Performance Direct Mail Specialist

Overview

You'll design, execute, and optimize direct mail campaigns that get employers' employees and health plan members to sign up for Virta's diabetes reversal program. This means working with data teams to build mailing lists, coordinating with creative and vendors to produce physical mail pieces, and figuring out how to attribute online conversions back to offline mail drops. You report to the Director of Growth Optimization.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Later-stage private (864 employees, well-funded digital health company)

Size: 864 employees

Growth: Expanding B2B2C channel - they sell to employers/health plans who offer Virta to their members

Market Position: Category leader in nutrition-based diabetes reversal, competing against traditional medication management and other digital health programs

GTM Reality

How This Fits:

• Virta sells to employers and health plans (B2B)
• Those organizations then offer Virta to their employees/members (B2C)
• This role is on the B2C side - getting eligible members to actually enroll once their employer has bought Virta
• Direct mail is used alongside email, paid ads, and in-app messaging to drive enrollment

Why Direct Mail:

• Health plan and employer populations skew older (diabetes prevalence increases with age)
• Physical mail has higher open rates than email in 50+ demographic
• Less ad fatigue than digital channels
• Compliance-friendly channel for healthcare marketing

The Challenge:

• Attribution is messy - someone gets a postcard, then signs up via mobile app 2 weeks later
• Long testing cycles compared to digital (can't A/B test daily)
• Higher upfront costs and vendor coordination

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Campaign Planning (25%) | Vendor/Creative Coordination (30%) | Analysis/Attribution (30%) | Internal Meetings (15%)

Key Activities

• List Building & Segmentation: Work with data team to pull lists of eligible members from employer/health plan databases. You're looking for people with Type 2 diabetes or prediabetes who haven't enrolled yet. Segment by geography, demographics, previous engagement for testing.
• Campaign Design & Testing: Brief creative team on offers and messaging, coordinate with mail vendors on formats (postcards, letters, dimensional mail). Set up A/B tests on creative, offers, timing. Most tests take 6-8 weeks to read out.
• Vendor Management: Coordinate with 2-3 mail houses on production timelines, data file formats, postal logistics. Chase down proofs, approve mail dates, troubleshoot data file issues when lists don't upload correctly.
• Attribution & Reporting: Build tracking systems to connect mail drops to online enrollments. Use promo codes, dedicated landing pages, and statistical modeling. Report on cost per enrollment, enrollment rate by segment, LTV projections. Spend a lot of time in Excel and your analytics platform.
• Budget Management: Manage mail budget across multiple campaigns, forecast costs, track vendor invoices, optimize spend allocation across segments based on performance.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Attribution is imperfect: You'll never have perfect line-of-sight from postcard to enrollment like you do with digital ads. You use proxies, incrementality tests, and modeling. Leadership will ask "how do we know this is working" and you'll have directional answers, not pixel-perfect tracking.
• Long feedback loops: Digital marketers are used to seeing results same-day. Mail campaigns take 4-6 weeks from concept to mail drop, then another 2-4 weeks to measure response. If something doesn't work, you've burned weeks.
• Vendor dependencies: You're coordinating printers, mail houses, data cleaners, USPS delivery schedules. Delays happen. Data files reject. Mail gets delayed by postal holidays. You spend time chasing vendors.
• Internal skepticism: You'll need to educate stakeholders who are used to digital's instant feedback and lower CPMs. Some will question why you're "wasting money" on mail when email is cheaper.
• Compliance constraints: Healthcare marketing has rules (HIPAA, state regulations). Legal and compliance review cycles add time. Some creative ideas get shot down.

What Success Looks Like

• You prove direct mail drives incremental enrollments at acceptable CAC (likely $200-500 per enrolled member based on digital health benchmarks)
• You build reliable attribution methodology that leadership trusts
• You identify 2-3 high-performing segments that become repeatable playbooks
• You're managing 8-12 campaigns per year at scale

Who You're Targeting

Primary Audience:

• Employees at companies that offer Virta as a benefit
• Members of health plans that cover Virta
• Typically age 40-70, diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes or prediabetes
• Mix of working adults and retirees

What They Care About:

• "Will this actually work for me?" (skepticism about another diet program)
• Medication reduction (many are on multiple diabetes meds)
• Avoiding complications (neuropathy, vision loss, amputation)
• How much effort is required (daily coaching, food tracking)
• Whether their specific health plan/employer covers it fully

Requirements

• 3-5 years in performance marketing or growth marketing, ideally with some offline channel experience (direct mail, TV, radio, out-of-home)
• Strong analytical skills - comfortable with attribution modeling, statistical significance, cohort analysis
• Experience managing external vendors and creative agencies
• Familiarity with healthcare or insurance marketing (nice to have - compliance environment, B2B2C model)
• Comfortable with ambiguity and building processes from scratch (this is described as "taking direct mail to the next level" - implies they're scaling up, not maintaining established programs)
• Ability to translate messy offline data into actionable insights
• Project management skills - juggling multiple campaigns with different timelines

What This Role Is NOT

• This is not brand marketing or awareness campaigns - you're driving measurable enrollments
• This is not purely digital performance marketing - if you only want to optimize Facebook ads, this isn't it
• This is not a creative role - you brief creative, but you're not designing the mailers
• This is not healthcare sales - you're not talking to employers or health plans (that's a different team)