Direct Mail Marketing Guide (2026): 5 Steps and Tips

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1. 1. Test with digital “Direct mail is expensive to produce, so you want to have confidence that you’re using the most high-performing messaging and creative on your mailers. Ergatta tests creative using digital marketing channels to find winning combinations.” “Start with your digital,” Tom says. “Figure out what creative, what message, what audience combinations work. Then you can extend those into a new medium with direct mail.”

   In Campaign variant testing

2. How does direct mail compare to email marketing? “Direct mail is more expensive than email marketing but can provide a higher engagement rate. Almost twice as many consumers engage with direct mail than open marketing emails.”

   In Direct mail

3. Instead of using direct mail to generate brand awareness, use it to push consumers at the bottom of the marketing funnel toward making a purchase. ““Don’t use it as a broad educational channel. Fold it in later for a highly targeted, lower-funnel, high-intent, vetted audience, and then expand from there,” says Tom. “It’s just too expensive of a channel to do prospecting or broad targeting and upper-funnel stuff.”” 3. Keep it simple

   In Direct mail

4. 5. Track your campaign “Measure the effectiveness of your campaign by tracking conversions and cost per acquisition (CPA).” Ergatta tracks conversions at checkout. “When people buy, they need to enter a shipping address. Then we match the shipping address to the mailing address,” says Tom.

   In Direct-mail costs and unit economics

5. Tom says that one way to measure it is with a holdout group—a group of customers who are intentionally excluded from receiving the campaign. Some direct-mail vendors, like Pebble Post, measure incremental lift from the targeted group relative to this holdout group. “You might also include QR codes, custom shortened links, or a unique email address for customers to reach out to with questions about your product. These let you directly track the engagement of your marketing campaign.” Drive your business forward with Shopify’s Analytics

   In Direct-mail response tracking

6. The cost of direct-mail campaigns varies according to several factors: “Mailing list. This is the cost of acquiring the physical addresses of your target audience.” Physical media. This is the cost of materials like paper, ink, stamps, and envelopes.

   In Direct-mail targeting

7. Tom says that one way to measure it is with a holdout group—a group of customers who are intentionally excluded from receiving the campaign. Some direct-mail vendors, like Pebble Post, measure incremental lift from the targeted group relative to this holdout group. “You might also include QR codes, custom shortened links, or a unique email address for customers to reach out to with questions about your product. These let you directly track the engagement of your marketing campaign.” Drive your business forward with Shopify’s Analytics

   In Outbound source and campaign tracking