MarTech Edge Interview with Sarah Kicinski, Chief Marketing Officer, PostcardMania

You have been leading PostcardMania as its CMO for 14 years. Brief us on your journey.

I started working at PostcardMania in 2004, straight out of college. I was originally hired to run a project to partner with franchises and then was promoted to launch all new products as the Vice President of Business Development. Five years later, our VP of Marketing gave notice, and Founder & CEO Joy Gendusa asked me to fill his shoes (which I have to admit was a bit terrifying). At that point, we had a $4 million marketing budget, and I didn’t want to mess it up! It worked out, and I was able to outperform existing metrics and was eventually promoted from Vice President of Marketing to Chief Marketing Officer. It’s now been 19 years, and I feel very lucky to have been part of this company’s journey as we surpass $100 million in annual revenue. We continue to evolve our products around an unwavering commitment to helping small business owners grow their businesses and contribute to an expanding US economy. Currently, my team is made up of 10 marketing professionals who are all experts in their fields and generate more than 2000 B2B leads each week.

Please walk us through Everywhere Small Business, PostcardMania’s flagship marketing product, and the recently added features.

Everywhere Small Business is our multichannel marketing campaign package that gives small business owners the opportunity to target prospects with postcards and coordinated digital ads on Facebook, Instagram, Google, Gmail, and YouTube. As the postcards are mailed out, digital ads are displayed to prospects on these platforms, and not only do they amplify the client’s reach and exposure and make it seem like their business is everywhere, but they also give prospects an easy way to get to clients’ websites to convert.

The recent features we added to Everywhere Small Business expand the reach of those coordinated digital ads by targeting prospects based on their online behavior and the physical locations they visit. So, for example, a vet could target people nearby doing research online on why their cat might be throwing up at night or people visiting a local dog park.

The best part about the new Browsed-Content Targeting and Visited-Locations Targeting is that small business owners have access to premier technology previously only available to large brands. And at prices that a small business can afford. By leveling the playing field with bigger brand names, small businesses can achieve success and grow bigger and better than before—and that’s PostcardMania’s driving mission.

What major alterations have you made in marketing strategies to sail through economic downturns like the current one?

PostcardMania was founded in 1998, so we’ve been through our fair share of tough economic times. We had our first major economic challenge in 2008, which ultimately gave us the experience we needed to be better prepared for any economic downturn.

In 2008, 46% of our revenue came from clients in the mortgage and real estate industries, and we lost thousands of clients almost instantly when the housing bubble burst. Against our gut instincts, we cut our marketing spend significantly based on advisors’ recommendations. By 2009, we were struggling to make payroll and were down 15%. It turned out that reducing our marketing budget had made everything worse. So we decided to restore the marketing budget back to pre-crash totals, and our numbers recovered quickly—2010 ended up being an all-time high revenue year for us at the time.

We learned the valuable lesson to never stop marketing regardless of economic conditions, and we applied this principle when the pandemic hit in 2020. We never cut our marketing or even laid off a single staff member despite our revenue crashing over 40% for several weeks in March and April 2020. But we recovered more quickly than most. July 2020 became the new highest-ever revenue month for us. In the final six months of 2020, we increased our leads by 9.24% without increasing our marketing spend. Our competitors all cut back, which ended up making our marketing efforts more effective than ever. Every year we get a little bit smarter and more efficient with our marketing efforts, but consistency is something we have kept in since day one. It’s honestly our biggest piece of advice to clients, and it doesn’t change even during an economic crisis.

What is PCM Integrations, and how does this technology work for marketers?

PCM Integrations is one of our newer divisions that has been expanding by leaps and bounds. It is a direct mail API which is basically a software connection between us and any other software to automate mail going out. It gives businesses the opportunity to automate mailings based on triggers like when a shopping cart is abandoned or if a new lead is entered into a customer relationship management system. Business owners can automatically target their hottest leads with mailers at a key time in the buying process, and it is a one-time set-it and forget-it process. It gives brands the opportunity to automatically increase credibility by 49% over just sending emails to prospects.

We have clients switching over to us from other direct mail APIs every day because of our vast knowledge of direct mail design for response, as well as our print quality. Other direct mail APIs outsource the production to many different printers, which means the quality control of the finished product is nonexistent. We also don’t charge tech fees which can save companies tens of thousands of dollars a year. It was a natural fit for us to build out a development team to offer this based on our existing capabilities and experience. I don’t know any other company with as much direct mail marketing experience as us. We have over 110,000 clients at this point.

Despite market conditions being on the downside, how did PostcardMania reach new revenue records?

I think it goes back to building so much momentum during the pandemic by never pausing our marketing. Since then, we’ve reached new revenue records in 2020, 2021, and 2022, growing total revenue an average of 20% per year after a decade averaging 5% revenue growth. And the momentum is still rolling—we just set a new quarterly record in revenue in our first quarter of 2023 at over $25 million and $1.8 million more than the same quarter last year. We also achieved the most revenue in a single month in March of 2023, right at the end of the quarter.

That success has come from our commitment to pushing forward with our marketing strategies, increasing our marketing spend despite economic challenges, and adding new direct mail marketing solutions in the past couple of years. We mail 190,000 postcards a week and spend more than $5 million a year on marketing. Since we switched from a print focus to a technology focus, growth has reached a new level. Everywhere Small Business, our retargeted direct mail solutions and PCM Integrations are sure to push us to new heights for the rest of the year and beyond.

Name 3 things you do to ensure marketing, sales, and customer success are on the same page.

Good leadership has a massive influence on the fluidity between departments. The C-level executives here are actually friends, and we’re all working towards the same goal. There is no finger-pointing; we’re working together to make improvements or fix issues. We’ve worked hard at developing this over the years, but this is still one of our top priorities. We all do a trip every year and several other team-building dinners and meetings throughout the year. Last year, we promoted a longtime PostcardMania staff member, Jackie Wirsing, as Chief Experience Officer. It’s her job to boost clients’ results by enhancing the quality of our operations throughout the business. She has helped us improve the internal performance of our staff and the customer experience for our clients. As a guiding hand, she figures out how to help each department and division work more effectively and efficiently toward the goal of improving client success. She’s been doing a phenomenal job, and we’ve witnessed a tremendous difference overall.

What advice would you like to give to budding marketing professionals?

Don’t underestimate the amount of promotion you need to do to get people’s attention. Between direct mail, online ads, social media ads, and email, we are sometimes hitting prospects 20-100 times before converting them to a sale, and we are reaching up to 250,000 businesses every week. Don’t get frustrated or discouraged if you don’t see results right away. Stay the course and market more than you think you need to. People can be super indecisive these days, and they are being hit with so many marketing messages that you need to be persistent and consistent.

How do you foresee direct mail technologies evolving in the upcoming years?

Like many other marketing tools, direct mail has evolved and become automated. This means the technology is intelligent enough to mail postcards, letters, or brochures to people based on their actions in real-time. Currently, we have a service called Website to Mailbox that can mail a postcard to an anonymous website visitor within 24 hours. The technology can capture a visitor’s location, match it to an address, and even select certain mailers based on their browsing behavior, like which pages they read, for how long, and more.

Our PCM Integrations division has also created new avenues that let businesses send fully responsive mailers any time of day without lifting a finger. A business can connect its CRM to our direct mail platform to enable triggered mail based on actions taken at any point during a customer’s lifecycle with the business. A salesperson calls and makes contact with a prospect—or doesn’t and leaves a voicemail—both prospects get a follow-up postcard. Someone purchases from you for the first time or hasn’t purchased for a year, they get a postcard. The options for nurturing leads and fostering relationships are endless.

In the future, I foresee even more specialized technology that can detect specific customer behaviors and react to them quickly. The targeting will get even more detailed and personalized so prospects can find the products and services they need lightning fast. I also see marketers returning to more traditional channels like direct mail as digital advertising becomes more and more saturated and digital response rates continue to dwindle.