What I Learned At The First Free Toaster Curated Table Event
We met in NYC and spent 3+ hours talking about direct mail
We missed you at the first Curated Table event in New York City on March 5th sponsored by ICS Corporation (and its subsidiaries IM Group, LAMA, and Sayker Analytics).
Our guests - primarily senior marketing executives at consumer lenders - came together to discuss what’s working (and what’s not) in Direct Mail marketing in 2026.
First a few pictures so you have feel for the vibe 👇
The headline observation: mail still drives roughly 40% of new accounts for the lenders at my table. That’s typical for growth-stage fintech lenders I speak with, too.
Some other cool things I learned 💡
The 30% “oops, I lost it” stat. Of the consumers who intend to respond to a mail piece, roughly 30% no longer have the mail piece by the time they act. They remember the brand, Google it, and convert through paid search or “organic” — with limited connection back to the mailer that actually planted the idea. Make sure your attribution model considers this.
The holdout hack. Everyone at the table had basically given up on “perfect” statistical attribution for mail. Consensus: stop trying to build models on top of production data. Run a holdout instead. Mail one group, hold back a matched control, measure the lift. You end up with one clean incremental number you can actually defend in a budget meeting, instead of a complicated attribution model nobody trusts anyway. Our table had consensus that the word “attribution” was more closely associated with organizational politics than math or truth. That one hit home and I had never heard it framed that way.
The LTV by channel point. The teams that actually track lifetime value by acquisition channel consistently see direct mail customers outperform digital. I’m not sure if this is because direct mail reaches older customers and those customers are inherently more valuable, or if it’s because of something more subtle the channel is doing for lenders.
This one made me laugh. USPS has a discount for mailers who use AI in their creative process. A screenshot of the AI tool is sufficient proof. That is the bar. I don’t think they’ve fully thought through the enforcement mechanism.
On that note — the whole USPS discount menu is more generous than I realized. Most programs are worth up to ~5% each and many of them stack:
Tactile/sensory stuff (textured stocks, scented materials, die-cut edges)
QR codes and AR elements
Informed Delivery — the free program that emails recipients a preview of their mail. You can make your piece clickable in the preview at no cost.
Continuous Contact for remailing the same offer
Sustainability (1% year-round, basically free)
The Growth Incentive Program — up to 30% back on incremental postage for volume increases YoY
The AI screenshot one
A sophisticated mail shop will get you to 7%+ off postage with almost no administrative drag. If you’re not capturing this, that’s free money you’re walking past. Dennis Fish - and the team at ICS - can help you with this if you’re not sure how to operationalize it.
This observation alone would have made it worth the trip to NYC if I was an early stage lender building a mail program for the first time.
Off topic, but the AI conversation got pretty crazy after hours. I had a senior exec show me a Slack bot his team built that would have run circles around me in my peak analyst days. He let me ask it unstructured questions I thought it couldn’t handle and I was impressed by the responses. They even gave it a name and there’s an “executive version” of it very few have access to that taps into HR data like compensation, bonuses, and other sensitive data.
If you’d like to hear more about direct mail marketing insights from the March 5th event, I recently jammed on this with Dennis Fish and John Minalga on The Free Toaster Podcast.
Before we wrap today, I’d like to thank:
Amanda Braslow, our GM of Events - For executing an impressive inaugural Curated Table event for The Free Toaster
Dennis Fish and John Minalga - For trusting us to host the event as our sponsor!
All of our guests - For investing 3+ hours of their evening!
Going forward, Curated Table events will cover a range of marketing topics for lenders, like:
Reducing Friction in Marketing Funnels (April 27th in NYC!)
How Lenders Are Using AI in Their Marketing Workflows
How to Get Marketing and Risk to Play Nice in the Sandbox
What’s Working (and not Working) In Paid Social
Note Swapping on GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
If you’d like to attend a future event, here’s how to stay in the know:
Sign up for The Free Toaster Newsletter
Email Amanda (amanda@thefreetoaster.com) with subject line “Events” to get on our events list (we’ll inform this list before anyone else)
Follow me on LinkedIn
Stay tuned for a big event we have planned for September 23-24 in San Francisco - The Affiliate Marketing Summit for Decision Makers. I hope to see many of you there, if not sooner!
Thanks,
Carlos
PS: If you’re a B2B brand that would like to reach our network of consumer lending leaders, please email Amanda (amanda@thefreetoaster.com) with subject line “Sponsored Dinner” and we’ll setup time to chat.