Has direct mail found a new lease of life?

Andy Long

Andy Long writes:

Consumers are inundated with marketing messages each and every day. There are billboards and posters on buses and subways, print advertisements in newspapers and magazines, product placements on television programmes (and increasingly, even in books) and of course, radio and TV adverts are as ubiquitous as ever. Online, there are banner ads, contextual ads in search engine results and of course, millions upon millions of commercially oriented email messages, unsolicited and solicited alike.

For advertisers, all of these media channels offer a chance to get their marketing message across to the public; but for consumers, much of this advertising is just so much more noise. People are experiencing a sort of advertising fatigue, especially in regards to email marketing. What was once a medium which was fresh and exciting enough to yield a solid ROI for advertisers has become something which many consumers simply ignore. Is there a future left for direct response marketing in a media-saturated age? There is – and in this case, the future may lie in the past as direct mail begins to pick up steam once again as an advertising and marketing medium.

It appears that the reports of the demise of direct mail may have been an exaggeration. If you’ve been checking your mailbox lately, you may have noticed that you’re receiving more postcards, brochures and other marketing materials by post than you have been for the last decade. While many of us are still deluged with spam email, either filtered out by increasingly sophisticated spam blocking software or not, advertisers are aware that email marketing has hit the point of diminishing returns. Due to the incredibly low cost of sending email (essentially nothing), consumers shouldn’t expect to see the flood of spam cease any time soon, but it’s a certainty that more and more ads will be arriving by standard mail in the near future.

The reason for the revival of direct mail marketing is that in an age where consumers are constantly exposed to commercial content in digital and broadcast media, printed matter that they receive in their post boxes tends to get a little more attention. It all has to do with the shift from print to online media which has been going on ever since a critical mass of households found their way on to the World Wide Web. The number of letters and postcards sent experienced a precipitous decline as individuals and businesses alike began to favour the instantaneous communication of email and other newer technologies.

In the rush to get online, many advertisers let direct mail fall by the wayside; but it’s now poised to make a comeback in a big way. Consumers seem to be looking for the kind of personal touch that is lacking in email marketing and online ads; and direct mail offers advertisers a medium which gives them a little more time to make their case and that simply feels more intimate than yet another commercial message in an email inbox.

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