I’ve wanted to do this podcast episode for a long time.
Not because direct mail is some new, shiny thing. It’s literally a hundred years old. But every time I walk to my mailbox, I notice the same thing: it’s getting emptier. Mostly just the stuff the post office has to give you. Bills. A flyer or two. And then, every once in a while, a beautifully designed postcard from a brand I actually care about. And I stop. I actually look at it.
That doesn’t happen with my email inbox. I can barely keep up with the promotional tabs in there. I’ve been watching Postpilot since their early days. I remember first hearing about them and thinking, wait, direct mail? But the more I paid attention, the more the logic clicked. So when I finally got Ben Walter and Drew Hart from the Postpilot team on the podcast, I came in hot with questions.
Ben runs partnerships at Postpilot. Drew works closely with agency partners and spent time on the account management side, helping brands actually get campaigns off the ground. Between them, they’ve seen this channel go from “does this really work?” to brands reaching out saying, “We need this yesterday.” And Postpilot just landed at #80 on the 2025 Inc. 5000. So clearly something is clicking.
Here are five things from our conversation that stuck with me.
1) Your mailbox is empty, and that’s the whole point
I brought this up right at the top of the interview because it’s something I genuinely notice in my own life. My physical mailbox gets smaller and smaller. Meanwhile, my email inbox? I’ll get hit four, five, six times a day from the same brand.
Ben had the perfect contrast. Think about how busy your email and SMS inboxes are, he said. Now think about your physical mailbox. One is chaos. The other is quiet.
And when a postcard shows up in that quiet space — your name on it, a brand you recognize — it doesn’t register as marketing. Postpilot’s data shows that about 60% of people who receive their cards actually perceive them as a gift. Not an ad. A gift.
I’ve experienced this myself. When I see one of those beautifully designed pieces in my mailbox, I’m genuinely delighted. It’s a completely different emotional response than another subject line I’m going to scroll past.
The channel everyone forgot about became the one with the least noise.
2) The founders saw it firsthand, then built the tool that didn’t exist
The Postpilot origin story is really what made me want to have this conversation. Co-founders Drew Sanocki and Michael Epstein are guys I remember from podcasts back in like 2005. Real veterans. They’d been running big e-commerce brands like Karmaloop and AutoAnything. Often stepping in as turnaround specialists. Massive top-line revenue, but losing millions quarterly. Sinking ships, leaky buckets.
And one of their go-to playbooks for turning those brands around was to dig into the deep customer lists, especially suppressed buyers who’d stopped engaging with email and SMS, and reactivate them through direct mail. It worked every time.
The problem was that for digital-native Shopify brands, doing direct mail was a nightmare. Source paper, find a printer, design creative for a physical format you’ve never worked in before. It felt like a foreign country.
So they acquired the Postpilot technology in 2018 and set out to make the whole thing feel like setting up a Klaviyo flow. Today, it’s a Shopify app. You plug in your email provider, pull over your existing segments, and their team handles design, printing, and shipping from their own in-house facilities in South Carolina and Arizona.
Ben’s line that stuck with me: “Basically zero lift to get off the ground.”
I marvel at that, honestly. The ability to look at something that’s technically complicated and say, no, it doesn’t have to be.
3) Twenty-four hours from abandoned cart to printed postcard
Okay, this is where my jaw dropped a little.
Drew walked me through how it works on the back end. Someone abandons a cart on your Shopify store. Within 24 hours, a personalized postcard is printed and shipped. Depending on how close the customer is to their facilities, it lands in three to seven days.
I told Ben and Drew, if I abandon a cart and then go pick up my mail and see that brand sitting in there? I’m going to stop in my tracks. Honestly. One, out of shock. Wasn’t I just on that website? And two, because it’s a tangible, physical thing that cuts through in a way another email simply can’t.
The most popular automations are what you’d expect: abandoned cart, welcome series where a new subscriber who hasn’t converted in 14 days gets a card, and the big one: win-back campaigns targeting one-time buyers who haven’t come back after 90-120 days. That last one, Drew said, consistently drives the highest return.
And when you compare the longevity, the difference is stark. A digital ad click gives you maybe a two-minute session, and that’s generous. A postcard? It sits on someone’s desk for days. Gets stuck to the fridge. Ben made this point and it’s powerful: we’re talking about days or weeks of impressions versus seconds or minutes.
Same marketing dollar. Completely different shelf life.
4) No opt-in required — and that changes everything
This is the part that really made me sit up.
In email, you need consent. You worry about deliverability, spam filters, the ever-growing unsubscribe rate. In SMS, there was a moment when Texas basically tried to remove the ability to send marketing texts entirely. Digital ad targeting has been hammered by iOS privacy updates.
Direct mail? None of that applies. You don’t need an opt-in to send a postcard. It’s completely legal in the United States. No deliverability risk. No algorithm deciding whether your message gets seen.
I asked specifically about this. Can you still reach someone who’s unsubscribed from your email list? And the answer is yes. The Klaviyo integration and the direct mail channel operate independently. You don’t need permission to send a card.
Ben put it this way: typically, maybe 20% of your customer base is subscribed to email. Direct mail lets you reach the other 80%. That’s not a nice-to-have. That’s a fundamentally larger audience.
And then Ben dropped something near the end that I keep thinking about: it takes an act of Congress to change the cost of direct mail. I joked about the inefficiency of passing laws, but the point is real. Unlike digital ad auctions where your CPMs swing daily, the economics of this channel are stable. Predictable. Built into the system.
The channel that doesn’t need an algorithm might be the most durable one you’ve got.
5) Get creative with what you put in someone’s home
This is where I got really excited, because the creative possibilities are wild.
Ben told me about a shoe brand that sends postcards with a cutout so parents can measure their child’s foot. Think about that. If you’ve got multiple kids, that card isn’t going in the trash. It’s living in your house. It’s getting used.
He told me about pitching a puzzle brand on sending monthly postcards with a few cut-out pieces. At the end of the year, you’ve got a complete puzzle assembled from twelve months of mail. I mean, come on. That’s brilliant.
And they’re rolling out a feature to display loyalty points and tier status right on the postcard. Imagine getting a card that says, “You’ve just reached Gold status. You have 500 points. Use them this Black Friday.” No discount code. No margin erosion. Just activating the loyalty program your customer already signed up for, through a channel they’ll actually see.
When I think about a gardening company sending a seasonal trifold with tips and tricks, the kind of thing that gets a magnet on the fridge, that’s not marketing. That’s becoming part of someone’s life.
You’re physically in the home. What you do with that opportunity is up to you.
There’s so much more in this conversation. The 450-million-profile database and how their identity graphing can find someone even after they’ve moved and changed their name. The acquisition AI tool that builds lookalike audiences from your customer data. The benchmark AI reporting that literally tells you which campaigns to turn back on. And a stat that genuinely surprised me: millennial women are Postpilot’s highest-performing demographic cohort. Not the older generation you’d assume.
But the five things above are what I keep coming back to, because they apply whether you’re running a $1 million brand or a $50 million one.
The physical world didn’t go away. It just got quiet. And the brands that figure out how to show up there — thoughtfully, beautifully, at the right moment — are going to have an edge that’s really hard to replicate with another retargeting pixel.
Or as Ben put it simply:
It feels like a digital channel, but you’re taking advantage of being outside the busy inbox.
—Ramin
📬 Connect with the Postpilot team:
Ben Walter: ben@postpilot.com | LinkedIn
Drew Hart: drewhart@postpilot.com | LinkedIn
Website: postpilot.com
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Download the BFCM Direct Mail Report at postpilot.com
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