Can Old-School Direct Mail Beat Email Marketing in Ecommerce?

Can Old-School Direct Mail Beat Email Marketing in Ecommerce?

July 16, 2026 · 42 min · Episode 296

About this episode

Matt discusses the effectiveness of direct mail compared to email marketing with Daniel Dunn, highlighting the potential of reaching warm customers through tangible mail.

Direct mail to your warm customers pulls four to five times the response of email, and most ecommerce brands aren't using it at all. This week Matt sits down with Daniel Dunn, CEO and co-founder of Paper Planes, to make the case that the letterbox is the reactivation channel hiding in plain sight. Summary Daniel Dunn spent years working on Tesco Clubcard data strategy before co-founding Paper Planes, a direct mail platform built for DTC ecommerce. (For anyone outside the UK, Tesco is the country's biggest supermarket and Clubcard is its loyalty scheme, one of the richest customer datasets in British retail.) His argument is simple. Most brands lean entirely on email and SMS to work their first-party data, yet a big chunk of that database never opens, clicks, or responds. Those people are prime for something tangible in the post. Matt, who cut his teeth in direct marketing in the late '90s, digs into how the channel has changed. Dan explains why mail to warm customers outperforms email, how a single abandoned-cart postcard nudges buyers back, why hyper-personalisation lifts basket spend, and the second-purchase problem that has become the biggest challenge in DTC since COVID…

People in this episode

Host: Matt Edmundson

Guest: Daniel Dunn

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Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Paper Planes, Tesco, Tesco Clubcard

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