If you’re considering using mail as part of your marketing mix, try it. Experiment. Especially if you care about effectiveness. Test a small batch and measure the response (which is brilliantly easy with mail). It isn’t cheap per contact, but mail clearly works to drive big customer interventions and its high dwell time can change minds. It grabs attention, gets read, and sticks around – none of which most digital channels can claim.
Part of my reason for exploring mail is my 10+ years working at or with large (usually FMCG) brands and no one bothering to give it a try. I believe that marketers should explore what's effective, not just what's popular. I love industry media research and white papers but most ignore direct mail. Reading JICMAIL's research, that punches way above its weight, really opened my eyes to the attention, trust and emotional physical advantage that mail has.
A sign of a good marketer is one that can experiment. 70:20:10. Put 70% resource towards proven growth drivers with high-profit ROI. 20% towards experimentation (what mail should fall in for most brands). And 10% into whacky stuff that just might transform your marketing and business.
I'd encourage people to explore and read what mail is good for. It won't do everything, but it's clearly suited to a lot of tasks most marketers have relegated to digital without a second thought.
We, even beyond marketing, have become efficiency obsessed. Less, quicker, cheaper, fleeting. Mail is effectiveness cream on top of an efficiency milk.
Before the sort of research that I do at System1 blew up, and everyone got a lot more well versed in the system 1 vs 2 and the power of feelings, we all used to talk about "surprise and delight". That's when you see growth, when brands surprise and delight with marketing and innovation. Receiving direct mail is surprisingly joyful.
You see some examples where the creative doesn't take advantage of the opportunity with mail and it has generic, rational, bland messaging. When the strategy is sound and consistent, the idea is right and the execution takes advantage of the unique physical power of being in someone's home and hands – anyone can see that this could spark magic.
I agree with JICMAIL that mail is a super touchpoint due to its unique, 7-day-long dwell time in people's homes and the fact that you can pick it up with your hands. The emotional connections drive action. Mail peacocks. It's luxurious. It serves as a pause for thought and sits next to us whilst we decide what to do next. Probably ends up there whilst we go make dinner, forget about it, and then we come back and have another ponder.
I used to go to war to ensure my point-of-sale merchandise for the alcohol brands I ran was in the right bars, so they’d get swiped and end up in people's homes. When something lives in someone's home, it becomes a totally different experience. Mail lives with you.
It's awesome to see JICMAIL and others shine a spotlight on mail's effectiveness super powers. People like Richard Shotton have always shared the behavioural science principles behind why mail makes sense for marketing (things like costly signalling) but there's finally a growing evidence-based tool kit to allow marketers to dive into mail and use it to grow their brands.
But honestly, I prefer to simply still cite these reasons intuitively: If someone's bothered to send a letter to your home, it says a lot about the brand that sent it.
