As digital advertising costs continue to rise, some brands are looking for more ways to reach customers in print, ranging from catalogs to direct mailers.
One such way is through package inserts, the card ads that come inside a package with offers from other brands. People who have signed up for subscription services like Hello Fresh and Blue Apron have long been accustomed to receiving these types of inserts, and according to marketing agency heads, more brands are planning to invest in package inserts as they diversify away from digital advertising.
While it can be tricky to quantify the conversion rate from these inserts’ promo codes, brands can run post-purchase surveys to matchback those customers.
Andrew Lipsman, independent analyst at Media, Ads + Commerce, told Modern Retail that “inserts can be an effective way to reach a qualifying audience.”
“I am a big fan of direct mail at this current moment. To me, package inserts are a clever version of direct mail,” Lipsman said. At this time, he said, online media ads “are often very ineffective because they’re highly cluttered and they don’t capture people’s attention.”
Using the example of a cookware brand paying for inserts to be added to a meal kit, Lipsman said inserts can be helpful because they piggyback off of a customer’s existing purchase. “By virtue of the fact the customer is using meal kits, that this is probably the right audience to be considering new cookware,” he said.
How it works
Eric Smith is president and COO at 20-year-old Incremental Media, which specializes in insert ad programs. Incremental Media offers dozens of insert programs in partnership with about 30 programs run by companies that include HelloFresh, Zulily and Gilt. According to Smith, between 2023 and 2024, Incremental Media had an over 100% increase in DTC brands testing inserts. “And we are on pace to grow that another 50% in 2025,” he said.
While Incremental Media is not the sales representation for those companies, it acts as a middleman between the insert buying brands and the programs. Its insert-buying clients range from Hexclad to BetterHelp. Incremental Media generates revenue by getting a cut from the insert program in exchange for bringing ad business to the program.
Smith said a brand can choose a program based on the specific audience they want to target. “For instance, households led by affluent females in the 30-50 age range in a certain part of the country,” he said. “Then, whatever programs work the best for the brand, we scale up by placing the inserts in similar programs.”
Generally, a campaign starts to run over the course of a month before a brand scales it with a long-term run, Smith said. A typical insert program test budget can range from $25,000-$50,000 over a month.
Compared to direct mail ads, Smith said there are some draws. “Since the brand doesn’t pay for postage, you get a piece of mail into someone’s hands for dramatically less than direct mail,” he said. For context, he explained, if direct mail costs $0.40-$0.60 per piece, inserts would cost about $0.05 to $0.08 cents, depending on the program.
In theory, anybody who opens an order package could potentially be in the market for the related product that’s being advertised. For instance, a wine subscription company would be a good fit for a meal kit inserts program. “The more niche you are, the harder it is to get inserts to work,” Smith said. “The brands with big ticket items that want to target a more broad audience are ones that usually see success with an insert.”
As such, the targeting is more limited than digital advertising. According to Smith, “It’s akin to traditional TV spots, where the brand is targeting a network or a show, not an individual that’s watching,” Smith said.
Direct mail experts say brands are incorporating inserts through both shared mail and inside other brands’ packages.
Polly Wong, president of marketing agency Belardi Wong, which specializes in direct mail, said insert media can be a cost-effective way to reach a specific audience.
Belardi Wong’s in-house program, called Right@Home, is a shared mail program that offers access to buyers of luxury homes within 90 days of their move. Envelopes typically include six to eight inserts from premium brands. Wong said insert media programs often deliver 8X ROAS across several categories, such as home furnishings, garden, pet supplies and meal subscriptions.
“We often see opportunities targeted at certain markets, like new movers or new moms,” she said. There are many premium brands who use insert media as part of their marketing mix, she said, naming Casper as one of the early DTC brands that has always used insert media in their marketing strategy.
Wong added that inserts’ growing popularity is due to more brands mixing offline and online channels to effectively reach target consumers. “Marketers don’t want to be dependent on Google and Meta for new customer acquisition, and insert media provides a cost-effective way to reach new consumers at scale,” Wong said.
The pros and cons
Hexclad is one of Incremental Media’s inserts clients. Cam Bush, head of advertising at Hexclad, said the company began testing inserts in 2022, around the same time it got into direct mail.
“That quickly showed us that homeowners are the core consumers of kitchen products,” Bush said. “So we liked the idea of qualifying our audience by being a part of these insert programs.” As in, if someone is a HelloFresh customer, they’re probably cooking at home three or four days a week and would be open to buying new cookware.
Hexclad’s inserts creatives often show easy cookware cleanup or getting easy-to-cook recipes from the brand. “From us, you’re going to see recipes and great pictures of pans and a picture of Gordon [Ramsey],” Bush said. And for those that don’t throw the card out, it may end up placed on their fridge as a reminder of the brand.
“We’ve gotten a lot bigger as a company, so the ad budgets have naturally grown, too,” he said. But inserts still make up a small percentage of Hexclad’s overall ad dollars, with the company running ads on 16-20 channels in any given month. “In our recent insert campaign, we did 57 million households across nine programs,” Bush said, including Blue Apron, Green Chef, HelloFresh and Wine Insiders.
Bush said, at their core, inserts are an awareness play that at least remind the target audience of the brand’s products. “We consider inserts to be a mid-tier channel, one that we’re going to keep doing, particularly around tent pole events and releases,” Bush said. That’s despite the difficulty to optimize it due to the lack of matchback data.
Indeed, accurate attribution is the main drawback for insert ads.
Smith said most programs don’t provide the client brand with matchback data because it’s part of their proprietary customer database. It can also take a lot of time and resources to try to manually track redeemed promo codes across different package programs.
“The best way to measure inserts is to capture the people who don’t use the provided promo code but still come through and convert,” Smith said. This is typically done through a post-purchase survey to figure out where or how customers heard about the brand.
While it takes some testing to figure out their effectiveness, Lipsman said, there are ways to AB test inserts through different market holdouts, similar to podcast ads. “I do think we’ll see more brands using inserts,” Lipsman said.
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