We surveyed our clients and marketing contacts regarding what direct mail formats are currently working for them in 2008. We then compiled the data into a 10-page PDF report.
We welcome all comments below. Thanks for reading!
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Tags: Commingling, Direct Mail Formats, Direct Marketing Report, Postage
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We’re starting to get some good PR as a result of this new direct mail report. For example, here’s a well-written article DIRECT published yesterday:
http://directmag.com/directmail/mail-format-postcard-dominates-0618/
We would like to mention that we’re not specifically saying that the postcard is THE most effective direct mail format…per the people we spoke with, it was simply the most mentioned.
But it completely depends on the industry. For example, postcards are good for most retail stores, but for the publishing industry, a simple postcard isn’t sufficient.
Here’s another example…
We see a lot of software companies mailing postcards, but many financial investment companies need the real estate of an oversized self-mailer to be effective.
So it really depends on the industry and what you’re marketing…
I am completely bemused by this survey. As a study of the psychology of perception shows, how a person reacts to a mailer depends very much on how well they know the sender.
In one way this is obvious - I read postcards from my daughters word by word, I keep them, I read them again. I’m soppy that way. A postcard from a firm I’ve never heard of selling something that I am not responsible for buying doesn’t get me going at all.
As I say, that’s obvious. But what is not so obvious is the fact that we make our decisions as to how to treat these items according to how we perceive the sender. That affects the amount of brain power we give to the piece. Then, whether we read the piece or not is further affected by how much brain power it demands (lots and lots for colour pictures, far less for text). There’s some articles on this on sites like http://www.theory.bz which deal with the original research into these topics.
So without knowing whether the postcards were sent to customers in love with their suppliers or just to a cold list, and without knowing whether the postcard contained pictures and other high demanding things or not - we are not getting very far.
Likewise we don’t know if the people who said “postcards are best” actually tried testing against anything else - like A4 letters. And if they did, did they keep the content the same? Or did they test at different times and thus have the danger of time affecting their response rates?
And then we don’t know if (perhaps by chance) they obeyed the rules of the psychology of perception on the postcards but not on the letter.
Surely without any of this information we are not really making much progress at all.
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