Mailmen – Direct Mail Report Endorsed by Marketing Leaders

Mailmen: Marketing Leaders Endorse Royal Mail MarketReach Direct Mail Report

Robert Senior Comments on the effectiveness in the use of Direct Mail in a marketing campaign

Mailmen: Marketing Leaders Endorse Royal Mail’s MarketReach Campaign endorsed by five influential industry leaders: Robert Senior, Worldwide CEO, Saatchi & Saatchi Fallon Group; Karen Blackett OBE, CEO MediaCom; Nik Roope, Founder, Poke; Elspeth Lynn, Executive Creative Director, M&C Saatchi and David Robinson, Sales and Marketing Director, The Sun.

No marketing professional will ‘put everything on red’ when it comes to planning a successful marketing campaign, but there has been a reawakening of late in the realisation that the value return made from social media and email campaigns without the combined use of a more tangible and emotive marketing touch point such as printed direct mail, does not create the returns required.

At Romax we are huge advocates of the correct use of data driven marketing to ensure that the message of  your campaigns reach the target audience via their preferred media, but also as importantly allows them to respond by the method of their choice. Increasingly this is by a hand held device, tablet, phone or web device. The marketing stimulant to drive activity on your site is what needs thought – a true multi-media cross media  data driven campaign.

Salvation Army Case Study: There is a great case study in the report from a Charitable perspective. It is important to remember that direct mail is the strongest stimulant for the charity sector, but if your non-charity sector marketing campaign is planned as well you will achieve good results too. The graph speaks for itself.

We thought this was a little extreme, but let’s remember this is a marketing report endorsed by ‘The Sun’ so you would expect an evocative headline. As we believe that direct mail is the epitome of communication with clients we can categorically state that no animals were (or will be) eaten as a result of this report!

Part of the report around the impact of direct mail was around the retained value in the household. Big Brother style cameras were installed to ascertain where and how direct mail was interacted with and acted upon. The opposite plan demonstrates the ‘warm’ and ‘hot’ spots of interaction. Unsurprisingly (some may say surprisingly) 1% of people do actually take their mail to the toilet to open it! Top spots being of course the Living Room and Kitchen. More importantly however this shows that once the mail piece has reached destination, it stays in around the household as a tangible interactive marketing piece for so much longer than a electronic communication which we feel are best used as reminders to jolt a response as part of a campaign.

All reports need a comparison chart and we chose this one to discuss here (there are lots more in the report so if you like a good graph or two, you won’t be deprived!) The open rates for ALL of these mail pieces are all much higher than any email campaign would dream of achieving, (where an open rate of 15% plus is seen as a result!) Interaction again is considerably higher than email alone, where a click through interaction rate of single figures is good. So to download the report to read it for yourself now that we have provided an overview click HERE

OK So there was one more….Again we are very clear that email on its own is the poor relation when it comes to achieving results, we also strongly believe that email should definitely be used in a planned and positive way in conjunction WITH direct mail. Key to this is understanding your data, if you know how your clients currently interact with your organisation, then you can, with confidence, communicate with them using their preferred method enforced through other channels.