Balsam Hill Sees 14% Profit Boost with Strategic Direct Mail

Challenge

Balsam Hill is recognized as a premier provider of artificial Christmas trees and holiday décor, building a loyal customer base through its commitment to quality and craftsmanship.

The company’s marketing mix includes a successful catalog program that drives significant revenue during the critical holiday season. However, its direct mail program faced significant challenges that were impacting both effectiveness and efficiency.

“Holiday 2024 was actually my first holiday season at Balsam Hill, and naturally, I wanted it to be a great one,” shares Holly Klingel, Director of CRM & Loyalty at Balsam Hill. “We have a very successful catalog program. But the direct mail program hadn’t been built correctly and needed to be completely revamped.”

Many customers were simultaneously receiving both direct mail postcards and catalogs, leading to double counting of revenue and inefficient spend. “Unfortunately, there wasn’t any customer or response data to use to create a more effective plan,” Holly explains.

The team needed to determine which direct mail tactics actually drove results — whether retargeting site visitors, thank-you mailers to recent purchasers or event-driven campaigns supporting major promotions like Black Friday and clearance sales. Balsam Hill sought out an experienced partner who could bring both strategic thinking and analytics to optimize their direct mail efforts.

Solution

Balsam Hill partnered with LS Direct to completely rebuild its direct mail strategy, leveraging LS Direct’s data-driven approach and Boomerang direct® postal retargeting solution to best support the customer journey.

The collaboration focused on eliminating the inefficiencies of the previous program and identifying the most profitable direct mail investments. According to Holly, “My goal was to drive incremental revenue and find the pockets of opportunity for direct mail as well as to identify customers our other channels were missing.”

LS Direct’s modeling and analytical capabilities proved crucial during the holiday season. “LS Direct had the modeling and analytical strength to test in the fall and quickly determine which customers to mail. When our big traffic increases came in November, we were ready for a dramatic increase in investment,” Holly explains.

The results were immediate and impressive. The new strategy dramatically reduced overlap between catalog and direct mail recipients, with catalog orders touched by direct mail dropping from 63% to 32% year-over-year. This strategic targeting eliminated the double-counting issues that had plagued the previous program.

“In a competitive holiday market, we achieved a 25% reduction in spend and a 14% increase in profit,” says Holly. “We’re especially proud of the part direct mail played in changing the trend for new customers. They’re vital for a business whose products last 10 years, and these were the highest increases we’d seen in years.”

The campaign delivered exceptional results with a $27 overall ROI and a $9 incremental ROI — demonstrating the power of precise targeting and data-driven strategy. LS Direct’s comprehensive reporting tools also made it easy for Balsam Hill to demonstrate success internally, with detailed lost opportunity charts showing potential for continued growth.