Case Study
Project Overview
This year working with Postpilot, taught me a lot about new audience attitudes towards print. In the garden center industry, the legacy of seed catalogs was the cornerstone of annual marketing plans. Over time, catalogs became challenging for small businesses but today, print is making a major come back as the current digital landscape drives consumers to find trustworthy brands off the screen.
The Challenge
My initial instincts were to approach the project as a way compromise between the target audience’s loyalty to seed catalogs and our company’s decision to discontinue them. Younger generations don’t need them to convert, the attribution was very difficult to track, and the cost is only increasing. Small direct mail campaigns did more than help our team compromise, especially with their “cardalog” mail.
Strategy
- Phase One: Direct Mail Postcard campaigns
- Seasonality: Garden centers are in tune with the rhythms of the season, bare root trees arrive in early winter and deliveries happen by early spring. Postcards are an easy reminder for pre-orders, planting support, and new variety annoucements.
- Loyalty: By integrating LoyaltyLion, we could target our tiers when their rewards are available. Further, the positive performance positioned the card as a potential flow keeping loyal customers engaged year-round.
- Segmentation: In the B2B segments farmers from California and PNW who are within reasonable shipping zones converted more often than with email communications alone. We could also send the same cards to segments of previous buyers and those who had never purchased a particular product to test key messaging.
- Phase Two: The Cardalog
- Seed Catalog Concepts: As I mentioned, consumer loyalty was deeply connected to catalogs and it’s easy to see why. Just a search of historical catalogs will take you down a rabbit hole of vintage illustrations and nostalgic gardening. It’s that key imagery and emotion I used to inspire the design.
- Catalog to Cardalog: How do you translate a robust catalog into a large trifold? You focus on seasonal flagship categories of products and curate by new and popular varieties. Add a layer of tradition/nostalgia like recipes and growing instructions and you have an interesting mailer that has longevity potential.
- Targeting: Again we targeted consumers who previously shopped that category and consumers who had never grown the product before. The results were big wins!
Results
📈 The Cardalog was the 2nd top performing creative for 2025.
📈 ROAS was a combined 29X.
Key Takeaways
- Compromise works: Cardalogs were an efficient way to give loyal consumers a sense of the nostalgia attached to seed catalogs.
- Seasonal opportunity: Flagship categories now have the potential to make a big impression at the right time of year rather than all at once at the beginning of the year.
- Print continues to nurture trust: AI can deteriorate trust in modern digital marketing but print bridges the gap in unexpected ways with vendor who can back up attribution.
- Something I would do differently is scale the graphics for use in digital activations.
Lola Reyes-Grant 