Cut insert costs by 87% without losing a single customer

The situation

This was a business built on offline media. Press ads. Direct mail. Catalogue inserts. Even some TV.

We were spending over £1M a year across these channels. And it worked. Offline was the acquisition engine.

Then paper costs started climbing. Print runs got more expensive. Postage rates went up. Suddenly our 16-page inserts were eating into margins.

The easy answer? Keep doing what we'd always done and hope costs came back down.

I didn't think that was good enough.

What I did

I owned the entire offline operation. Not just the media buying. Everything.

I briefed and created all materials from scratch. Wrote the copy. Directed the creative. Managed the mailing schedules. Negotiated with publishers and print houses.

When costs spiked, I started questioning assumptions. Did we really need 16 pages to drive a response? What if the customer only needed the right message at the right moment?

I tested a stripped-back 2-page format. Same offer. Same targeting. Just less paper.

What made it work

Most people treat offline media like a black box. You put money in, customers come out, don't ask too many questions.

I tracked everything. Unique codes on every piece. Response rates by format, by publication, by mailing window.

That data told me something important: customers weren't reading all 16 pages. They were responding to the headline, the offer, and the call to action. The rest was expensive padding.

The 2-page format forced clarity. No room for waffle. Just the essential message.

I also learned that mailers consistently outperformed other channels. So when budgets got tight, I knew exactly where to double down and where to pull back.

Results

The format change de-risked our insert spend completely. We went from 16 pages to 2 pages and maintained the same customer acquisition cost.

That's a big cost saving.

Across the portfolio, I kept acquisition costs stable despite rising media costs. Press, direct mail, inserts, and limited TV all working together. All tracked. All optimised.

Over £1M in annual spend. Every pound accountable.