcast Podcast: Spring Marketing Strategies & Strawberry Mimosas

STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to the Lobcast Podcast: Mixers and Marketing. I'm Stephanie Donelson, your hostess with the marketing mostess, and I'm the senior content marketing manager here Lob. I'm thrilled to be joined by Kim Courvoisier yet again to talk all things marketing. Kim, do you mind introducing yourself to any new listeners out there?

KIM: Sure! Hi, everyone! As Stephanie said, I'm the senior director of content marketing at Lob and I'm thrilled to be here for another action-packed episode. I have to ask you, Stephanie, what are we drinking today? Because when you told me we needed a bottle of champagne, I was totally here for it. So are we creating champagne campaigns?

STEPHANIE: I mean, when you execute a really well-done marketing campaign, you've got to pop a bottle. But today we are making strawberry mimosas. And so, listeners, if you want to make this cocktail at home, you are going to need a bottle of champagne, 2 cups of orange juice, and a half cup of fresh strawberries. This does make six servings. So be sure to share with your other marketing friends. We're not encouraging you to drink a whole bottle of champagne by yourself, but you're going to add the orange juice and strawberries to a blender, blend until smooth, and then pour your champagne into your flute about halfway up and then slowly top your champagne with the strawberry OJ concoction and then garnish with a strawberry if you so wish. So cheers. And welcome back to the show, Kim.

KIM: Thank you. I thought I got the whole bottle, so I guess I'll have to share. Also, I left out the OJ and the strawberries, but cheers anyway. I'm doing it my own way.

STEPHANIE: All right, so last time on the podcast, I had Scott from marketing ops on and we were talking about spring cleaning marketing workflows, and it really got me thinking about spring marketing strategies and freshening up campaigns. So let's start by talking about spring cleaning and marketing. Kim, what comes to mind of things to tidy up or spruce up in marketing tactics, channels, or even plans?

KIM: Well, as marketers, we never can just rest on our laurels, right? Saying that we've done something good enough. We're constantly testing, learning, optimizing, producing better, faster, and drive results. So with a new year upon us and today just happens to be the first day of spring, so well done on the timing, you know, and it's a season that's all about growth and we're always trying to grow our results right up and to the right. Spring seems like that perfect opportunity to take a step back and assess what's working, what could be better, and maybe try some things that we haven't and go from there, whether it's the channels you use and your customer journey, the keywords you're targeting, you know, the types of content you create, it's all up for review. For example, I'm going to take a step back and my little time machine to the end of last year when we were maybe in Q3, we were loosely flipping around the idea of doing a podcast and here we are 11 episodes later! Thanks to all of your work. And you know, this is a new channel for us. We're testing, we're learning, and we're optimizing on the fly, which I think is really exciting.

STEPHANIE: No a lot of blood, sweat, and tears has been put into this!

KIM: And some champagne !

STEPHANIE: And some champagne. I mean, that's I really like that answer. You know, for me, I also think about cleaning up. So just because I've worked in that industry for so long, I mean, it goes hand in hand with content, which you and I do on a daily basis. But, you know, reviewing backlinks, making sure that they're not harming our website score or hurting our SEO efforts, making sure that our listings on other websites are up to date and correct and just updating metadata. You know, Scott and I talked about marketing workflows quite a bit. And so that makes me think of automated marketing series. So Kim, in your opinion, how often should marketers be cleaning up nurture series or adding additional touch points to those customer journeys?

KIM: That is a great question. And it depends. I mean, you'll hear me saying that quite a bit today.

STEPHANIE: I am going to make temporary tattoos for every guest that says that: It depends. We're all going to be branded.

KIM: Right? Because there's no one size fits all for marketers. It really depends. We're all doing different things. There was an organization that I worked at where I had 12 different nurture series running at the time, this is going to date myself, but they were not automated. We were not on a marketing automation platform yet. So the thought of doing that is really daunting, right? And so we're all super busy. So thinking about pushing the pause button and like cleaning up or reworking can seem really daunting when we have so many deliverables to hit like in the here and now. But if we don't take that time, if we don't press pause and look at the things and sort of tend the garden in the spring, same here and the things we've already created, then those things can start to work against us. Right and that's not great. You know, you mentioned SEO and you know how often you do a technical audit? You should definitely do that once in a while, especially if you're new to an organization or that you have some technical debt to fix things like that. But, you know, you have to think about the fact that even for us as content marketers, content goes stale, links break, there's new stats that come out, and new content is created that would add value, especially when you're thinking about a nurture series, right? Think about all the content we've created last year that we can now take back to our Demand Gen team and think like, oh, we have different industry nurture. Now we have this piece of content. So it goes without saying that you should look at your touchpoints and see what's working and where you can update it. I would say at least once a year, if not more often, depending on your resources. And I know one of the first projects that you worked on, which may or may not have been fun was a content inventory. Right and an assessment to see and identify where we had gaps and where we had opportunities to map things to industry and to funnel states. And that's a really nice thing to do, especially when you have someone new come to the organization, because not only does it help them get familiar with what you have. As an outside perspective. It's also kind of easy for them to come in and identify like, hey, why don't you missing this and you've been sitting in front of it for a year that didn't even hit you because you're so in it every day now.

STEPHANIE: No and that was an interesting project. I mean, as much as making those audits and the inventory in the library, whatever word people apply to it, it's a lot of work. But you're right, it does just give you that nice snapshot of here's everything we have, here's how it all relates to each other. Here's where it falls in the funnel. So then other team members can come in and be like, OK, I need a nurture track for this industry. It's like, all that content already exists. Now you just have to build out the emails and link it correctly. But a boom. But you're done.

KIM: Yeah now and I know we'll talk about later about grouping things together and doing different things with content and etc. And I think that's a great way to figure those kind of things out.

STEPHANIE: Yup! So I may not love reports nearly as much as you do because I see that gleam in your eye when I show you a new spreadsheet. But how often do you think that marketing teams should be doing deep dives on their data and analyzing the results? Is that something that's monthly, quarterly, biannually, or does it depend on what campaigns or projects those teams are doing?

KIM: Yeah, so you got me. I do love to geek out on data because data is our right and that lets us make informed decisions versus guessing. And we look at different data for different channels and whether it's Google Analytics for our website, I'm actually taking their data for class right now to be ahead of that or like Marketo to look at how our email marketing campaigns are performing. I think they each have their own cadence of when you should be looking at them, right? Because reporting comes in at different times. And I know you look at social media every month, so the analogy I like is that I'm borrowing this from someone from years ago is this microscope and a telescope point of view. So really zooming in at something and looking at the nitty gritty and then really zooming out and looking at the big picture. So using that combination.

STEPHANIE: Yeah no, that approach makes a lot of sense. I mean, I've definitely been on teams that kind of don't combine those views. Like one team I've been on was way into the weeds and making changes that then kind of had negative impacts on, you know, the forest. Like you're not looking at the whole picture there. And so it really is coming down to combining those views and understanding like, OK, if we make changes here at the small level, how does that impact all these other campaigns or the other pieces of the puzzle? Like, you can't just focus on one tiny little square and expect that the rest will follow. You have to make sure that it fits in with everything else.

KIM: Yeah and you got to make sure your teams are talking to each other when they're making changes and that they're documenting things, right? Because otherwise you're like, what happened here?  

STEPHANIE: Yeah. OK Google Analytics annotations are your best friend any time you make a change.

KIM: Agreed!

STEPHANIE: So Kim, when it comes to doing some spring cleaning on marketing campaigns versus a complete overhaul or refresh, what metrics do you pay attention to?

KIM: I won't say it, but I'll give you an example. I'm curious if we could refresh your archive, some of our blog content, because we create a lot of it, right? I'm going to do that deep dive. I'm going to do that microscope approach into Google Analytics and look at a number of different metrics. I'm going to look at our traffic page post over a given time period and look at the bounce rate. I'm going to look at the time on page and I might even look at some secondary actions, right? Did they click on a link that they downloaded? Did they take some did some event occur? I'm going to use my terminology. You know. So and then as you mentioned, I'm going to look at SEO. Is there a keyword that we're trying to rank or is this content helping that hurting that could I do better? And based on all of those different data points, I may decide to archive that piece, I may decide to refresh it, I may decide to write another piece that's related to it so that we could do some interlinking. So there's a number of different things. And again, it's really going to depend on what you're trying to measure, what you're trying to do there. So I think especially for what we do, though, content is always something that can benefit from like planting fresh seed or watering the garden.

STEPHANIE: OK so you've earned two temporary tattoos that have "It depends" on it now, but let's say that we live in a perfect world and our marketing channels or tactics, plans, whatever require no spring cleaning. Let's talk about actual spring marketing campaigns. So to kick us off. I'm going to talk about something that we're both very passionate about: words. So what about messaging? What kind of words can marketers work into their spring campaigns' marketing messaging to get customers to spring into action?

KIM: Well, it's the most timely question ever, right? today is literally the first day of spring. So I opened up my inbox because I knew I was on this podcast today. Spring has sprung. Spring is in the air. You know, coming up roses, spring forward, like all of these words, right? Spring break, like there's so many ways to use it. And, you know, there's no shortage of that. So looking in your inbox, looking into your mailbox for inspiration are great sources for that. But then there's event related words around the holidays and things like the first day of spring, we've got Easter and Passover and Women's Day, Equal Pay Day. I think last week we have Pi Day was last week, March Madness. The Kentucky Derby is literally a holiday or a day to commemorate everything from chronic illness awareness to peanuts to margaritas. So the sky's really the limit of just how creative you're going to be.

STEPHANIE: No! I think there's a National Day for everything. As a social media manager, I've spent many, many hours on that website being like, OK, what? Like weird little holiday? Can we like celebrate? But it still isn't really fun because it's just something unexpected. It's just a way to, again, have fun with your audience and your campaigns and just put a little bit of human into it, especially with the rise of all AI. Like OK, let's celebrate these weird little holidays, but still have fun with it.

KIM: And I agree. Like those campaigns to me stand out more than the expected campaigns. You know, like if I get like, oh, it, you know, whatever day it's like hug your cat day, like, oh, who knew that existed? And I'm like, well, come here, Cleo, let's get a hug, you know? And I probably more likely to click on something a little more kooky like that than I am. Like it's easier!

STEPHANIE: I assume the next day is National Band-Aid day. For all the scratches you've gotten.

KIM: You've met Cleo.

STEPHANIE: Those industries are in on it together.

KIM: Exactly.

STEPHANIE: So you talked about, you know, how creative your team can be. So I'm just curious, personal opinion when it comes to springtime colors, which is more appealing to you, pastels or vibrant spring colors?

KIM: I know you know the answer to this question already, but I love action. I love energy. And I love all things that are, like, fast and vibrant, hence my shirt for today. So I'm fully here for the vibrant colors. But if I were applying this to our marketing campaign, I'd want it to fit the aesthetic of the campaign. We want to think about things like what is the rest of it look like? If it were a landing page, I want it to have a message match like the e-book, but I like the colors, work together. And so it doesn't look like something completely foreigner unexpected. So I'm here for vibrant. But you know, if it was maybe something to match this, I maybe wouldn't have this.

STEPHANIE: You've got the vibrant down. I've got the pastels down.

KIM: Yes, we're here for all of it.

STEPHANIE: Does it change if the campaign is digital or printed?

KIM: Not in my mind. Again, I think it would come back to that message and create a match for the brand in the rest of the campaign. With that said, yes, if you're printing on paper, do you want it to be super light and maybe not stand out as much? But to me, it's not about the medium or the mode of light, printed or digital. It's just more of like, what do you want it to really say to your audience?

STEPHANIE: Yeah and I think you make a really good point. You know, it's like matching the branding. I think we've used Ulta as an example of a company that sends really great direct mail campaigns. You'll find them on our best direct mail campaigns page, but I think they're one that has a very vibrant color, but it's everywhere. It's in their stores, it's online, it's in print. But I do also think that, you know, people that are maybe new to direct mail marketing should think about just how much ink it takes and, you know, making sure that their colors print as well as they look on digital. So just something that I recommend anyone keep in mind

KIM: There's a guy on our team, Dave K., who always talked about paper being like the fifth color.

Recommended reading: How paper impacts color when printing direct mailpieces

STEPHANIE: Yeah and it makes you consider the difference of paper. Oh, yeah. Like, yeah. If you're just printing on regular paper, like, it can absorb it pretty fast, but, like, cardstock, like, it's going to have to really sink in there.

KIM: And that's why it's so important. Yeah it's so important to color check and make sure you work with a printer or a direct mail platform that does all that checking for you, too. Quality assurance.

STEPHANIE: Yeah. Yeah. Cause I remember one of my first direct mail campaigns and it looked great on my computer, like, yeah, send it off. And then I actually got the postcard. I was like, well, what the heck is this like? It's just not it.

KIM: Which is also why you're always on the seed list so you can get a copy and see what it looks like.

STEPHANIE: All right, so let's talk about something that I love. I mean, anyone who listened to the podcast understands that I love themes and alliteration. So what are your thoughts on themed promotions or campaigns? I guess we kind of talked about it already a little bit with some of those words, but spring savings deals are April Fool's Day social media blitz. What are your thoughts about that?

KIM: Yeah, I'm here with you. I'm totally a big fan of the theme. It doesn't matter so much as there's a dose of creativity and a compelling offer. Like I said, my mailbox was brimming with one subject line headline. So like I said, if you're ever at a loss, just go to your own inbox or mailbox. I do that all the time. For inspiration, check out our best direct mail campaigns page. And you know, you can also jump on the AI bandwagon. As we said, if you have a subject line or a headline for your direct mail piece and you're looking for maybe some options to A/B test you're just looking for a little bit more but AI is not always known for its creativity. So a little bit of a caveat there, but it can give you a bunch of options very quickly. So that's useful. Or you can even use a tool like CoSchedule headline analyzer. You can put your headline in there and it'll tell you like it'll basically read it and then give you some improvements for it too. So those are both useful tool.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, I love that tool.

KIM: Shoutout to our friends at CoSchedule!

STEPHANIE: I'll get back something like, Yeah this headline is really bad. I'm like, oh, well.

KIM: We're marketers, we have no egos.

STEPHANIE: All right, so one thing that you and I have talked about on past podcast episodes is preference centers. And I think one trend that I'm kind of excited to see grow in popularity is the ability to opt out of certain holiday messaging that may be triggering, or it's hard to get bombarded with messaging about it like I've seen, especially, you know, floral retail brands send out emails asking if I want to opt out of certain holiday or certain emails regarding a holiday in May. Can do you think this trend will continue?

KIM: Yes, absolutely. And I'm a big fan of this because it ties back to something we talk a lot about. We talked a lot about in episode nine, which is relevant and respect for your audience. Right so giving them what they want, not what they don't want. And certain holidays can be really triggering like Mother's Day or Father's Day. Valentine's Day. Right any of these emotionally tied things can be triggering and not a great way. And I love seeing brands stepping up and providing options for their subscribers and for their audiences. Right but it does add to the pressure. If you give your audience that option. Then you better get it right and you better not screw it up because I have seen examples of that. And then it is double bad, right? Because you've given them the option to opt out and then you send it anyway and that hits hard. So just if you're going to do that, make sure you email the execution.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, because that's kind of the whole point, right? You want to make a good impression. You want to keep that relationship strong with your audience. And you're saying, I respect you enough to ask like, hey, how do you feel about this? If you don't want these messages, great, we're going to suppress you from this list. But then, oops, actually you're going to get these because we need to meet a sales quota. I'm like,

KIM: Yeah, I often don't think it's that. I think sometimes it's just like a mess with the sending or the execution or the list for which, you know, we've all been there, we've all done it, and it's not great and it's not the way you handle it. But I think what you're getting at is the bigger win for the brand and for the subscriber, the audiences, to give them that option and giving them the relevance. And you probably in some way remember, right, the brands that do that are you and it's an anchor, right? Because now you have a point of contact and you're like, oh, that's the brand that offered me to not receive that message about Valentine's Day.

STEPHANIE: Yeah all right. So what about a channel that we love around here at love? How does direct mail fit into springtime promotions?

KIM: Well, direct mail is seasonless and it can and should be used all year long as part of your omnichannel or multi-channel strategy. Right it's not a one hit wonder or one season wonder. 72% of marketers are using direct mail in conjunction with their email marketing and 46% of paid social. So it's less about a season and more about how it works as a touchpoint in your customer journey. And we see our customers using direct mail, not just for customer acquisition, but for retention and for win back campaigns all year long with massive success.

STEPHANIE: No, I think that's very fair. I mean, in the marketing world, I feel like no matter what organization I work, work in or the industry that I'm in, the summer is essentially kind of a dead time and a time to just keep the status quo. Having said that, do you think that spring is a good time to test new marketing channels?

KIM: My approach is normally I like to do a lot of my testing in the first half of the year, right, so that I can apply those learnings and optimize in the second half. Because for many companies, Q3 and Q4 are the big kind of Qs to put the wins on the board, right?

STEPHANIE: Crunch time!

KIM: Yes, it is crunch time. And you're building, right? And so you're putting a lot of things out the first half. You can leverage those all the way through the year, which is why you and I are really office in session, Q1 and Q2 actually all the time. But because we can leverage and we sometimes release some of our big rock pieces in the first couple of quarters because then again, we can leverage that goodness all year long. But I don't want to say those words again. It would vary based on your industry because you might have an industry where, you don't want to do a lot of testing of things in the first part of the year because maybe you're in insurance or you're in something tax-related and you don't really want to be messing around. But I would say that can do testing and optimization any time you want to test smaller things that you can get wins from, whether if you're in tax season. And you can test two different subject lines or two different headlines and go from there, that because you want to make sure you're picking an opportune time of year.

STEPHANIE: Sure. So what about testing new audiences or refreshing your targeting? Is spring a time to tap into consumers feelings of out with the old and in with the new? Is there an ideal time of year to play around with segmentation, or does it vary by industry or organization?

KIM: Never going to live it down again.

STEPHANIE: Drink it every time you say it.

KIM: That was a proactive one. Again, at my core, my mantra has been ABT or Always Be Testing. So it's not a season-based strategy. There are better times and others to do big test like I just talked about. But you can always be testing something, right? So whether that's your web page headlines, your calls to action or more major things like the number of touches and a customer nurture or adding field to a forum on your website or taking them away?

STEPHANIE: Yeah no, I definitely agree. I think, you know, we tend to think of A/B tests or at least. Maybe it's just me, but I feel like it's, you know, emails, the bucket, website's the bucket and like you're never testing multiple things at the same time and you're generally making big tweaks like it's, oh, we're going to be designing this new landing page for this e-book that we're coming out with. Here's the time. We're going to do our A/B testing and so be like, well, we've got this old blog post. Like, why don't we test a different CTA there? Or, you know, let's actually embed a video versus sending someone somewhere else. Like even those kind of small tests can really help you understand more about your audience and how to optimize your next marketing message.

KIM: And I think testing's fun! It's like a puzzle trying to unpack, like if you change this, what happened here and like, you know, it just it's a challenge and I kind of think that's fun. Maybe that's the geeky data person in me.

STEPHANIE: Well, I think it's always interesting just to see the results. On the last episode, Scott and I were talking about, you know, like as marketers, we tend to kind of go with our gut soemtimes. We understand our audience, we typically know who we're going after, but sometimes your audience really surprises you. Like social media marketing. I feel like, oh, yep, I've got my, you know, I understand what I'm doing here. Oh, I know what kind of post people are going to react to. And then I will post the most random thing and within half an hour, it has 30 likes. I'm like, that was just like, no, that's not what you're supposed to interact with the other posts. So your audience can always surprise you. And so I think that a reason to be testing because at least it helps you narrow down what factors kind of have that impact on the actions they take. So then you can continue to refine.

KIM: I mean, I would say, when they surprised you, that's when you learned the most, right?

STEPHANIE: Right.

KIM: When you think you have it all figured out and they come along and do something random and you're like, what?

STEPHANIE: Yeah or it's like the test on the smallest thing, like testing second person language versus first person language. And your first person goes through the roof. And it's like, oh, OK. Like, learn something new about them. All right. So lastly, one thing that comes to mind with spring season is sustainability, a topic that we love around here. How can marketers ensure sustainability is at the forefront of springtime marketing campaigns as well as the rest of the year?

KIM: Well, April is Earth Day month, so there's never a better time to share your thinking about sustainability. But again, it's seasonless, right? You can be thinking about that all the time. And one way we help here at Lob is by making every campaign we send on our customer's behalf is carbon neutral. All mail that sent out through Lob is carbon neutral throughout the entire lifecycle from raw materials, right the tree to the ultimate disposal recycling Lob also uses responsibly-sourced raw materials to minimize our footprint as much as possible. And some less obvious things you can do as a brand is email smarter, not more. So send fewer campaigns that get better results because you're doing things like targeting, having relevant personalizing and making sure that recipient gets value out of what you've set. And then you can also proactively ensure your mail gets delivered by using address verification before your campaign gets sent to make sure the addresses you send to are valid. Address verification helps ensure accuracy by correcting mistakes and misspellings, which are very common, especially if you're gathering those addresses from online. Right or people are buying, meeting US Postal Services' address formatting requirements, and then preventing that bad address data from causing like downstream bottlenecks or roadblock. So on the flip side of the coin, now that your mail personalized, relevant target and addresses are valid, you can use a direct mail partner, like us, that invests in sustainable direct mail and builds ESG accountability into every direct mail campaign to help you meet your sustainability goals. That's easy peasy. And don't we... Don't we have some stats that we plant like trees for everything we send.

STEPHANIE: We do!

KIM: Do you know what it is at again, refresh my memory.

STEPHANIE: Our Eden Reforestation Projects. Yes, I think we're up to. Hold on...

KIM: How many trees are we up to?

STEPHANIE: I know we just pulled.

KIM: I mean, I wasn't putting you on the spot for the exact number, but I know we plant trees for every campaign sent, which is pretty cool. I remember when I heard that, I was like, that's awesome.

STEPHANIE: Yep so our latest numbers is in February alone, we planted almost 22,000 trees and we're at 733,000.

KIM: Almost a million trees. Very cool.

STEPHANIE: Almost yeah.

KIM: To trees!

STEPHANIE: To trees. So you talked about brands building their ESG goals into everything they do. And I think a really great customer to highlight right now is thredUP. Not only is the brand focused on sustainable shopping, but it also incorporates sustainability in its direct mail marketing. Kim, do you mind giving our listeners the rundown on how thredUP uses Lob?

KIM: For sure. So run up some managed online clothing marketplace providing a bunch of fashionable secondhand clothes, and it was founded back in 2009 and quickly grew into one of the world's largest apparel resale platforms now. Right but recently they had a cohort of turned customers that had it purchased in the past year. thredUP wanted to reactivate these customers with an offer, right when that campaign we've all heard of them. What thredUP did was ran a reactivation campaign and they ab tested two different creatives, two different cohorts of their audience. To see which creative would perform the best and which would be most responded to the. By testing their offers, they were able to figure out what worked best and then roll that out to their larger audience, enabling them to make smarter, not harder. So I love that testing on a small portion of your audience, right? It's not like nobody's ever done that before, but I love that from a sustainability point of view because you're testing, you're learning, and then you can roll it out to that larger audience and in a lab made it seamless for thredUP to be able to automate triggered campaigns and reduce the manual effort and increase efficiency while generating better results and higher ROI.

Recommended reading: The thredUP case study

STEPHANIE: I see what you did there! "Seamless."

KIM: Right!

STEPHANIE: I think that you and I both have very similar writing styles when it comes to I mean, I'm probably actually more working in like puns and stuff like that into our work.

KIM: I mean, Taylor Swift was the Easter eggs and all her songs and her post. So we should work them into our content. And, you know, maybe one day we'll be, as you were saying,

STEPHANIE: You are trying your hardest your heart is to convert me.

KIM: I am.

STEPHANIE: Since we're still talking about sustainability, you know, here at Lob, we send carbon neutral direct mail. But if brands are still doing direct mail in-house or working with another vendor, what kinds of things should they consider to send sustainable mailers?

KIM: That's a great question. I mean, for starters, You can ensure the paper stock contains PCW, which is post-consumer waste fiber for all letter and postcard mailings allowing you to reduce your carbon footprint. You can save water power and reduce waste. And then you can also make sure that if you're working with another printer that they work with the Forest Stewardship Council, FSC certified stuff paper and you can even look on a lot of the mailing to get in. You'll see little marks on the back of them that say if they're working with a board Stewardship Council. We actually featured some of these on our best direct mail campaign page this month to go check those out. But this paper that it's certified for sustainable harvesting and production. And then you can also offset carbon emissions by purchasing carbon offsets through companies like Terrapass or a number of others. But again, if you're using Lob, we do that all for you because every mailing we send is carbon neutral.

STEPHANIE: Yes, I love that. All right. So lastly, I think we can apply the idea of reduce, reuse, and recycle not just to paper products, but also to our marketing campaigns in general. I think we've talked a few times on the podcast about just the sheer volume of marketing messages that we get every day that they kind of start to fade into the background. So by reducing our messaging, like you kind of talked about earlier, we have to make sure that it's impactful and it drives action and we can reuse campaign assets and rerun fan favorite promotions or give away older swag before we order more. And of course, recycle what we can, especially in our space of direct mail. Kim, do you agree?

KIM: I mean, totally. I run content marketing and a core tenet of our branch of marketing is making what we call a big rock piece of content. Right and then breaking it into little smaller pebbles and leveraging it in a myriad of different ways and formats. You mentioned reusing things that work like giveaways or offers, and that's something every marketers looking to do is create something that's repeatable and scalable in a campaign or program. The State of Direct Mail report and the sister report, the consumer insights. It's very much in that vein, right? Because we repeat it every year with fresh data that we're able to take something that works and then rinse and repeat that. That makes it a lot easier than it is, but that's just of it. And then we recently packaged up a bunch of our webinars and ebooks into a direct mail master class course, which was a fantastic way to take existing resources and use them in a new fashion.

STEPHANIE: No, I love it and I definitely recommend any listeners if you're wanting to refresh your skills in any facet of marketing, not just direct mail marketing, please feel free to check out Master Class. So Kim, any final thoughts that you want to share or anything we didn't get to today?

KIM: Nope I just wanted to thank you, as always, for having me on the podcast. Always fun conversation to be had. And maybe I can just figure out what to do with the rest of this bottle of champagne.

STEPHANIE: You just came for the drinks!

KIM: I think the combo is my favorite.

STEPHANIE: It is mixers and marketing, so we got to have a little fun with it. Yeah all right. So to our listeners, thank you so much for joining us for mixers and marketing today. If you're thinking of launching some springtime marketing campaigns that feature direct mail to acquire new customers, be sure to read our complimentary e-book, The Modern Marketer's Guide to Customer Acquisition with Direct Mail before you launch that campaign. You can get your copy at lobdemo.co/acquisition. We hope you'll join us again as we talk all things marketing and enjoy a mixed drink. As always, you can browse our library of episodes over at lobdemo.co/lobcast. Thanks for listening, and that's all, folks.