Running on Empty
Feel is a premium vitamin and supplement company offering personalised wellness products including digestion, cognition, beauty, and nootropic supplements through subscription and one-off purchases. They faced significant challenges with customers abandoning their baskets at checkout, representing substantial lost subscription revenue and failing to convert high-intent prospects who had shown clear interest in their personalised wellness solutions. Their digital-only remarketing strategies weren’t effectively recovering these potential subscribers or driving the long-term engagement and repeat purchase behaviour essential for a subscription-based wellness business in an increasingly crowded market.
The Wellness Formula
Feel partnered with Paperplanes and PSE to launch a programmatic direct mail pilot in April 2021, targeting customers who had fallen out of the basket process to test whether physical mail could create long-term engagement, greater spend, and increased purchase frequency. The campaign featured simple, focused creative reflecting Feel’s overall brand mission with personalisation in the greeting using customers’ first and last names, deployed as A4 letters with branded outer envelopes. The strategy included discount code incentives whilst employing sophisticated tracking technology to capture all mailed customer conversions on-site, not just those who entered codes, providing full visibility of campaign impact beyond traditional code redemption tracking.
Full Strength
The campaign delivered outstanding results from launch on 8th April 2021, with mailed customers converting at 9.3% over double the 4.1% control group conversion rate—achieving a £10.72 CPA based purely on conversion versus contacts mailed. Mailed customers proved 10% more likely to return direct to Feel versus non-mail counterparts, spent an average of 15 minutes on site, and visited 13 pages on average, demonstrating significantly deeper engagement. Most impressively, 18% of the mailed universe made more than one follow-on purchase compared to 0% in the control group, proving direct mail’s effectiveness in driving repeat subscription behaviour. The optimal conversion time of 10 days (with mail landing day 3) demonstrated how physical mail stays in home longer than digital touchpoints, with 84% of mailed conversions occurring without entering the discount code, revealing that Paperplanes’ tracking technology captured substantial sales that traditional code-only attribution would have missed entirely.
