July 25, 2017
Written by Nilda Cerna, Marketing Manager at Romax Marketing & Distribution.
Direct Mail
Are you trying to increase the open rate of your emails to bring more traffic to your website and grow sales? What if I told you that Direct Mail delivered a great return on investment (ROI) and creates strong, emotional connections and brand associations? Let’s show you figures from the Private Life of Mail research by Royal Mail Market Reach that supports this. Research based on eighteen months of investigation, which included focus groups, neuroscience and tactility work, and more than 9.5K survey responses.
Mail in the home
“On average, people kept door drops for 38 days.”
The study shows that people commonly keep mail they find useful. 66% of the respondents stated that they keep mail that they considered useful. Financial and tourism sectors mail saw increases on that figure up to 72%. In contrast, a study of the email analytics revealed that 51% of emails are deleted within two seconds.
Kantar Media’s TGI survey confirmed that 80% of adults had kept relevant mail in the last four weeks. On average, the mail was kept for 17 days for advertising mail, 38 days for door drops and 45 days for bills and statements. For the same reason, it is common practice in the transactional mail, to include targeted communications and adverts, Romax’s many utility clients use this strategy to cross-sell other products.
The age group of 15-34 years old (millennials) are:
- 42% more likely to find mail memorable than the UK population as a whole.
- 71% more likely to trust the advertising mail they receive.
- 21% more likely to have switched supplier as a result of mail.
Mail in the heart
“People value something they can see & touch 24% more than something they can only see.”
There are strong reasons why getting consumers to engage physically with a brand is likely to have a stronger effect on them. Multisensory stimulations alter the way the brain processes messages which are key to driving an emotional response to messages or brands.
Physical contact results in a sense of ownership over an item (Endowment effect), therefore mail gains an advantage over email.
In the study, 64% of the responders had opened a piece of mail that day, and the majority who did go on to interact with it. The highest open rates and interactions come from Statement, bill or information updates, brochures and letters with a promotion or special offer.
Mail in the Wallet
“ 87% of the responders were influenced to make online purchases as a direct result of receiving mail.”
The Internet has changed your customer’s behaviour. They research a product online and buy it in one click. Often digital behaviour is the last action, an identifiable part of the process, though generated by offline media.
The Royal Mail research shows that mail is highly effective at delivering ROI. When mail was included in a campaign, the total communications ROI increased by 12%. Including mail delivers more than just ROI. Incremental reach, the efficient growth of market share and cost per new customer acquisition also perform better.
To summarise, a single piece of mail can represent multiple opportunities for people to engage with a brand, reminding them of it, reinforcing its values, and ultimately becoming part of everyday life. Direct mail creates an instinctive sense of value being exchanged between the sender and recipient, which the latter may not be aware of.
References: Private Life of Mail, Royal Mail MarketReach. 3Bet Media Marketing, Litmus Email Analytics 2013. TGI Kantar Media, 2014.
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