Objective
This retail brand needed a lot of help to revamp their Direct Mail program strategy and operational process. They were sending multiple monthly catalogs, postcards, trifolds, etc., using a stale customer segmentation strategy, and had an overly long audience list production schedule.
This brand was previously working with a different agency to support their Direct Mail audience list files.
The length of time it would take to produce a final audience list was about two months. On top of that, they would only update their “database” on a monthly basis. This led to their final target lists being quite stale by the time they were put into the mail.
This other vendor also only offered a “black box” solution; no transparency when it came to their modeling or segmentation processes. The strategy put forth by the use of this solution was also quite poor. They were overmailing the same people; many customers received 13+ catalogs in a 12 month period. They were also mailing to groups of people who did not need a catalog in the first place. In some instances upwards of seven mailings would drop within a single month, many of which had overlapping audiences. This was financially wasteful, given our analytical findings that there is a lack of revenue lift for customers to receive two or three books in one month, rather than just one mailpiece.
This other agency also came with a hefty price tag of $500-700K per year.
Solutions
Based on our analytical insights, and powered by our holistic CDP solution, we were able to pitch and launch a new strategic direction and operational process for the client’s Direct Mail program.
We shortened the length of time to produce a final audience list immensely. The workback schedule was cut down to span less than a month across multiple vendor handoffs. Our operational process is so efficient that we once turned a mail file list around from start to finish in less than 24 hours due to a last minute addition from the client.
Because we use our CDP solution, all datapoints are updated nightly, giving the client an up-to-date look at customer segmentation whenever needed. Our dataset is never stagnant.
We also provide full transparency into our segmentation modeling. We only use actual historical data from our CDP to power our models, and the client can adjust any levers needed at any time.
When developing the updated strategy for the Direct Mail program overall, we provided several analytical exercises to come to a collective new approach to both segmentation and mail frequency. Segmentation was greatly simplified, which makes the downstream reporting and analytics much more efficient as well. The previous agency used upwards of 300+ segment keycodes per mailer. We trimmed that down to well below 100 with clear groupings for incrementality analysis at a finer grain.
Results
Since we fully took over the process for the client in June 2025, we’ve helped them rake in $43M in incremental revenue and counting.
Building on that, we also helped the client cut back significantly on production costs due to our efficiency gains. For the mailfile prep process alone, we helped them slash their fees by ~50% by swapping from their old agency to us. The client was then also able to trim back on the count of mailers sent per year using our analytical strategies. This has helped to streamline their merchandising and creative teams’ processing, plus yield a significant reduction on print and postage costs.
This proves the value of utilizing Stirista’s CDP capabilities, alongside our strategy team, to capitalize on the Direct Mail Program that they already had.
