One journey, across channels: Inside SimpliSafe’s award-winning direct mail strategy

When a SimpliSafe direct mail piece arrives at someone’s home, another part of their marketing journey also kicks into gear.

The team uses mailing activity to time an email or SMS around a piece’s arrival. An email can come first, giving a prospective customer a chance to respond before SimpliSafe invests in sending mail. And the decision to send that mail in the first place can depend on what SimpliSafe already knows about the prospect.

It’s direct mail built as part of a conversation across channels. “Each touchpoint should be additive to your whole experience,” says Kate Chamberlain, Director of CRM & Promotions, SimpliSafe. 

This approach earned SimpliSafe Best Omnichannel Campaign in Lob’s inaugural Postmark Awards. Behind it is a sophisticated lifecycle marketing program connecting direct mail with the rest of the customer journey.

Bringing direct mail into the lifecycle

SimpliSafe’s mission is simple: to keep every home secure. For Chamberlain and her team, that means helping prospective customers find the security system and offer that’s right for them. 

Historically, much of that conversation happened over email. A prospective customer might take a quiz, receive a system recommendation, share their email address, and enter a nurture journey.

But, as Chamberlain puts it, “email’s just one place where you interact with a company.” So the team brought direct mail into the same lifecycle. Once SimpliSafe identifies someone as a lead, mail can join the ongoing conversation based on where that person is in their journey and what the team knows about their needs.

Reaching the right people with direct mail

SimpliSafe uses signals, including how long someone has been a lead and their propensity to respond to direct mail, to determine who receives it. The team has also identified geographic differences in response and is exploring deeper persona segmentation to create more relevant experiences.

“If you’re urgently looking for a solution, a digital channel is probably going to be faster,” Chamberlain says. “But if you’re taking a longer time to consider what’s best for you and to make a purchase choice, then direct mail is a good channel to continue that conversation.” 

The goal is to get increasingly precise about not only who should receive mail, but what that person should receive and when. That includes matching the offer to the type of security system someone is considering and where they are in the decision process.

Making channels respond to each other

The real magic of SimpliSafe’s omnichannel approach happens when those individual touchpoints start talking to one another.

SimpliSafe uses Braze to orchestrate its lifecycle communications, with direct mail triggered through Lob. Mailing activity then flows back into Braze through webhooks, bringing triggered direct mail activity back into the broader customer journey.

“We can actually trigger follow-up messages in email or SMS on the day that you receive a mailer,” Chamberlain explains. 

The coordination works in the other direction, too. In one example, the team can send an email first, allow time for the customer to respond, and then follow up with direct mail. That helps SimpliSafe use a more expensive physical touch where it can add value rather than simply layering more messages onto the journey.

Reaching customers at the right moment

SimpliSafe is rethinking direct mail timing around a simple idea: the best time to reach a customer isn't necessarily the same for everyone.

The team is testing different points in the customer lifecycle to better understand when mail is most likely to make an impact. A test might show that day 30 performs best overall, but some customers may be ready to act much earlier, while others may need more time, or may convert without receiving mail at all.

Ultimately, the goal is to move beyond a fixed campaign calendar and deliver mail when it's most relevant to each customer. SimpliSafe plans to use randomized testing to build the data needed to model the ideal audience, timing, and offer with AI.

“Using AI to model out the best send time will just make this investment much more efficient,” Chamberlain says.

Measuring the whole journey

An integrated customer journey also requires a different way of thinking about attribution.

Jack Canning and the SimpliSafe analytics team connect Braze trigger data, Lob mailing data and order data. They examine multiple conversion windows to understand how mail contributes alongside site activity, telesales, email, and other interactions. 

“Triangulating between the different conversion windows is usually our best read as far as any individual send, and how is that actually impacting that customer’s conversion,” Canning says.  

SimpliSafe uses holdouts and A/B experiments to determine whether a treatment creates incremental lift. “We literally test everything,” he adds. 

That means the final conversion doesn’t need to happen in a particular channel. A customer might scan a QR code, visit the website, or pick up the phone. The goal is to give customers the flexibility to engage and shop in whatever way feels most comfortable and convenient to them. Ultimately, what matters is whether the experience as a whole created lift.

Making direct mail more responsive

For all the sophistication behind SimpliSafe’s program, Chamberlain’s advice to other marketers is surprisingly straightforward: explore going programmatic.

Traditional direct mail can require teams to lock creative months before a piece reaches customers. SimpliSafe’s lifecycle approach gives the team the ability to respond much more closely to what an individual is doing now.

That agility allows direct mail to behave more like the other channels in the customer journey: triggered by real behavior, personalized to the individual, measured alongside everything else, and continually optimized. 

For SimpliSafe, that’s what omnichannel ultimately means: making every interaction part of the same conversation.

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