12 Old-School Marketing Tricks You Should Know—Even in 2025

Modern marketing didn’t just come out of nowhere. It built on what came before.

Segmentation. Retargeting. A/B testing. None of this stuff just fell from the sky fully formed in the year 2010. Of course, if you paid attention to the way people talk about these tactics online, you’d be forgiven for thinking they did!

Everything we take for granted about marketing today evolved from decades, sometimes even centuries, of real-world experimentation. And ironically, our current marketing technology is finding novel ways to break down, so old ideas are becoming new again.

Privacy laws are getting tighter. Browsers are blocking cookies and pixels are not firing like they used to. Conversion tracking and attribution systems that used to feel bulletproof are crumbling before our eyes.

If you’ve felt like it’s getting harder to measure what’s working, you’re not imagining things.

That’s why history matters so much. Long before Meta and Google controlled the marketing funnel, marketers were solving many of the same problems.

They found ways to reach the right people, test their creative, build loyalty, and prove the value of their work. And they did this without smartphones, browsers, or even computers.

So if global privacy regulations like GDPR or CCPA, or VPNs, or ad blockers have you feeling confused on how to do your job, take heart. Marketers even 20 years ago didn’t have perfect tracking and they learned how to measure results all the same.

They didn’t fly blind—they just used different tools. They had their ways of reaching the right people, crafting the right messages, and distributing them ways that got the results they wanted.

There’s no reason we can’t blow the dust off some of those old tools and use them ourselves.

In this post, I’d like to talk about 12 old-school marketing tactics (many of which are still in wide use) and why they’re feeling very relevant right now.

Before email, there was direct mail, and it was every bit as sophisticated.

Marketers bought targeted lists from brokers, personalized mailers by ZIP code or interest, and printed response codes to track what worked. It was expensive, but it worked. Mail could be segmented, tested, and tracked.

And, yes, people would sometimes call or even write back after getting sales letters in the mail. None other than David Ogilvy himself sang the praises of direct mail in Ogilvy on Advertising.

Sure, it wasn’t instant. But it was reliable.

Today’s email tools like Klaviyo and Mailchimp fell from the same family tree. Segments, flows, abandoned cart emails, and dynamic content—all of that’s built on the same principle: send the right message to the right person, and measure the response.

Even retargeting ads mirror this mindset. They re-engage warm leads much like a well-timed follow-up postcard. When digital gets noisy, direct mail’s lessons—relevance, segmentation, and measurable action—are worth remembering.

The Sears catalog was once known as "the Consumers' Bible." Starting in the late 1800s, it let customers shop from home, choose from a vast product selection, and get goods shipped directly to their door—no retail store required.

Sound familiar?

Mail order catalogs established the model for what we now think of as eCommerce. Sellers themselves owned the customer relationship and were able to show off their products with compelling copy and images, and make ordering as easy as possible.

Today’s Shopify stores and subscription boxes are the direct descendants. Convenience, direct relationships, and brand control still win.

And just like the old days, customer acquisition costs are high. But this is balanced out by high retention and LTV, both of which matter more than ever.

Smart catalogers knew their reorder rates and average customer lifespan. We should too.

And if you doubt this old method still works, consider this: Amazon sends out physical catalogs these days, too, as does the major B2B packaging supplier, ULINE.

Direct mail, after all, never gets filtered out by Gmail.

How many times has a podcaster tried to sell you something like a mattress or a software subscription?

I bet you that it always comes with a promo code like PERSON10 or they tell you to go to somesite.com/podcast or somesite.com/youtuber.

Back in the heyday of print, brands would run FSIs (Free Standing Inserts) with scannable codes to trace redemptions by region, publication, or audience segment. In fact, I remember this being a common way to advertise even in my teen years in the late 2000s.

Now it’s digital promo codes, affiliate links, and influencer-specific discounts. But even though FSIs are going the way of the dodo, it’s plain to see that couponing and promo codes are not dead. In fact, this is one of the best ways to track whether a marketing campaign successfully won business, even if conversion tracking or UTM parameters fail.

From S&H Green Stamps in the mid-1900s to your neighborhood coffee shop’s 10th-free punch card, businesses have long used tangible rewards to encourage repeat visits. The idea remains as simple today as it was back then: come back, get rewarded, come back again.

Punch cards themselves are still around, particularly for small businesses. But when Delta gives you SkyMiles and Starbucks gives you Starbucks Rewards, or your favorite small online store uses some kind of gamified loyalty app, you should know that’s just a modern version of something much older.

Sure, points accrue in apps instead of wallets, but the basic feedback loop is the same.

Marketers who treat loyalty as a spreadsheet problem often miss the point. The best systems feel rewarding, immediate, and a little bit fun.

Before we had fancy real-time dashboards powered by Google Analytics or Meta pixels, there were TV diaries and people meters.

Nielsen built its empire by sampling households to figure out what Americans were watching. It wasn’t perfect, but it was consistent, and certainly enough for marketers with serious budgets who wanted a sense of how to spend.

Their metrics ended up shaping ad buying for decades. Even now, the data provided by Nielsen and Comscore are the backbone of both streaming and linear TV planning.

For marketers raised on granular digital data, sampling can feel strange—but it’s becoming essential again.

Hard truth: as tracking breaks down and privacy laws get stricter, we’re going to need to learn how to do it. Roku, Google, and Apple are all building their own opt-in panels to regain lost ground from iOS changes and cookie depreciation.

Guesswork won’t get the job done. We’ll relearn the art of modeling just like they did in the big-haired 1980s.

Not every marketing win is a click. Some are felt days later.

In the Mad Men era, brands used Starch tests and day-after-recall surveys to see what ads stuck in people’s heads. They wanted to measure three things:

Modern equivalents like Google and Meta’s brand lift studies do the same thing—they ask real people if they remember your ad and whether it changed perception. YouTube gives you similar data when you see backend metrics like reach and watch time.

The point is, if you care about long-term brand building, you need a way to measure the same three things that used to be measured by Starch tests.

Long before digital ads, marketers ran split tests by printing two versions of a magazine ad and mailing each to different ZIP codes. In retail, they'd run promotions in just a few geographies to see what was successful in winning sales.

Yep, direct mail strikes again!

Today, we have plenty of modern ways to measure lift in different ways. In fact, it’s this same principle drives A/B testing tools like Optimizely and geographic split testing with ads.

Sure, the tech has changed, but the core idea hasn’t: isolate variables, test one at a time, and let data guide your decisions.

Most of what’s sold today as “conversion rate optimization” is just a modern remix of 1950s direct response testing—only now with heatmaps and hover states.

I’ve spoken about this at length in my post about marketing lift.

But as a quick recap: marketing mix modeling started in the 1960s, built on models comparing total ad spend to sales data. They didn’t have cookies or pixels, nor did they know that these tools would one day exist, so just used what they had—statistical regression and math.

Today, MMM is back in vogue. New MMM software tools like Rockerbox give marketers the models they need to look at trends over time and adjust for factors like seasonality, price, and competition.

When paired with lift studies—think regional holdout tests or geo-based experiments (like the previously mentioned split-run tests)—you get a clearer read on what’s actually causing people to buy.

Even though tracking doesn’t work like it used to, you can still measure the real impact of your marketing campaigns.

So as these new privacy walls continue to gum up the firehose of consumer data, MMM is starting to feel next-generation again.

Before anybody ever used the term “marketing funnel” or “customer journey,” there were models like:

And much like the modern concept of marketing funnels, the idea was to have a structured way to talk about moving people from unaware to ready to buy.

Today’s marketers talk about funnels, journey stages, lead scoring, and CRM pipelines. The names changed, the platforms got fancier, but the core idea is really old.

The point here is that whether you’re using HubSpot, Salesforce, or just a sticky note, you’re trying to guide people through a process. And if you ever feel like modern tools are making the process too vague or abstract, you can always fall back on the older models, which are, in my view, elegant in their simplicity.

USP is one of those terms that online marketers love to throw around. You would think that it was invented in the last 15 years.

Not so. Rosser Reeves coined the term “unique selling proposition” in the 1940s.

His go-to example was M&Ms—“Melts in your mouth, not in your hands.”

While that reads like a slogan today, at the time, it was a genuinely interesting claim. And it was one no one else could make.

Fast forward to now, and the same idea powers brand positioning across SaaS, CPG, DTC, and any other industry that you can reference with a 3- or 4-letter acronym.

When your category is crowded, clarity is the most stable currency. And that’s because your busy, overwhelmed customers don’t have time to guess what makes you different.

To that end, a USP doesn’t need to be poetic. It just needs to be true, memorable, and hard to copy.

Before there were ring lights and affiliate codes, there were suitcases and doorbells.

Traveling salesmen and trade show reps pitched with eye contact and a firm handshake. They didn’t necessarily have to be polished. They didn’t need funnels, landing pages, or conversion scripts—they just needed to show up and make their case face to face.

These days, you can imitate that to some degree through “parasocial” online relationships such as TikTok Shop, livestream demos, and creators who feel like a trusted friend.

The context changed, but the psychology didn’t. When someone looks you in the eye (or straight into the camera) and says, "I use this every day," it bypasses skepticism.

That’s why live shopping is gaining ground again—because we never stopped responding to human connection. Online media just gave it scale.

Back when TV ruled, planners used GRPs (gross rating points) to allocate spend: Reach × Frequency. There were no budgets that you could move up or down whenever you felt like on Google Ads or Meta Business Suite. You purchased ad slots, paid for the number of eyeballs you’d reach based on Nielsen ratings, and that was that.

It was a blunt tool, but you have to admire it for its ability to force discipline. You had to ask, “Will this ad be seen enough to matter?”

Meta, Google, and connected TV all give you more precise tools. But it’s still a good idea to consider the media planning mindset. It requires a certain amount of money to do proper testing, and it’s hard to do much if you go into advertising with a $25 budget.

But undisciplined spend is just as dangerous. Spray-and-pray is not a strategy. That’s why the media planning mindset can be helpful even in the modern context. It’s a great defense against slot-machine like misuse of easily accessible advertising tools.

In the 2010s, marketers got used to a lot of new technology. And a lot of that tech is not working the way we expect it to, whether it’s due to tracking changes, software updates, AI, or something else entirely.

But that doesn’t mean we have to reinvent the wheel.

We don’t need perfect knowledge to do our jobs well. All we have to do is reach the right people with the right messages at the right time.

If yesterday’s marketers could build empires with letters and stamps, we can manage just fine without a perfect pixel.