Mail Services

What’s the value of direct mail?

Direct mail is a rising star for communicating with your clients and customers. Study after study shows direct mail outperforms all digital channels combined. In the 2018 Response Rate Report, direct mail had a 9% response rate for a house list – the highest rate ever reported. The 2017 report was also record-breaking at 5.1% after averaging 3.6% from 2003 to 2015.

According to the study, oversized envelopes had the best response rate at 11% followed by postcards at 12% and letter-sized envelopes at 10%. This is not just high in comparison to digital media response rates (1% email, 1% paid search, 0.3% online display, 1% social media) but has been increasing independently each year.

Personalized, high-end direct mail pieces work effectively in integrated campaigns, and the study showed that most direct mail was not used alone – the top choice for maximum impact was a combination of email, social media and direct mail.

The power of Retail Catalogs

Retailers are also finding great value in printed, mailed catalogs as a way to integrated online and offline marketing – especially with print catalogs that are targeted and personalized.

Upgraded from catalogs of the past, the new wave of retail catalogs look and feel a lot more like lifestyles magazines. They invite shoppers inside an experience aimed to drive them online to buy.

Some online only retailers are reporting that 20% of their new customers came online to shop after reading a print catalog. And when they did, the catalog readers spent 1.5x as much compared to the average new shopper.

The power of retail catalogs comes from the multi-channel shopping experience. Other retailers report that shoppers who regularly interact across different shopping channels spend 4x more than those who do not.

Track your ROI

Tracking mailing dates, customer codes, and source codes can help you understand your direct mail ROI, whether it’s a catalog or a postcard. Most people will check out your website before calling, so it’s important to have a personalized page set up with information tied to the campaign you can use to track activity. And the good news is that people look forward to checking their mail and sort it as soon as it arrives, so there is not a delay in seeing your results.

When you build a custom mailing list you’ll get the best ROI by targeting your message based on personal interests and past purchases. Just using someone’s name and a color mailer can increase responses by 135%, but adding personalized information from your database can increase responses by up to 500%. Keeping an accurate and up-to-date customer list is critical to successful direct mail.

Reach Across Generations

Here’s a surprising statistic – when the average direct mail response rate was looking good at 5.1%, the response rate for 18 to 21 year olds was a whopping 12.4%. Millennials are engaging with print and digital. And they aren’t the only ones. Another 2017 study found that almost half of U.S. households use at least eight different sources (across print and digital) to get information about products and sales.

Direct mail stands out and can be a strong way to reach out with personalized content that works with your other marketing messages. It gets attention across generations.

We can help you get started with a new direct mail campaign including Every Door Direct Mail, custom mailing lists, and even setting up Informed Delivery so your mailer shows up in email the same day it arrives in the mailbox.

Contact us today to learn more.