Super Touchpoints: The Mail Channel’s Trojan Horse?
Ian Gibbs, data and insight expert shares his thoughts on what makes a marketing channel a ‘super touchpoint’ channel. This is the holy grail for brands and marketers looking to boost media effectiveness. Learn more in his insightful blog.
Effectiveness
Life is tough for the average planner these days. Everyone keeps telling them that creating a media plan should be simpler than ever: AI, automation, click-of-the-button social platform optimisation – every week there’s a new tool to help them do more with less and less resource. But it’s never that simple is it? At the same time, there have never been more forces placing a downward pressure on effectiveness: digital ad fraud, opaque measurement processes, declining consumer trust and a challenging economic climate… why aren’t these wonderfully efficient media plans creating more effective outcomes?
The simple answer is that good planning is rarely as simple as that… and yet it could be if planners would get back to basics and apply to some good old fashioned planner principles to contemporary effectiveness challenges.
It’s against this backdrop that the mail channel is fighting hard for marketer’s attention. Mail ad spend in the UK grew 13% year on year in Q3 2024 according to WARC – a figure second only to online display. In the same report, eleven channels are listed, yet within each of these there are hundreds, if not thousands of touchpoints that provide a unique exposure opportunity for different audiences.
Touchpoint-based planning has been a staple in the marketing industry for decades, popularised by the IPA’s Touchpoints survey. This method of planning acknowledges the fragmented media landscape and the varying effectiveness of different touchpoints based on factors such as time of day, mood, platform, device, location, and context. Marketers have long understood that an ad’s impact can vary significantly depending on where and how it is presented. For instance, an ad for a luxury holiday in the Financial Times or a creatively-rich coffee table brochure will resonate differently than the same ad on a niche fishing website.
This is where Super Touchpoints planning comes in.
What is a marketing Super Touchpoint?
Defined by a group of marketers from advertisers, agencies, industry bodies and measurement specialists (including JICMAIL, The DMA, System1, Barclaycard, The British Heart Foundation, People’s Postcode Lottery, MGOMD, VML and The IPA) Super Touchpoints are high attention / high trust channels which are highly transparent and measurable. They are rich in creative opportunity, deliver sensory marketing comms and can have impact throughout the customer journey.
Crucially any channel has the potential to have Super Touchpoints working within it (although some are more hidden than others, and many channels might be carrying average or under-performing Touchpoints).
How can marketers determine what channel is a Super Touchpoint?
The idea is to evaluate media plans using a Super Touchpoints Evaluation Points (STEP) score, which involves a detailed assessment of each touchpoint's effectiveness using over thirty different criteria. The crucial decision is then how to act on the results. If your channels contain below average touchpoints do you down-weight or divest your plans of them; and if they contain Super Touchpoints then do you consider dis-proportionately higher investment for dis-proportionately more effective outcomes?
Why mail is considered a Super Touchpoint channel
JICMAIL’s “Mail: The Super Touchpoint” report released at our annual conference at PWC, highlights the potential of mail as a Super Touchpoint channel. The report underscores the importance of transparency, creativity, and emotional engagement in media planning. Mail, often overlooked by larger networked media agencies, is shown to excel in these areas. The report provides compelling data from eight years of mail measurement, demonstrating mail's ability to attract attention, deepen customer relationships, and drive commercial outcomes:
- Attention and Engagement: Mail engages consumers for the equivalent of 10,000 years annually. Attention converts into effectiveness and the proportion of mail prompting a purchase related action increased by 35% to 8.4% of mail items last year.
- Effectiveness for Large and Small Advertisers: Mail is effective for both advertisers large and small. For example, large brand advertisers enjoy three times the voucher redemption rate of the average mailer, while 10.7% of Door Drop from local tradespeople results in a commercial outcome.
- Deepening Customer Relationships: The ROI of direct mail in the retail sector targeted at existing customers increased by 32% to £7.80 last year.
- Household Conversations: Mail prompts brand conversations, with 17.5% of direct mail and business mail items prompting a conversation last year, up from 15.8% two years prior.
The proof points for mail are abundant, yet to effectively implement Super Touchpoint planning, marketers must adopt a more granular approach to media planning. This involves breaking down channels into their component touchpoints and understanding the synergies across each one.
Super Touchpoint planning represents a significant shift in how marketers approach media planning. By stepping out of their comfort zone and evaluating their plans using the detailed set of criteria laid out in our report, we’re pretty confident the mail will rise to the top – encouraging disproportionately high investment for disproportionately effective outcomes.
Super Touchpoints are the mail channel’s Trojan Horse. The widespread adoption of touchpoint based planning there shouldn’t be a need for the mail channel to hide anymore. If marketers apply best practice Super Touchpoint planning principles to their plans, the mail channel should naturally rise to the top.
