Direct mail marketing (flyers, postcards and glossy brochures) was around back then as a cost-effective marketing solution for small businesses. But is it still effective in our new digital world?

Surely email marketing has replaced it? In the same way emails have replaced faxes. (Who also remembers those full-page fax ads that would clog up your fax line? And use up your ink to promote a holiday in Fiji you couldn’t afford!)

Email marketing is:

1. Highly customizable and personalized.
2. Inexpensive
3. Reaches people when they are most likely to be looking at their smart phone or desktop.

However, for email marketing to be effective you need a large permissible database to start with. You can’t just buy a list of data, upload it to mailchimp and start sending people advertising messages. That’s a breach of the anti-spam act and you’ll be force closed (and blacklisted) faster than a fire door in an inferno.

Email providers (I’ve used mailchimp as an example here as it’s the most recognized) are highly sophisticated platforms that also recognize an old or stale list of addresses. If your ‘hard bounce’ rate is too high, you receive a spam complaint or there’s just one email on your list that is blacklisted, you risk the same instant shut down scenario.

As leading software platform provider hubspot* points out, even buying an ‘opt in’ list isn’t the solution since that list opted in to a business that wasn’t yours.

So are we saying that email marketing doesn’t work? No. It does work, BUT before you start considering it as your only marketing tool ask yourself this:

1. Has everyone on my email list opted in? Do you have their ‘explicit consent’?
2. Is my email list big enough to get my message across? According to top logic 3 the average email open rate is 20.94%  So if your email list is let’s say 500 people, less than 100 will see it.
3. How well do you know your audience? Sending an email at the wrong time (and with the wrong subject line) can cause that email open rate to plummet even further.

Now let’s consider the advantages of direct mail marketing:

1. Reach a large audience without needing their express permission. You can buy a list of highly targeted consumers without breaking anti-spam laws.

How? Unlike in the digital world where permission can be vague or unknown, in the offline world permission is easy to spot. Put simply if a mailbox has ‘no unaddressed mail’ it’s excluded from a direct mail marketing message.

• Get more eye balls on your message. According to Australia post, 83% of people take unaddressed mail into their homes*  Compare that to the 20% email open rate cited earlier
• Get noticed amongst the clutter. Leading internet guru Neil Patel* cites that the average person receives 121 emails a day (excluding promotional ones)! When was the last time you received that many letters or flyers in your mailbox? The volume of direct mail has decreased rapidly in the past 10 years, whilst emails have grown exponentially.
• Reach a customized consumer audience. Choose Cotegic for your next direct mail marketing campaign and we can source targeted B2B lists or consumer lists based on a range of demographics including geographic area, age and income, sex, home ownership & more…

In conclusion, direct mail marketing might be old school. Yes it worked in the 90’s. But it’s back with a vengeance. It helps you cut through the digital noise by reaching people effectively in the offline world.

In 2022 we are likely to see the trend of WFH (Working From Home) continue, meaning letterboxes are no longer to be ignored….

*Information sources for this article:

*2

https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/32892/why-purchasing-email-lists-is-always-a-bad-idea.aspx

*3

https://www.topiclogic.com/post/what-is-email-open-rate/

*4

https://auspost.com.au/business/marketing-and-communications/business-letter-services/bulk-mail-options/unaddressed-mail

*5

https://neilpatel.com/blog/old-school-marketing-tactics/