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Welcome to the Amazing Authorities podcast, where game changers, visionaries, and category leaders share how they built their brands, platforms, and global influence. Your host is Mitch Carson, international speaker, media strategist, and creator of the Instant Authority system. If you're ready to learn from those who've done it and want to become the go to expert in your space, you're in the right place.
B
Ladies and gentlemen, Jesse Mansfield is in the house, hailing from Austin, Texas, and he owns the print shop. Jesse, welcome to the show today.
C
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
B
Yeah. And you're all mic'd up. You've got the headphones on. I'm. I'm. I gotta show my ears. They need some breathing room, but we've got quality mics and we're gonna do this today. And you're. We were talking before we began the. The process. I was in the print business myself for more than two decades. I loved it, miss it. And then I explained, because of life circumstances, I. I'm no longer involved. So I was very much looking forward to this conversation because I can refer to you as a peer and I know your pain and all the joys of the business. Now, how did you get in this? Was this a. This is unusual for a guy your age to be in the print business and to be successful in it. And that's usually grandpa's business.
C
Well, it was my grandfather's business.
B
Oh, my gosh, here we go. Legacy.
C
Yes. So I'm a third generation printer. My grandfather started the company almost 40 years ago in 1987. Daycare. I went to the print shop during the summer or. Okay, I kind of grew up into it. I wasn't ushered into it or encouraged at all to join the business, but I did, in and out. And I just. I found this passion for entrepreneurship in college, just by happenstance, I took a random class and I glommed onto this business as a way to express that. And since then, I, you know, I had my business almost taken away from me as well during COVID Oh, right.
B
Oh, boy. I get you.
C
And I left. I was like, oh, well, I got to go get a real job now. And I just climbed my way very quickly up the technology ladder, was working as an engineer at Microsoft within a couple of years. And I just tell people, if you can do printing, you can do anything. I was just like, this career stuff is easy. But I came back about a year ago to carry the company forward, and my business partner and I are running the place and really focusing on commercial printing. So specifically Printing for businesses is what that means generally speaking.
B
Sure.
C
We also focus specifically on what we call a small format or narrow format printing. We're not focused in large format like signage or banners or anything like that.
B
Whole different sector.
C
Yeah. And direct mail is the biggest focus. It's not easy. Most people don't know how to do it. Navigating the bureaucracy and all the rules of the US postal system which are necessary. But it's, it's also, like you said, it's a disappearing. There aren't in many people my age doing this. I saw that as an opportunity. I always have. But especially now. There's no millennials or Gen Zs or like my son. Gen Alpha is coming up. Nobody's starting a printing company. They don't have the skill sets. They're not teaching it, where do you learn it? And they don't see it as an opportunity. Right. Printing is old and the computer, everything social media online is new and the barrier to entry is pretty high. Not only with the skill set, but also monetarily. You have to have a physical building and you have to have these expensive machines.
B
Capital, capital, yeah. You need capital investment.
C
Even if you have the capital, you got to know what you're doing and that's hard one stuff. So I want to carry this legacy into the future. I also just find I just fell in love with printing and direct mail advertising along the way. It's so intricate, it's so powerful. And what I love about it is it's a black box that most people don't know about, they can't know about. And the people who really know how to use it there, they have the secret weapon that nobody else knows they're using.
B
You've hit the nail on the head today. I, and I will say this. When I was running, I ran a lot of direct mail programs. I mean I had a whole operation in that area, unique direct mail. Not just sending out postcards. I used modern postcard back then a long time ago. I don't know if you know them there. I think they were in California someplace, Orange county. And they would handle, I would send them the electronic file and then they would print and mail for, for me, all done. That was one step in the process. But when I got to assembling unique mailers, bulk mailings, dimensional mail, we did that all in house and charged premium prices because the return on investment, the roi using that mechanism when it was called for in the promotional campaign, you have to have a high end service, there has to be a high ticket Component to that sales. If you're selling, you know, something that's above $100 and your mail cost, the cost of the buying, the client, because that's what it is. Client acquisition costs is 10 bucks well worth it. And if it's a hundred, you know, two hundred, a thousand, oh my gosh, it's totally worth it. And. But people don't understand that. They're so locked in today to. You got to do email marketing. Oh, what's your, are you using funnels and all the, all this? They're missing a golden opportunity. And you said it. You fortunately were groomed in this at a young age. You saw it. But it is a hard science. But once you crack the code on direct mail, you'll never go back. In my opinion. You just, well, you just won't. It's an integral part. It's one of the big arrows in your quiver. It's the bullseye arrow when you dial it in.
C
Yes, nobody knows how to do it and some people know how to do it. And those people are winning. It's has a high barrier to entry as a, as a marketer because it's very expensive. So I always tell people print and direct mail is very expensive. Lean into that. Don't try to make your print as cheap as your email. Nothing's ever going to be cheap as email. You know, cheap in both cost but also impression. So if you're going to do print, invest in it. And with email marketing, for instance, how do you, how do you make a super email? Let's say you're, you're like, hey, I've got a thousand targets. They're all CEOs of waste management companies. I need to make sure that they receive my message right. Can you, can you, can you spend an extra thousand dollars per email to make it really pop and really jump out of their inbox? There's diminishing returns. Right. There's nothing you can really do to get past their spam filters, their assistance, all of that stuff. You can't make the email come out of the screen, you know. Yeah. By the shirt tail.
B
Yeah. You have to have the right product, the right grabber that will hook somebody. Today the term is how do you hook them? And back then is how do you grab their attention? And I, when I had a promotion with a company called Always that handled the Bay Area of California, a well known copywriter came to me named Alex Mendozian and said Mitch, he knew I was direct mail guru at the time. This is late 90s. I I think it was. Or maybe early 2000s. I don't remember the exact time, but more than 20 years ago. And he said, I want to get into Always. This is a promotion that they want to send out to all of their commercial accounts because that's where they make their money. It's not on. Not on residential. It's commercial. Do you pick up my garbage? And they were a premium supplier, but they were reliable. And all this. I said, I got it. Let's write a sales letter. That. And crumple it up, put it inside a metal trash can. Metal. Because back then cans were metal. They weren't plastic. And rolled back then. They were. You had to drag them to the street in metal trash cans. And is before the plastic came in even. And it worked extremely well. We crumpled up and said. And they would open it up. As you see, we're tired of our sales letters being thrown in the trash. So we've saved you the time today. So you put a unique spin on the grabber. Everybody smiles. And then there was the longevity of the trash can that they kept after the fact for a pencil caddy. And on the outside, of course, had ALWAYS logo and phone number. Contact us here. You'll never throw us out again. And it was a cute little cliche using mail. And you. And you said it exactly correct. You have to lean into the money. If you want premium results, you've got to invest. And it's not about how cheap it is, how effective it is. God, I could keep telling case studies, man. That was my.
C
That's an amazing case study. And I'm so glad we're talking because this is exactly what I'm trying to communicate to people. They lack imagination. And. And you. You said earlier, customers, wait till they get.
B
Wait till you get my book. I've got all I know studies in here.
C
I'm so excited. Yeah, I bought it off of Amazon. I'm waiting for it to come in. Something must have happened because it should have come in by now. I'll have to double check. But yeah, that. That's exactly. You could go. You could spend a thousand dollars per impression on direct mail, you know, and in some cases that's the case. I had a advertising professor now who's tons of experience, and he was talking about. I met him at a cigar bar randomly. Very interesting conversation because he was explaining this B2B. And what we're talking about is a lot of B2B with these really campaigns. Right?
B
That's where the money is.
C
Yes. That's where the Money is. So how do I get these people's attention? How do I get past all the gatekeepers? Well, you think big. And he sent his. His client was an interchange for international phone calls. That was his company, his client. And his target was executives at places like AT&T. Right?
B
Yeah.
C
He's the only people that would buy this service from him, so. And each contract he gets with these people is worth millions of dollars.
B
Oh, you spend like crazy then.
C
Yeah, spend like crazy. I mean, just. And he. This campaign where it was freeze dried ice package with like sushi.
B
Yeah.
C
And I don't remember what the tie in was, but to. To the message, but everybody opened it. The whole office was feasting on it and talking about it for weeks on end. And you can guarantee that they got the meeting.
B
Oh, you, you feed them. And I mean, it's a, it's a core need. I think we have to. We need air, we need food and we need water. Yeah. Supply that and put a unique marketing twist to it. You've got them how everybody has to put their pants on one leg at a time. And they were all the same. You just, you address that and have some sort of pain. And here's the solution. It's all very fundamental.
C
I had a client, digital marketer.com.
B
Okay.
C
Ryan Dice.
B
Sure. Ryan is a client, by the way. He was one of my very first buyers of my black belt direct marketing system. He was in the crowd at a Dan Kennedy conference where I was speaking and. No, no, Ryan was a client. He told me at his event, Traffic and Conversion. I went one time some years ago in San Diego, I think it was. I went out to his event and I went up to him. He was one of the few people that actually bought, that used, utilized the. The consult that was included in buying my system. He was just a guy in the audience. He wasn't Ryan Dice then. He was a student of Yannick Silver, who was a friend of mine and also a client who was another marketer. And Ryan, I went up to it as event. I said, hey, Ryan, how's it going? He goes, mitch Carson, do you know I still have your marketing system on my bookshelf? That's the one I go back to no matter what in a lot of my marketing today. It's one of the best systems I've ever read. He said that. I wish I had it on tape, but that was. That was a long time ago.
C
You got to be kidding me. Because that's how I met Ryan and that's how he became my Client was from where?
B
Trafficking conversion.
C
I went to his traffic and conversion. And after the event, he was standing there taking, you know, pictures and everything.
B
Right.
C
And I walked up to him, shook his hand and said, hey, I have a commercial printing company right here. We do direct mail and fulfillment right around the corner from here. Yeah. We're both Austin, and I'd love to talk to you about doing.
B
He loves direct mail because he knows it's effective.
C
Yeah. We ended up losing that account not because we did anything wrong, but they canceled that. The project we were working on. But what it was was interesting if you signed up as a client. So this is the other side of direct mail that I really want to talk about, too. If you signed up as a client, as their core offer was $99 a month, I believe, to be a member of digitalmarketer.com and you got access to all the information inside. All the.
B
Right.
C
Well, that would kick off a direct mail piece from us.
B
Sure.
C
We would send them, you know, a welcome kit. Right. Which include. One of the important things that included was a sticker to put on the back of your laptop. Right, Right. Because you want to. You want people to be representing your brand. And that was a part of his whole system.
B
Nice.
C
You know, you need to turn people into promoters.
B
Raving fans.
C
Yeah, raving fans. And so you want them to brand with promo, you know. Right. Stickers or whatever. You want them to brand themselves with you, you know, so that was part of the welcome kit you got. I forget what you all you got in the welcome kit, but I think it was a membership card personalized, and when you completed your courses, you got a certificate. So I see this all the time on YouTube channels where somebody in the direct. In the digital marketing space has their digital marketer certificates that I fulfilled at one point along the way, you know, years ago, as sitting in their background on their shelf like I have right here.
B
Right.
C
And, you know, still to this day, people are representing Digital Marketer.com's brand in the backdrop of their YouTube channel for something that I fulfilled. So that's the other part of direct mail is the most expensive customer you're ever going to get is a. Is a cold customer.
B
Correct.
C
Doing advertising to a cold audience before you should ever even touch that and be touching the crown jewels of. Of direct mail and. And all of its power. You should be touching your current clients and turning them into raving fans and referring you.
B
Bravo. Bravo. Totally agree.
C
People who. Ryan Dice taught me this better than anyone else. And it's funny you said Dan Kennedy, too. I love Dan Kennedy. I still read his stuff. Brilliant copywriter, direct marketing person.
B
He was a client of mine. That's how I came. Yeah. And then I became a Mastermind member for nine years in his Mastermind. Yeah. So I know Dan quite well. Yeah. I'm in four of his books. He references my. I wrote for his newsletter for three years, every month. Because I mailed it. I mailed it to his list before Bill Glazer bought the business.
C
Oh, my goodness. Yeah.
B
A lot of legacy.
C
I hate that divorce you had. Yeah.
B
Oh, yeah. I was in it now, but we. We certainly talk about this stuff. That. That was my handle. All of his clients were my clients.
C
That's crazy.
B
Totally immersed in that world. I mean, that's how I know Ryan.
C
You weren't totally immersed. Like, you were at the top of it.
B
Well, but I was in it. Yeah. I mean, I had my history, but I had to let go just because of the situation that developed in life. You know, you just. You pivot or perish, and I've done.
C
That so many times. Yeah, well, and you. And the same thing happened to me.
B
Oh, you went through a divorce.
C
Well, we weren't, you know, married, but got it. Yeah.
B
Well, you went through a life change. Let's call it that. Without the paper. Yeah. You know, you.
C
You. You.
B
You adjust, don't you? And it just is cleaner when you don't have something legal with a notary public stamp on it.
C
Yes, yes, yes, exactly.
B
Jesse, how do you marry direct mail? This is where I wanted to pick you. You're a young guy, and you'll understand. I mean, you understand because you grew up in the print business, but how do you integrate direct mail with the, let's say, newer way, the newer medium of Internet marketing. Let's just call it one macro, including social media. All of that is a. It's. The principles are the same. Copywriting principles and human behavior have not changed.
C
But how do you integrate what is. Dan, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Sorry. What is. I'm just so excited.
B
Yeah.
C
What does and Kennedy say in his books? He's. What's the number one thing? The list. Yes. If you have the wrong list, I don't care if you're selling, you know, know the best dress in the world. If you're sending it to people who don't wear dresses, it's never going to sell. So number one is the list. You know, number two is the offer. As Dan Kennedy would say. You have to imagine you're Writing an offer that will drive somebody in a snowstorm to go down the street and put their reply letter into the mailbox. Now that's where the analogy stops. Because back then that's how you got response. You got, you had a business reply envelope. People responded, you know, maybe prepaid postage and they would reply by letter or phone. You know, you have a callback. But today we're driving people to an online funnel mostly, you know, and so that's just the basics. So you have QR codes and those at scale, we can, those can all be personalized with QR code tracking. We can also see physic, geo, geo, location of where they scanned and all of that stuff. Now there's Pearls. So personalized URLs. Yes, everybody has their own URL. And when they hit your landing page, you're spiking them with a cookie that is following them, some sort of pixel or all of the pixels. And now you can retarget that customer for pennies. I don't know if you're familiar with retargeting ads, but very much, yeah, I'm.
B
Still immersed in marketing, so yes, I get it. And that's just sequence.
C
Yeah, it's cheap. So you've got somebody who was interested enough but maybe didn't buy and you've pixeled them on meta and Google and now you're hitting them all over the Internet with the same message and they're like, this is a big deal because I'm seeing it everywhere. And yeah, it's same, it's the same thing. But you're also, so we're also taking your list and we are doing. Oh, what's, what's the, what's the term? We're adding, we're, we're adding to the list the missing information. So if you buy a list or you give me a list, I will then comb for their Facebook profiles, their meta profiles, and before they even, they don't even have to interact with the mail piece before they're starting to see your ad in their Facebook feed, their Instagram feed, they're seeing it in banner ads across the Google display network, anything like that. We can also. Oh, it's called append. Sorry. Yes.
B
Oh, append the list. It's just an amendment. Yes.
C
Yeah. And we can append phone numbers, we can append, we can append email addresses to a certain extent. Yes. So we, it's a multi channel thing, but the direct mail piece is the anchor. It's the thing that makes the most impression. And if you do It. Right. It's something that they, that they keep and something that they interact with and yeah, that's how we make it. You know, it's not just direct mail in isolation.
B
Well, I. Jesse, there are so many things. I was looking forward to this. I interview quite a few people with my podcast. Probably about up to 15 a week. I was very much looking for. I have three more interviews after you. I have. I'm in Thailand, by the way. I'm semi retired now, living in. Yes, I'm in Thailand.
C
So you're my future self. I want to go to the Philippines. I want to really go to Thailand. I've been to Thailand once, but I want to go to Vietnam.
B
I've been to all of them. I can tell you all of it in a conversation after this. I've lived in the Philippines. I had a show on CNN there for a season before the pandemic would have continued. But then the pandemic came and we'd have a whole separate cut. We've got to have part two because I would like to dig into pearls. That was just coming into play when I exited the business. And personalized URLs using direct mail pieces to drive them to the web. And how do we integrate that? Using micro print that you know, with a clue that will get people. They have to put their clue into the. The web into a landing page, squeeze page at the time which then will reveal a gift to get them involved. It's all about busy fingers gets response, busy involvement getting them. I enclosed all these. We'll talk at much greater length. We have to. So there's part two, folks, a lot. And this is the biggest gem you're going to find. I found somebody just a younger, better looking version than Mitch who's in the business that knows technology. My God, he worked for Microsoft. That says a lot. And he knows of the direct mail business because grandpa showed him. He's probably got blue ink on his fingers that is permanent because that's what happens when you're in the print business. You, you sometime will spill ink loading the cartridge. And that's just how it is. If you're in the works. If you're in the print business, you've got some ink stains and you don't wear white. That's. That shows you don't.
C
I'm wearing myself today.
B
But when you're out. When you're out. Jesse, you've been a great guest. We're doing part two. Where can people get a hold of you? So when they want to invest in direct mail and find the golden key, the golden egg of marketing.
C
Well, my website is the best place to get a hold of us. Just request a quote, but all you put in there is your information and say I want to talk to Jesse and I respond, I'll talk to anybody. I'm not looking to sell you. If you just want advice or strategy, you can have my 2 cents for what it's worth. For 30 minutes just go to my website and.
B
And your website is.
C
Please tell us the print shoppie shop.net.
B
The print shop s h o p e.net three times radio guy the print shop S H o p P E dotnet. That's where you're going to find Jesse Mansfield. You've been an exceptional guest, Jesse. Thank you so much for your time and we're going to schedule part two.
C
Yes, thank you.
A
Thanks for tuning in to the Amazing Authorities podcast. If today's episode inspired you, take a moment to subscribe, rate and leave a review. It helps more experts like you rise to the top. For behind the scenes access and free resources to boost your authority. Head to MitchCarson.com or until next time, stay amazing.
Host: Mitch Carson
Guest: Jesse Mansfield (Owner, The Print Shop, Austin, TX)
Date: December 1, 2025
This episode explores how direct mail—a long-established but often overlooked marketing channel—is achieving massive ROI when uniquely blended with creativity and integrated digitally for multi-channel impact. Host Mitch Carson, himself a former print industry insider, interviews Jesse Mansfield, a third-generation printer whose company is reimagining what print and direct mail can achieve today. They dive deep into the enduring power of direct mail, how to creatively elevate traditional print, and what it takes to merge legacy marketing with modern digital strategies.
| Timestamp | Topic | |-----------|-------| | 01:30–02:54 | Jesse’s family printing business origin story | | 03:43–04:19 | Lack of new generation in print—opportunity and barriers | | 05:50–06:46 | High ROI from expensive, creative direct mail | | 08:09–09:45 | Legendary dimensional mail “trash can” campaign | | 10:16–12:00 | Creative case studies: freeze-dried sushi, B2B activation | | 14:40–15:49 | Brand loyalty: DigitalMarketer.com’s welcome kits, certificates | | 16:08–16:29 | Raving fans and internal customer marketing | | 18:34–19:45 | Integrating direct mail with digital: QR codes, pearls, cookies, tracking | | 20:53–21:27 | “Appending” lists—omnichannel retargeting | | 21:27 | Direct mail as the “anchor” of a campaign |
This summary covers all key content and insights, focusing on actionable takeaways for authorities, marketers, and entrepreneurs interested in elevating their brand impact using direct mail and creative, integrated marketing strategies.