Why Direct Mail Still Works in a Digital World with Rick Rappe

Rick Rappe

Rick Rappe is the President and Owner of RPM Direct Marketing, a Seattle-based agency specializing in direct mail marketing services, including lead generation, acquisition, loyalty, and win-back programs. With over 30 years of experience in the industry, Rick has developed and managed some of the largest and most successful direct-marketing-driven sales channels in the country. Under his leadership, RPM focuses on delivering performance-driven direct mail programs tailored to clients’ specific goals.

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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • [01:58] Rick Rappe’s journey from agency life to direct mail expert
  • [04:29] Key principles behind building a high-performing direct mail program
  • [11:08] Why Rick left the agency world to start RPM Direct Marketing
  • [12:56] How RPM Direct Marketing provides a more efficient and cost-effective approach
  • [14:07] Why direct mail is still relevant in a digital-first marketing landscape
  • [17:09] What makes a direct mail piece stand out and drive engagement

In this episode…

Direct mail has been around for decades, yet many marketers question its relevance in today’s digital-first world. With online advertising costs rising and consumer attention increasingly fragmented, businesses are searching for ways to cut through the noise. Could direct mail be the hidden gem that marketers are overlooking?

According to Rick Rappe, a seasoned direct marketing expert, direct mail remains one of the most effective and trustworthy marketing channels. He highlights that while digital platforms are oversaturated and plagued by low engagement rates, direct mail reaches consumers in a tangible, less cluttered space — right in their homes. Unlike emails or online ads that can be easily ignored, direct mail allows brands to command attention and create a lasting impression. With strategic targeting, rigorous testing, and compelling creative execution, businesses can turn direct mail into a high-performing, cost-efficient sales channel.

In this episode of the Response Drivers podcast, Rick Rappe, President and Owner of RPM Direct Marketing, is interviewed by Chad Franzen of Rise25 to discuss why direct mail continues to thrive in a digital landscape. He explains how direct mail offers a level of trust and engagement that digital channels often lack, the role of data in optimizing campaigns, and why businesses are reinvesting in this strategy.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

  • “One of the major advantages of direct mail is that we can test multiple things all at the same time.”
  • “We have to assume that things are going to fatigue and that things are going to stop working.”
  • “Direct mail is a great tool because it reaches into everyone’s home and nearly 100% receive mail.”
  • “Once we’ve proven these things work, they become predictable sales channels, and we’re driving leads.”
  • “We can move away from guessing and guesswork and move into proven, data-driven ideas.”

Action Steps

  1. Test multiple direct mail strategies at once: Running A/B, C, D testing helps identify winning formats quickly and improves campaign performance.
  2. Establish clear cost-per-sale objectives: Focusing on measurable results ensures direct mail remains a profitable and efficient sales channel.
  3. Protect proven direct mail strategies: Avoid unnecessary tweaks to high-performing campaigns to maintain consistent and predictable lead generation.
  4. Continuously optimize for cost-efficiency: Refining production, targeting, and creative elements helps lower costs without sacrificing performance.
  5. Blend direct mail with digital marketing: Integrating both channels maximizes reach and creates a more comprehensive, data-driven marketing strategy.

Sponsor for this episode...

RPM Direct Marketing specializes in direct mail campaigns, offering services from strategic planning and creative development to predictive modeling and data management. Their Rapid Performance Method accelerates testing and optimization, ensuring higher response rates and sales at lower costs. With a proven track record across various industries, RPM delivers efficient, performance-driven direct mail solutions. Visit rpmdm.com to learn more.

Transcript...

Intro: 00:01

Welcome back to the Response Drivers podcast, where we feature top marketing minds and dig into their inspiring stories, learn how these leaders think and find big ideas to push your results and sales to the next level. Now let’s get started.

Rick Rappe: 00:19

Hey, it’s Rick Rappe here, host of the Response Drivers podcast, where we feature marketing executives, experts and innovators to uncover how they approach targeted marketing and use data driven strategies to acquire and retain customers. We’ll talk about what’s working, what’s changing, and how you can stay ahead in an evolving marketing landscape. This episode is brought to you by RPM Direct Marketing. RPM helps companies master and perfect direct mail marketing and turn it into a predictable, efficient sales channel for companies that are new to direct mail, the Rapid Performance Method accelerates testing and optimization, ensuring higher response rates and more sales at a lower cost for existing mailers. RPM uncovers opportunities for innovation quickly, leading to breakthrough performance and significant cost savings with a proven track record.

RPM delivers smarter, more profitable direct mail solutions. You can visit rpmdm.com to learn more. Today I’m here with Chad Franzen of Rise25, who has done thousands of interviews with successful entrepreneurs and CEOs. And we’re going to flip the script, and he’ll be interviewing me to learn a little bit about why we’re starting this podcast.

Yeah. Hey, thanks for joining me, Chad.

Chad Franzen: 01:35

Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it. I’m looking forward to finding out a little bit more about you and about RPM, and about the value of direct mail. I’ve done all sorts of interviews, as you mentioned, and you’re the first person I’ve talked to about direct mail, so looking forward to getting into it.

Hey, as we get started here, just tell me a little bit about your background, maybe before RPM and kind of kind of how things went at that time.

Rick Rappe: 01:58

Yeah, well, I started as a project manager in a large agency. Well, initially I was working on non-profit accounts and fundraising, and then I moved into a different agency as a young professional where, you know, I was a project manager and a production coordinator working on big direct mail programs for commercial clients. And so that’s where I really got started. And I quickly switched over into the account services side and started working as an account executive and then climbing the ladder within that department. And that’s where I got involved with the AT&T account, which became one of my big learning experiences in the industry.

Back then, I, I started as working on the Southwest Region campaign for the AT&T program, which was they were looking to try and find higher performance from their direct mail programs. So we developed a big test program that. Focused on offers and creative packages and different list segments and list. Targeting. And through that test campaign, we were able to really crack the code and bring their performance levels for for direct mail, increase their performance levels, bringing their cost per sale way down in the process.

And that made Direct Mail a really successful sales channel for the southwest. Southwest region. And then from there, AT&T looked at all their regions and said, which one is the most successful? And the Southwest Region program became the national sales program for AT&T. And it grew and grew and grew and grew.

And so I manage the AT&T program for a little over ten years. And it like I said, it became the national sales program and grew to a size of about. I believe our budget was about $100 million a year, and we were mailing over a million pieces every day. So it became a very exciting account for me to work on. And I an enormous learning experience.

I got to test and learn as much as I could to try and keep that program performing and moving forward, and it was a very exciting time in my career. And that’s that’s how I got started.

Chad Franzen: 04:18

Yeah, that’s that’s great. Good to know. So, you know, you were in charge of a very successful program there in the southwest. What were some of the maybe the guiding principles that you use to build that kind of a program?

Rick Rappe: 04:29

Yeah. Well, luckily I had some great people in the agency to learn from, and I think I kind of took their approach and added bits and pieces of my own approach onto it. But some of the most important things that I learned over the years working on that account was, number one, you have to start with a really clear objective in mind. And for us on the AT&T program, that was the cost per sale number. That was the key metric.

And I think cost per sale was super important because it it was looking at the cost but also looking at the results. And that was critical in learning how to think about direct marketing. I mean, if you only think about the costs, that’s that’s one sort of mentality. But really what matters is how much are you spending for a sale, right. Not how much you’re spending for a piece of mail.

So that was important. First established clear objectives. The second thing that was critically important for our success in that program was to establish winning programs very quickly. So we developed a very focused head to head testing process. One of the major advantages of direct mail is that we can test multiple things all at the same time.

You hear about a B testing, we do a, B, C, D, E, F, g testing and you know, and we can learn things rapidly. So the idea there is like design tests in your direct mail that give you an enormous amount of learning very quickly. And then the third thing that I think was critically important was to think about a multiple program sort of channel building strategy, rather than just a single program. It’s it’s always good to think ahead, think multiple moves ahead. And that was critically important.

Another key learning guiding principle from the AT&T program was to just manage risk, reduce risk. So once we had a proven control package, it’s very critically important that we stick with that control package and not tweak it. Because, you know, once we’ve proven these things work, they become predictable sales channels. And we’re driving leads into big groups of telesales reps that are answering the phone. And, you know, we don’t want to start tweaking things and let people go, oh, I want to change this, because that can obviously crash the performance of a program without without any warning.

So we have to be really careful to protect what works. The next critical idea that I say I learned over the years was you have to assume that things are going to fatigue and that things are going to stop working at some point. And so we we need to continue testing all the time to continue pushing performance and increasing and improving performance, but also so that you have a new control that you can pivot to or move to before your existing control package sort of fails. I think those are those are some of the most important things. I mean, we also it’s critically important to have flawless execution.

Obviously, direct mail has a lot of moving pieces. We have the creative, the offer, the lists, the production of the mailpiece, printing, personalization, logistics of delivery. All these things come into play. So we have to have flawless execution because obviously there’s some complex testing strategy going on and all of that can just be ruined, right? If you if you don’t execute the campaign properly.

And I think one of the last guiding principles, actually two more guiding principles that I want to mention, one is that we have to focus on opportunities to reduce costs. That’s that’s important. Once you find a winner, we start looking at how how can we fine tune this to drive cost down. What can we do to, you know, tweak this where we won’t hurt performance. But we’ll but we’ll make it more and more efficient.

So we’re constantly testing to improve efficiency as well as testing to sort of find the next big idea. So we’re working in two directions at the same time. And lastly, I guess that’s the last idea really is you have to constantly be working to to bring new ideas to the table. To test and innovate. You have to build a pipeline of of new ideas from multiple sources and keep that pipeline running at all times to keep your program, you know, fresh and and continuing to work.

Chad Franzen: 09:08

So it sounds like you you had to kind of approach it with multiple mindsets, like a strategic and creative mindset and operational mindset to ensure efficiency and then a financial mindset. And then, yeah, kind of operational in terms of the efficiency.

Rick Rappe: 09:22

Yeah. Initially in a in an initial program, everything is a test and you just are you’re testing to crack the code, right? When you’re building a new program from the ground up, which is what we do today for a lot of our clients, you know, they come to us and they say, we don’t have direct mail yet. We really want to build a direct mail sales channel. And so this is where we come in.

And we use our experience and our expertise and we, we work to crack the code and get to their their target cost per sale. But once you have a program up and running, then it becomes like, okay, we have this sales channel that we’re relying on now and we still have to we have to take we have to fragment our our segment, our thinking, and we might say, well, let’s put 80% of our program into something that’s tried and true and proven and not mess with it. Leave it alone and do what works. And then the 20% is R&D budget, where we’re trying to beat the performance and optimize and learn and continue to push performance further. So it’s a scientific approach.

I mean, we try to be data driven, obviously in direct marketing. That’s one of the beautiful parts of doing direct mail. Why I personally love it so much is because it’s data driven and we can test and measure and learn, but it’s also about reducing risk. And I think one of the things that I love about this type of marketing is that, you know, pretty quickly, we can move away from guessing and guesswork and move into proven, data driven ideas.

Chad Franzen: 10:52

So, so you, you know, you’re you’re working there in the agency world and things are are it seems like you’re you’re doing you’re being very successful. You’re learning a lot of very valuable things. But then you left the agency world. When, when and why did that happen?

Rick Rappe: 11:08

In the early 2000, late 2006 and 2007, I, I left the agency world. At the time, what I really ran into was the size of the agency was growing. The agency that I worked for was getting larger and larger, and it was actually purchased by a big New York holding company. So we had, you know, bosses back in New York, and the agency got bigger and bigger and more bureaucratic and slower and more expensive, and it just became more and more difficult to get work done. You know, part of the part of the the game with agencies are to hire junior level people and then have, you know, older, more experienced people managing their work and checking their work.

But that becomes very inefficient. And it’s it’s it’s a great way to maximize profit, I guess, for the folks back in New York. But it’s not a really good experience for customers, for clients. So I just came to the conclusion that the agency that I worked for was just way too large and and too difficult, and that I wasn’t I was frustrated with the service that I was able to provide for my clients. So I went out on my own and and at first I became a consultant and went to work with some other large agencies and some large, really large accounts like DirecTV, LifeLock, SimpliSafe, big accounts like that.

And then I then I started acting as a small agency and building a team of people here so that we could, you know, serve clients needs and handle their programs from from start to finish.

Chad Franzen: 12:48

Okay. Very nice. So then that led up to founding RPM. Kind of tell me that origin story.

Rick Rappe: 12:56

Yeah. Well, RPM was really built out of that frustration. And I decided to start a smaller agency and and really to strip down the agency to its bare minimum, its core elements. And I felt that that really allowed me to be more efficient with my time and serve clients needs better. We’re way more nimble.

We’re able to be way more cost effective for our clients with a smaller size agency. And, you know, we just don’t have we just don’t have all the waste, wasted effort that goes into a bigger agency. We’re all senior level direct marketing experts. So that allows us to just be faster and faster and more efficient is what it’s all about.

Chad Franzen: 13:43

Okay, so let’s kind of address the elephant in the room. I’m kind of wondering, along with probably anybody under the age of 30 that might be listening or watching in today’s world. Maybe it’s kind of a digital world where there’s a lot of digital marketing. Marketing. Why is direct mail still valuable and something that businesses should consider doing if they don’t already?

Rick Rappe: 14:07

Yeah, well, direct mail has been effective and been working for a long, long time. So it’s just a classic, you know, classic tried and true tactic I think, in today’s digital world. One of the reasons why clients are coming back to direct mail and and companies are coming back to direct mail now is because of what’s happening with digital marketing. I mean, there’s a lot of digital disengagement and digital, I guess I’d say digital fragmentation. Consumers are starting to opt out of a lot of the digital platforms that they’ve been in, you know?

So I think it’s harder and harder for marketers to reach their target market on digital platforms. I mean, they can reach part of their target market on digital platforms, but there’s just so much clutter, there’s so much noise there. And when customers are online, they’re just absolutely bombarded with all types of marketing from from a million different directions. So it’s just getting harder and harder to get your message through there. I mean, just think about email, for example.

I get hundreds of emails a day that make it through into my inbox, but there’s also all the emails that don’t get through into my inbox that get filtered out. And I have like multiple layers of filters on my emails that are preventing messages from getting through that. Plus, you know, there’s a there’s kind of a crisis of trust, I think, in digital marketing. A lot of digital marketing is very is essentially free for people to send out. And so people realize that digital marketing is full of things that, you know, are scams and are not not legit.

And that makes it difficult for consumers to have have any trust in what they’re getting. I mean, so a lot of things just get ignored because of that. So I think companies are starting to look at what else can I do. What can I do to in the to to sell my products. And a lot of companies realize that, yes, the digital market, the digital universe is important.

And we do spend a lot of time on our digital devices every day. But we are in the physical world 24 hours a day also. And direct mail is a great tool because it reaches into everyone’s home and, you know, every on nearly 100% of the people out there can receive mail. So it’s a great way to to reach the entire target market. There’s there’s other advantages as well, which I’m happy to go into in more detail.

Chad Franzen: 16:39

Sure. So yeah, you know, when I go to the mailbox and I bring stuff back, that trust is never an issue when I receive a marketing a piece of marketing material. What is something? I mean, I’m sure we could do an entire episode on this, but if you have, like, a, like a Cliff notes version of this answer, what is something that would catch my eye or something like that when I. So it wouldn’t just be like, okay, I’m going through this.

Is there something maybe in a piece of direct mail that would like, cause me to stop and take note of it?

Rick Rappe: 17:09

Yeah, well, we think so. I mean, this is what we’ve been testing and and learning for 30 years in my career is what what gets performance, what works, what what grabs people’s attention. So we definitely have strong opinions about these things. You know, it just depends on what your offer is and what your product is. In certain cases, if your offer is really simple, a postcard is a great thing to mail out.

And it’s it’s a low cost format. It’s a quick, quick read. It’s like getting a little billboard in the mailbox. I mean, and those things can work and do work for the right in the right situation. In other cases, we we like to do things that are more official looking, for example, in the mail.

And that might be something that it it we like to think about how people bring their mail in from the mailbox and how they sort their mail. And if they sort their mail into sort of bills and, and important things, if we can get in that pile, then people will spend a little bit more time reading it and engaging with it, and we can have a little bit longer sales message and explain a product that’s a little bit more difficult to not and not immediately Something that will grab you. So we use different tactics for different situations. And you know, we’re testing and measuring like different concepts and different hypotheses about what will work. And then we we want to basically see the results and let the market really ultimately decide and tell us what works, and then we move in that direction, if that makes sense.

Chad Franzen: 18:47

Yeah, sure. Well, this is this is very interesting stuff. I’m sure podcast listeners will learn a lot more about it in great detail when they tune in. Tell me, as the host of the podcast, what are you looking most forward to? This is kind of one of your first episodes for the future.

What are you looking most forward to?

Rick Rappe: 19:04

Well, I’m excited about connecting with experts in our industry. And people who’ve done amazing things with direct marketing and who have really interesting stories to tell. I mean, I just have a lot of curiosity about. I think I have a really strong opinion about how direct mail and direct marketing should work, and I want to learn from other people and follow my curiosity and just get to know interesting people and and see, I’m sure there’s lots of other ideas out there besides the ones that I have, and I’m curious to learn more.

Chad Franzen: 19:40

Yeah. Sounds fantastic. Well, I’ll look forward to tuning in to future episodes. Thanks so much for having me today, Rick. Really appreciate it.

Rick Rappe: 19:47

Thank you Chad. It’s been fun and I hope to talk to you again soon.

Chad Franzen: 19:51

Absolutely. So long everybody.

Outro: 19:53

That’s a wrap for this episode of Response Drivers. Thanks for tuning in. If you found today’s insights valuable, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left a review. Got a question or a topic you’d like us to cover?

Just drop us a message at responsedrivers@rpmdm.com. Until next time, keep driving response and making your marketing work smarter.