Collin Street Bakery: Classic Marketing Never Goes Out of Style

If you are looking for a great example of why customers should add color to their direct mail envelopes, look no further than Collin Street Bakery.

Working with direct mail consultant Greg Hennerberg of the Hennerberg Group, this Texas-based bakery achieved a 60 percent lift with a simple direct mail packet. No sophisticated personalization. No multiple channels. Just great old-fashioned marketing and lots of color.

Collin Street Bakery ships to nearly 200 countries around the world. It produces a wide variety of baked goods, including cookies, cheesecakes, and pies. The bakery has a great re-order rate, but it was looking to increase orders from new customers.

First, Hennerberg found out more about the bakery’s signature product, a pecan-laden fruitcake, which he encouraged the client to rename the Texas Native Pecan Cake. This cake became the centerpiece of the campaign. Instead of buying a fruitcake, customers would experience part of authentic Texas. This was reinforced by text on the back of the mailing envelope that said, “Proudly baked in Texas. . . shipped to the world.”

For the direct mail letter, Hennerberg researched the variety of pecans used in the cake and found the differentiators from commercial pecans. For example, Texas native pecans are smaller and more flavorful, and because of their need for specific soil and rainfall conditions, native pecan trees only grow in Texas and certain areas of the South. Some of these trees can date back to the early settlers and the Civil War.

This became the fodder for a powerful story. The direct mail letter told the story of the native Texas pecan tree and how, by purchasing one of the bakery’s native Texas pecan cakes, recipients would be partaking in part of this country’s history.

Storytelling is powerful. That’s why it’s one of Hennerberg’s seven MindGroove techniques for increasing the results of direct mail. “Storytelling creates a new perspective and a new memory,” he explains. “It gets attention, creates new groove in the brain, and enables easier retrieval. It’s not just that we think storytelling works. There is testing showing how it works—and why it works.”

Hennerberg’s big power punch, however, was the outer envelope. Regardless of campaigns, knows that if he can double the number of people who open the client’s outer envelope, he doubles their odds for success.

“Say you get one percent response rate (one out of 100), and 10 people who receive the direct mail package open the envelope, with one of the 10 making a purchase for a 10 percent conversion rate,” he says. “We need to get 10 people of the 100 receiving the package to open the envelope so I can get one person to respond. But if I double the open rate and 20 actually open the envelope, if my conversion is still the same 10 percent, I’ve doubled my number of responders.”

This is why Hennerberg is a great believer in what he calls “show stoppers,” or visual elements on the outside of the envelope that make people stop and look, even just for a moment longer. The envelope for Collin Street Bakery used seven show stoppers. These included:

• Collin Street Bakery logo
• Red and black marbled color band in the far left
• Wood background for the rest of the envelope
• Eye-catching headline: Native Texas Pecan Cakes
• Teaser copy that included the label “Dear Pecan lover.”
• Offer for a free gift if they acted within 10 days
• Money-back guarantee

Each one of these elements is designed to stimulate response, and their effectiveness is based on well documented consumer research. For example, the use of labels (“pecan lovers”) to identify recipients as part of a group most likely to respond. This is classic behavioral psychology. (In one study examining voting patterns, for example, researchers found that recipients randomly labeled “politically active” were 15 percent more likely to vote. This type of behavior is something Hennerberg counts on.) In Collin Street Bakery’s case, recipients were labeled “pecan lovers,” and they acted accordingly.

Hennerberg used other techniques proven to boost results, as well. These include the short-term offer and free gift offer. While deadlines may not increase response or conversion rates, they have been proven to get people to respond more quickly, and free gifts consistently prove to increase response rates. Hennerberg used both. Printed on the outside of the mailer was an offer for a free pound of gourmet Columbian coffee (to go with the Texas Pecan Cake) when recipients ordered within 10 days.

Ultimately, the combination of reframing the product, colorful show-stoppers, and proven behavioral psychology and Mind Groove techniques produced powerful results. Collin Street Bakery got a 60% lift in response rates over previous campaigns. These results didn’t come from being fancy. They came from good, old-fashioned marketing.

Hennerberg recently presented this case study as part of a webinar sponsored by Pitney Bowes.