#10 Antonio Hersonski | Why print marketing and how to make it ROI-positive

Antonio Hersonski isn’t your average CRM guy.
He’s been at the heart of CRM for eight years, shaping loyalty at brands like GetYourGuide and now leading the charge at Kartenmacherei — the market leader for personalized print products.

In this conversation, you'll hear how Antonio broke free from the noisy digital ad world...and why sending a real, physical letter might be your next CRM superpower.

You’ll learn:

• Why print isn’t dead — it’s just been misused.
• How to build print into your CRM playbook without losing your mind.
• The surprising timing trick that makes print and email work better together.
• How to track print ROI so you never fly blind.
• Ways to make high-cost channels profitable (and when to walk away).

Episode Breakdown

[00:00] — How Antonio went from selling to building loyalty empires (and why CRM felt like home)
[01:00] — Why printed paper — yes, paper — beats Instagram ads for the right customer
[03:30] — When print becomes your secret weapon: ROI math nobody talks about
[04:45] — Start smart: Why you should always build email first before touching print
[05:30] — Seasons of gold: How weddings, Christmas, and life moments fuel CRM wins
[06:30] — The email vs. print debate: What happens when you send email before a letter hits?
[07:00] — Tracking old-school marketing: How to prove your print mailings actually work
[07:45] — Optilyze, Emarsys, Deutsche Post: Choosing your partners without losing your sanity
[09:00] — The truth about print formats: Why customers crave simple, not shiny
[10:45] — Real talk: How long it really takes to ship thousands of print campaigns
[13:30] — Control groups that don't suck: Making experiments clean and convincing
[14:30] — What if your customers are 25 or 45? How age really (doesn’t) change CRM tactics
[16:00] — Perfection vs. profits: Why standardization wins when scaling print
[18:00] — Automation dreams: Using smart funnels to keep your print game alive (without drowning)
[19:45] — Minimum orders, postage hacks, and saving yourself a financial faceplant
[21:00] — Consent made simple: How to handle unsubscribes without headaches
[21:45] — Buying addresses: The good, the bad, and the very legally grey
[22:15] — Why unique voucher codes aren’t optional if you care about your bottom line
[23:30] — Skeptical about print? Start here: Parcel inserts and cheap wins to test the waters

Transcript

Jessica 0:01

Welcome to Inside CRM, the podcast where we explore together the tools, trends, and tactics to improve our customer relationship management. I'm Jessica Janssen, the host, but also CRM expert myself with over a decade of experience. In each episode, CRM professionals join us to share their knowledge to sharpen our CRM skills. Let's get started. Welcome, Antonio. So the first time I saw him was in a video call. And then we saw each other again here at the meetups and I was struggling a bit to connect because I have that always, if I get to know people in a video call and it's hard to remember the face for whatever reason I have that problem. But it was great to see you again and we started talking and What is especially interesting with you is the print topic that we want to discuss today. But we, before we go into it let's do a little introduction about yourself. What's your background?

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 1:01

Yeah so yeah, I've been in CRM now for about eight years and I really love CRM. I transitioned from a sales job into more of a marketing job and then at some point I realized I want to do CRM because it combines basically A very analytical aspect and also technical aspect and then also creative aspect. So it's basically everything that I really want combined. And yeah I'm passionate about it. And at the moment I'm working as a head of CRM at Karten Maharaj Which is a company focused on personalized print products. And before that I worked at SketchUguide, that's where I met Jesse. Yeah, and there I was responsible mainly for the app. So I was pushing a lot of app initiatives Forget Your Guide. And now that I joined two years ago, Karten Maharaj I discovered a new channel basically, which is direct mail, print mail. Very old school but it's also exciting. And yeah. I'm here to talk about it.

Jessica 2:02

Nice. So I know that quite a lot of people are hesitant to start with print. So what was the reason why you said, let's go for it?

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 2:11

I think for our product, it just makes sense. So our product is printed. That's why we know that our customers love printed stuff. And of course they also like certain business metrics. So we have a higher price point, for example, it doesn't make. sense for very cheap products, for example, because you pay up to a euro per touch point, or sometimes even more depending on what format you're choosing and what the volume is. So you have to think about, does it make sense for my product? What's the margin of the product and also how expensive is it? So how much is the company actually but essentially you can treat it as any other performance marketing channel and look at the return on investment or at the raw mass essentially. And that's what we did. So we looked at what how much am I investing and how much am I getting back from that channel? And that is just essentially a business case. And if it makes sense for the product, for the business for the audience as well, then you can try it. There are ways to, to measure your success. I guess we can talk about tracking later, but yeah, as essentially it's, and yeah, also for us, We do a lot of performance marketing, but we also have a huge market share. So that means we're the market leader in our in our industry. And when we do Instagram, Facebook ads we know that a lot of our existing customers will come back, which makes the channel extremely expensive. And I know a lot of other businesses are facing the same problem. But then print becomes more profitable than other performance marketing channels because you're targeting your customer base.

Jessica 3:54

Yeah, makes sense. So would you also say When you think about the channel set in CRM, is it like something that you would start from the beginning with print, or is it other channels that you would prioritize?

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 4:09

No, of course we started building out email as the classical CRM channel, also app app push and in app messages, etc. I think that was basically the groundwork, and then we looked at where Can we combine it with with print? And there were, like, multiple opportunities that we looked at and tried out.

Jessica 4:28

What were the use cases? Do you want to have a sip first? Oh, good.

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 4:32

Yeah so for example we have a huge product portfolio. We have like around 500 products in our portfolio which is a lot, but We do, for example, wedding stationery. You can get your wedding invitation, your wedding card invitation, and then we offer for the wedding menu cards, and that you can personalize. We offer stickers. We offer wine labels, for example. So everything that you essentially need that is printed for your wedding, we can offer that as well. And then we know also so when the customer orders a wedding invitation card we know when the wedding is, and then around that time, we also know that the customer will be looking for potential products, and then we send a print mailing to that customer around the same time we know this will be relevant to the customer. So these are use cases that make sense, but also we have a very seasonal business. For example, Christmas is very important, Easter, Mother's, Father's Day. So this gift business is also a huge, very important part of our business. So we use that as well to really push and and basically amplify our CRM measures with print.

Jessica 5:45

also with other channels, you often have the opportunity to combine it that you say, I do email push, for example, have you tested that? And have you seen uplifts through that?

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 5:57

Yeah, so yeah, of course, we combine it with with email. And of course, we see an uplift, and it amplifies the message of the print. What's also interesting that we tested out is whether it makes sense to Send the email before or after the print mailing and we found out that sending the email before the print arrives at the customer Actually works better for us. So that was also an interesting finding that we saw and also what we do now is Because we combine it usually and we also really try to have a similar message. So the customer sees It's the same image imagery in both email and the print touch points. So yeah, it's a message that just makes sense for the customer. So nothing that is really conflicting. And then we combine like the voucher code, for example we sent the customer voucher code that is in the in the print mailing and also in the email.

Jessica 6:54

you were mentioning already tracking. How do you track the impact of print?

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 6:59

So yeah, of course, most of our print touchpoints have a voucher. So voucher redemption is one way, but also, the best way to track it because yeah, sometimes we have like voucher redemption rates of over 20 percent or something like that. 20, 30%. Now for Christmas it's even higher. So because everyone is using the voucher but the best way to track it really is to have a control group. And before I joined the company didn't really do that, and I guess that was a big mistake. But now basically everything that we do, every print touch point that we have has a control group so we can measure the success against the control group that didn't receive the print mailing.

Jessica 7:38

How's the technical setup? What kind of tool are you using to make that actually happen in an easy way, hopefully?

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 7:46

Yeah we've worked, I think, with four or five different printing houses, depending on our needs and what kind of format we want, et cetera. So it's it's a bit complicated, but we're trying to streamline it. So the technical setup that we currently use is OptiLine. So Optilize can connect to Imarsys and allows us to basically implement the print touchpoints in the email journey, for example, as a touchpoint in the automation. So that works quite well. But then sometimes we also work with Deutsche Post directly. For example, for Christmas now, we're sending out Been mailings through the Deutsche Post and then it's not automated. We upload our customers there and then they send it out. So yeah, it's a manual process. But yeah, as we have and increasing the amount of automated touch points that we have we will be using optimized more and more.

Jessica 8:44

why do you then use for those specific use cases, Deutsche Post? What's then the difference in the operations that you need there?

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 8:52

Because we have a huge Christmas campaign and it's a lot of customers. And the decision was made because Deutsche Post was just cheaper. Yeah, they have a lot of different printing houses, so sometimes they can be more competitive when it comes to pricing, but then also now we're considering like streamlining everything and having one partner for that Might actually overweigh the additional costs because it is a lot of effort, you know working with two different partners also Has it difficulties so I, I think Optilize is a good solution, especially if you want to do automated for manual stuff we currently still use Deutsche Post.

Jessica 9:33

And I can imagine like the channel has some specialties compared to others, like you have digital products, but now it's something haptic. So what are your learnings there?

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 9:46

So yeah, I guess that's what's why a lot of CRM managers are a bit hesitant because it's an entire, entirely different world compared to, to email. It's a CRM touch point, but Yeah, you have to think about the paper, for example. So what's the weight of the paper that you want to use, how it feels. And you have to think about the format. There are also different formats that you can use. You can send out booklets. You can send out flyers. You can send out letters in an envelope. You can send out Postcards, for example. So these are all decisions that you have to make what kind of format you want to use. What format has the best cost to benefit ratio as well. What we're currently seeing is basically that our best performing formats are, for example, not the booklet, which is very expensive to produce. But I guess our customers don't want to. To don't or don't have the time to, to basically look into that booklet with like 12. 15 different pages. They want something smaller. So for example, the letter performs quite well, but it's also slightly more expensive than the postcard. And at the moment where we're looking at, it depends how Christmas works, but it could be that the postcard even though it has a slightly lower conversion rate might be better for us because it's it's cheaper

Jessica 11:10

just looking into the round. Anyone has a question?

Audience 11:14

how large is your. Control group out of your entire database? Yeah, that's one part of my question. The second part of the question is also previously been trying to drive direct mails I think it's taking a very long time to get everything produced. It's labor intensive So i'm curious to understand what your lead time is from the point in time of development to the point of sending out that letter

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 11:36

Yeah. Yeah, first part of the question how big is the control group? So our standard value is usually 5%, but it depends on how big the audience is and what the conversion rate is. So if you know the conversion rate or can compare it to another similar campaign that you ran, you can basically calculate the uplift that you need. To to have a significant result. You can calculate how many customers need to be in the control group and based on that. So basically you need the entire volume of the customers. You need the conversion rate. What uplift you're trying to achieve. And then you can just calculate How big it needs to be to have a significant value there. And the second part of the question is because it's not scalable, right? It's difficult to produce. So yeah, I think the key is to have a standardized process. And also I think what a lot of people struggle with and what we struggled with initially as well. For emails, you don't build emails just from scratch every time you send out an email. But for print for the first times we, we used it we build the print mailings from scratch, which doesn't make sense because emails, you have a template and then you use, reuse modules and blocks you can do the same thing for for print mailings, for direct mails. So if you have a format go to format like a postcard or a letter, then you can just build your modules that you need for the print mailings and then the designers or even CRM managers can just combine them and yeah, and do it. But yeah, of course it takes more time, but I guess it's also. The people who are working on it and they need to have a routine in doing that. Then you need a process that is clearly written down for everyone and transparent. And then also yeah, the printing partner. It needs to know your needs and and basically you don't want to decide the on the paper and the format every time you send out something you would have go to your standard kind of paper standard format that you would use every time and then also blocks. You put everything together. Yeah yeah, it will. Take more time because you also need to prove for example with emails. It's a bit faster but I think yeah, you can decrease it and we've decreased it also drastically. I mean in the past we have used like Months and now it's just down to a couple weeks

Jessica upbeat 13:55

How do you make sure that it is a clean control group? Are they only receiving the direct mailing?

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 14:01

Yeah we have a global control group that doesn't receive any CRM communication and that's a smaller percentage, of course, of the entire audience. But we use that also for the print mailing, for example. And that allows us, basically, to measure the entire CRM communication against nothing, essentially. And then what we do but yeah, we've done different things, but sometimes it makes sense to have a control group for email that is separate from the one that you have for print mailing. Sometimes we have a control group. Then receive email and and the print mailing. Yeah, different things. But I'm also a fan of not overcomplicating things. So we have the global control group in place. It doesn't receive any CRM communication. And there are usually two different experiments running on the email, specific email campaign and the specific print mailing campaign.

Audience 14:51

I have a question on the average age of your customers. So where is that and do you treat cohorts differently with communication channels based on the

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 15:00

age? Yeah. We don't know the exact age of our customers because we're not asking for birthdays. But from research, et cetera, we, we know that they're around like And end of twenties until like end of thirties, something like that. So most of our customers are young moms with kids, families, et cetera. And the other part of the question

Audience 15:25

I was wondering if the age range would have been broader, do you treat them differently? Like in the twenties, thirties, forties, and so on to like elder people get more. Letters and younger more emails or something like that.

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 15:35

No. I mean what we do for example when we see that the customer is not responsive to email. So for example now we're sending out a reminder for christmas Where we target customers that are not responsive to emails yeah, so this is also an interesting way we're trying now because it makes sense because some customers don't read emails. It's not because they don't like our brand. It's not that, it's not because they're not loyal. It's just because they maybe don't even use the inbox that they registered with on our platform. And then it's hard to target them. It's hard to reach them by the way, the print mailing. We dunno, the open rates, unfortunately you cannot track that with print mailings. But yeah I think it's higher, definitely higher'cause everyone opens mailboxes at some point. So yeah.

16:23

Let me quickly repeat the question of the audience. In print, you have the option to select different formats, the weight of the paper and more, but there's the risk that people might not like the product that you sent. How do you eliminate the risk?

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 16:37

it's very hard to really find out for example, what kind of paper the customer prefers as a specific one. Because the the differences might be so small that we just decided we're not gonna test different papers. For example we went to brand and asked brand, what do you recommend? That made our lives easier because I also don't believe that there will be huge difference, like in terms of the paper quality, maybe in the format that could be, maybe we could test out different things, and we have a small B2B part now that where we have a different format, we test out different formats for them but, yeah, I think When you want to scale, you have to simplify also things, and then you have to make sacrifices at some point. And especially for things that you're not sure how to measure, like the paper, et cetera, so it yeah. I don't think, in my opinion, it makes, it doesn't make sense to test like different papers because the difference will be so small. People who work with print, like our print designers, they feel the difference, but for the customer, the customer, It doesn't really care about it, unless it's like crappy quality. It doesn't, yeah, doesn't matter for the customer. we have a high standard but it's also what we're not doing is investing a lot, because then, also, you need a valid business case. If you have a super expensive paper, and then a a finishing also on top golden foil or something like that, then, yeah, of course we're, We have thought about it but then it makes the print mailing so expensive that it might not be worth it. And then again yeah, you, the customer wouldn't probably care about it anyway.

Audience 18:14

I have actually multiple questions. My first question is, beside your regular campaigns, like your Christmas campaign, do you use print mailings also in your automation setup? And the second question is are there any limitation you have in terms of maximum sent outs, minimum sent outs? And the third question is how do you handle consent? So when a customer doesn't want to receive it do you get any feedback back? So we can do it step by step, I can ask again.

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 18:46

so yeah, we use it for automations where we have predefined funnels. We send out automated print mailings. So for example, I mentioned for wedding where we know that the customer has purchased product. A and then product B makes sense after X amount of months. So this is an automation. We have a couple of other predefined channels funnels essentially. Then we also have CLV products like the photo book, for example. We know also that the photo book product. Can become relevant after X months after the initial purchase so complimentary products for example We also have automations that place for that So maximum. I don't think that there's a maximum you could yeah, in terms of cost, yeah, basically how much you're willing to spend and how much does make sense. Print is not email. So that's why you have to be selective about the customers that you're targeting. Essentially you need to look for, out for a higher conversion rate in this audience. So if you make a mistake and not a mistake, but if you make the email audience slightly larger than it needs to be, then, maybe you'll have some unsubs, that's it. But if you target customers who don't care about your print menu because the product is not relevant then you're potentially losing money. So that's why I strongly recommend being selective. So look for customers where you're confident that the, Product will be interesting and also we are selective about within the product categories. We're all selective about like the average order value of the customer or CLV, depending on how recent the customer is. You don't want to target like a, for example, low spender because the risk will be high as well. when it comes to postage and I think for most countries, or at least for Germany I can speak about Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and also France the limit is 5, 000 because below that, you're paying a lot when it comes to postage. So after 5, 000 there's just a threshold that you reach and then it becomes a much more cheaper for you just send it out. so it's a price thing. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it doesn't make sense to send it out also because if you think about the effort that you're putting in to five, five customers, you're not designing everything. luckily you don't need like a double opt in for print. So that's a good thing. But so there's like a small note a small print where we inform the customer about unsubscribing by just calling us directly and then customer service. Writes down the email and then it's just push, pushing our CRM system some from from a Google sheet. So yeah, then the customer is excluded from the next print mailing. So we have a separate print opt in field in our CRM tool that allows us to exclude those customers.

Audience 21:33

How do you send it? You send only to buyers or can you also send it to the leads?

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 21:39

in theory, yes. What we also do, for example, now we use it for acquisition. I'm not responsible for it. But yeah, we also use it for acquisition. So we buy addresses and then send them a print mailings. And then the same process, basically, if they don't want to receive yeah, they just call customer service. Yeah.

Audience 22:00

Unique codes versus general codes or generic codes, what are the pros and cons from your perspective? Like I know that printing unique codes is more expensive, right? But it has the advantage the tracking is much more precise, they cannot be handed on and stuff like that. And yeah, I don't know what's your perspective on this topic?

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 22:17

Yeah. Recently we we checked how much cheaper it would be to have a generic code. We usually use only individual codes and the difference was so small. If you want to save 200 or 300 euros for the entire print mailing Yeah. It, it wasn't a huge difference for us. it wasn't much more expensive. So that's why And also all the reasons that you mentioned tracking is more precise than also when we tried out a generic code at some point it took maybe two weeks and then it was on some portal, yeah, on some platform and yeah, we had to take it down and it was difficult because, they're not legally obliged to, to take it down your code. Yeah, that's difficult. So that's why, It doesn't make sense from my perspective to have a generic code. Actually,

Audience 23:04

some companies don't mind it if it's being shared on platforms and whatever it's just yeah, but then it kills

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 23:09

your tracking. Yeah, it does. Yeah. And then you don't know where the customers are coming from. I guess now with the control group it might mitigate the risk a little bit, but in my opinion, it's not really worth it, especially if the costs that not much, much higher to have an individual code.

Jessica 23:24

Thank you so much on your deep dive to, to print. I think that was really interesting. I get maybe. Does anyone of you are thinking now about getting a print channel? Steve, we converted one person.

Antonio Hersonski, Head of CRM at kartenmacherei 23:40

Maybe if I can say something to that. It is expensive, but and we also know that, but they are also different print touch points. And I think that the most important or the most expensive part of print mailing is not the printing part, but the postage. So basically delivering it to the customer and you can save a lot of money by just using parcel inserts, for example, if you have a physical product, you can use a parcel insert, you can put it into your parcel what we have, like free small gifts, and we also put that in our parcels like samples, for example, of our products, that also makes sense, and yeah, or sometimes we just On one of our pages, for example, for calendars, we also have like a small code or QR code, whatever which also serves as a CRM touch point. So integrating it's in our product itself is also possible in the parcels and saves you a lot of money as well. Yeah, if you're skeptical you could maybe start with something like that and then think about sending out direct mail.

Jessica 24:44

That's a great tip. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge here your experience with print.

24:54

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