Direct Mail Boosts Sales for Yorkshire Handmade Pies

Client

Yorkshire Handmade Pies

Services

Mail

Sectors

eCommerce

A trifold direct mail piece featuring photography of deep filled, Yorkshire Handmade Pie. Designed and printed by direct mail specialists Webmart.

Overview

Yorkshire Handmade Pies, a family-run online business, wanted to raise brand awareness and reach new customers. They’d tried a push on digital marketing, as well as magazine inserts. It was time to try something new: direct mail.

Working with the YHP team, we created a folded direct mail leaflet that blended smart targeting, storytelling, and a delivery schedule to land during peak pie season. With a freshly sourced audience and a beautifully crafted mailer, the results had our client coming back for more.

The Challenge

Before partnering with Webmart, YHP relied heavily on magazine inserts to get their message out – a low-cost method that delivered a respectable 1% response rate. Their digital marketing was ticking along, but like many growing eCommerce brands, they realised that to scale the business, increasing ad spend on crowded digital platforms wasn’t the only answer.

They needed to make a bigger impact, something tangible, memorable, and as rich in storytelling as the pies themselves. It was time to test the power of direct mail campaigns.

A Yorkshire Handmade steak pie cut open to reveal the steak filling packed full inside.

The Solution

After an intro to our friendly Webmarteers, we set about creating a plan to introduce direct mail marketing into YHP’s channel mix – and prove how optimising direct mail could help drive brand awareness and conversions.

What we did:

Targeting the right people: With a limited database of postal contacts, we worked with our data partners to build a fresh mailing list from scratch. Based on insights from our client, we created a persona based on their ideal customer: a northerner (of course!), aged 40+, with an appetite for fine dining, local produce, and wine.
Timing the drop: With pies being the ultimate cold-weather comfort food, we scheduled the campaign to land between October and November – their prime season.
Design: Moving beyond simple promotional inserts, we developed a rich, storytelling-led, trifold mailer. It included the heritage of the brand, their sustainability efforts, rave reviews, and a tasty incentive: a discount code to encourage first-time purchases.
End-to-end service: From print to fulfilment and delivery, Webmart managed the full direct mail process – ensuring the campaign was seamless, stress-free, and cost-effective.

The Results

It didn’t take long to see results. Within a few weeks YHP saw:

1,000 orders

the campaign saw 600 redemptions within the first two weeks, with a total of almost 1,000 orders by the end of the 8 week campaign.

10% uplift in AOV

the average order value for this campaign was £42, up 10% from their usual AOV.

2.5% Response rate

an impressive response rate of 2.5% was achieved with this campaign, a huge win compared to their 1% achieved through other channels.

For a first outing into direct mail, the numbers were impressive. But more importantly, it raised brand visibility in a crowded market and delivered genuine customer engagement, demonstrated through an increase in website traffic and customer reviews.

Looking Ahead

The second campaign is already in motion – and we’re doubling down. Quite literally.

Volume increased from 30,000 to 70,000
New creatives are being tested to see which messages rise to the top
Future campaigns are being lined up, with an eye on scaling sustainably

As James, the founder puts it, the only thing slowing them down now is making sure the kitchen can keep up with demand!

Key Takeaways

Yorkshire Handmade Pies is a textbook example of how integrated marketing campaigns, especially those with direct mail at their core, can drive powerful results for growing eCommerce brands. When your product is this good, you just need the right people to try it – and nothing delivers quite like a beautifully crafted mailer.