Left on the Hob
Cooks Professional offer a wide range of high-quality cookware, kitchen appliances, pans, woks and more, with low prices guaranteed across their ecommerce platform. Despite strong product appeal and competitive pricing, they faced challenges with customers abandoning baskets and not returning for repeat purchases, with lapsed customers representing significant untapped revenue potential. With their existing marketing focused on email, they wanted to understand whether programmatic direct mail could add incremental value across abandoned basket, next best purchase, and winback customer journeys.
Omnipet identified two areas for recovery: Lapsed Customers and Recent Cancellations. Winning back these segments required a more tangible, high-impact initiative to remind pet owners of the value of a consistent routine. Omnipet had tried other direct mail providers, but had not found the results they were looking for.
Turning Up the Heat
Cooks Professional partnered with Paperplanes to deploy programmatic direct mail across three distinct customer segments: abandoned basket (triggered after 24 hours with no return), next best purchase (targeting customers who had ordered within the last day to encourage repeat purchase), and winback (targeting customers who hadn’t purchased in 90 days). Two creative variants were tested across each segment, an offer creative featuring a 10% discount code and a free next day delivery creative, deployed as A4 mailers in C5 envelopes with dynamic content and full branding across front and back, with customers limited to one mailing every 30 days.
Serving Up Results
The abandoned basket campaign delivered the strongest performance, with 15.8% of targeted customers converting, demonstrating that physical mail can cut through at the critical moment of purchase consideration when digital retargeting alone has failed. Creative testing revealed that offer-led messaging outperformed free delivery creative for abandoned basket recovery, with the discount variant driving 16.7% conversion compared to 14.3% for delivery-focused messaging, providing valuable insight for future creative strategy. The campaign established a strong foundation of learnings, with next steps identified to optimise towards next best purchase campaigns and new product launches, whilst WooCommerce integration would further automate data flows and unlock even stronger performance across all segments.
