Snail mail is often used as a whipping boy when compared to email marketing. But ignore its strengths at your peril – because recent surveys show that we, the public, still love our letterboxes…
While email marketing continues to gain ground, traditional snail mail remains a much-loved form of communication according to the From Letterbox To Inbox survey by the DMA.
Any marketer who chooses to focus their direct marketing lists on a purely digital solution could be missing out. According to the survey…
- 90% of us couldn’t live without our letterbox.
- 46% of us believe a world without print would be worse than today’s.
Our love for the letterbox is reflected by the 19th Annual Door Drop Industry Report 2013:
UK door drop volumes have swelled from 6.9 billion in 2011 to 7.2 billion in 2012.
That’s a 3.5% increase.
And as drop volumes have grown so have the ROIs of direct mail year-on-year over the past decade,outperforming email marketing:
3.4% – direct mail’s response rate for direct mail to existing customers
vs.
0.12% for email.
According to the DMA’s Putting A Price On Direct Marketing 2012 report, businesses engaged in B2B marketing see direct mail as more vital to their success than companies engaged in B2C marketing:
36% of B2B companies who use direct mail
vs.
20.5% of B2C companies who use direct mail.
Because ROI and response rates are so high for B2B direct mail, marketers see it as an imperative part of their marketing strategy.
4 in 5 companies allocate funds from their direct marketing budget for their B2B operations.
- As a nation, we still love snail mail.
- UK door drop rates are on the increase, not in decline.
- Direct mail has been proven to outperform email marketing, especially when combined with targeted direct mail marketing lists.
- B2B companies see direct mail as more effective than their B2C counterparts do.
