So says Royal Mail Marketreach in its Mad Men-inspired ‘Mailmen’ campaign, which is effectively an elevator pitch for direct mail featuring the likes of Saatchi & Saatchi Fallon Group worldwide chief executive Robert Senior.
Yes, there is a vested interest at play, but the bottom line – that mail is a highly effective medium arguably in danger of being overlooked – is true. And for the sceptics, Marketreach has backed up the digital, print and OOH campaign with the publication of The Private Life of Mail, a report based on 18 months of in-depth research into the role mail plays in people’s lives.
The research, which was carried out by BrandScience, Media Native, Decode Marketing, Neuro-Insight, independent consultant Peter Field, Quadrangle and Trinity McQueen, left no stone unturned in its attempt to define how we physically, emotionally and intellectually interact with mail. It included the usual surveys, focus groups and interviews, but also 800 hours of CCTV footage from the households of 12 ethnographic study participants and a neuroscience and tactility study featuring more than 200 people.
The results range from the interesting yet unsurprising stats on the average length of time different types of mail spend in our homes (no prize for guessing bills and transactional linger the longest at an average 45 days) to the more groundbreaking analysis of the way our brains react to mail, both on its own and as part of a multi-channel campaign.
GI Solutions deputy managing director Patrick Headley is optimistic about the potential impact that campaign could have. “The Private Life of Mail is something that will be around for a long while and I think will potentially form a new chapter in direct mail’s history,” he says. “I’m amazed at how compelling it is and I applaud the Royal Mail for taking the time and money and having the courage to show the advertising fraternity that this is the forgotten channel that really does need to be considered in any campaign planning.”
Long-term performer
One of the recurring themes in The Private Life of Mail is that mail has a lot more permanence as a communications medium than any other channels. Door drops stay in our homes for 38 days on average, while advertising mail lasts around 17. Not only does mail keep your brand present in your customers’ households, but many of us have a prominent location specifically for displaying mail. Contrast this with email, which comes with a built in spam filter to attempt to remove a percentage of the vast volume of unsolicited attempts to attract our attention.
Some of this volume undoubtedly would have gone by mail in a pre-digital era, which means that in a twisted way the rise of digital channels has actually made mail a more valuable medium. “Now is a beautiful time for direct mail because we’re not inundated with it – the channel is so empty in many respects that it’s going to bear a lot more fruit than it ever did,” says Headley.
His view is supported by Adare operations director Danny Narey, who adds: “Marketers and agencies know this of course and I can’t believe that they don’t have plans to adjust focus back toward DM in some degree; but a marketing plan is a big ship to turn, and it’s not going to be a rapid swing of volumes and revenues in favour of DM.”
This may well be the case, but Christine Wilson, print buyer at Toyota, points out that while little has changed in terms of successful DM campaign planning in the past 20 years, changes among the buying community mean that printers will need to be proactive in encouraging brands and marketers back to the channel.
“Twenty years ago the people who understood direct mail said that if we got the data right, we’d get a good campaign with good ROI and that’s still the case today,” she said. “[But] a loss of knowledge on DM means that many buyers wouldn’t know what you meant if you talked about DPLE briefs, data dumps or live lasers. To add value, print companies need to educate the print buyers on what their kit can do and the production methods available.”
However, Narey argues that “all the DM skills prerequisite for good copy writing, effective use of imagery, tactility and call-to-action still exist within the marketing cabal”, but that “what may be ‘missing’ is the straight connection between direct mail and the rapidly broadening array of e-channels”. “This will be a challenge for any company that chooses to take the DM route – but no more so than say, the advent of TV brought to radio or off-the-page advertising,” he says. “What we all quickly learned then, and what the evidence points to now, is that the channels work better as complementary platforms than any of them do vying against each other.”
Of course, some may argue that it is disingenuous of Royal Mail to publish a report on mail and not mention the elephant in the sorting office that is the cost of mailing. As Mark Cruise, head of print management at BSkyB, points out, postal price rises have had a significant impact on the attractiveness of the medium. It’s a perspective that Headley agrees with, although he adds that even with its high cost versus digital, DM still has a compelling argument based on ROI, even if the investment part is now greater.
“We’ve been fairly vocal at GI about the effect of Royal Mail increasing prices but when you really consider it – and I’m not excusing that – when you have a channel that works, it’s then just down to maths,” he says. “You might have to invest a bit more to get your return going, but quid pro quo it works for you.”
Opinion: Mail recipients experience a greater level of engagement
Jonathan Harman, managing director, Royal Mail MarketReach
In today’s media landscape, brands and consumers are communicating in more diverse ways than ever before. We wanted to discover the role that mail played in this new media ecosystem.
One of the most interesting findings came from a neuroscience study. Using a proven technique called Steady State Topography, we wanted to assess the impact mail has on the specific areas of brain function that are known to correlate strongly with purchase and other commercial outcomes. These are engagement, emotional intensity and long-term memory encoding.
We found that, compared with other media, mail recipients experienced higher levels of emotional engagement and remembered more. We also found that this effect was more pronounced if people had seen other communications from the brand before receiving the message. Behavioural economists call this effect priming.
These findings make intuitive sense to us as consuming mail can be regarded as an immersive and tactile experience. Indeed, our findings appear to us to be broadly in line with other studies that suggest, for example, that children retain more information if they read on a printed page than on a screen and a similar recent neuroscience study has been conducted by Twitter.
Of course, we understand that ROI is important. This is why The Private Life of Mail contains more than one analysis that demonstrates that campaigns that include mail in the mix deliver a stronger return than those that do not.
We will continue to invest in research for marketers and expect to publish two further studies in 2015. In addition to this, we’re turning our attention to transactional mail and would like to speak with users who may be interested in taking part. You can get in touch with me at jonathan.harman@royalmail.com and download your free copy of The Private Life of Mail at www.mailmen.co.uk.
Reader reaction: Does direct mail still deliver as a communications medium?
Mike Colling, founder and chief executive, MC&C
“As a medium, direct mail is often underused and undervalued by the media and marketing profession. MC&C, and the vast majority of our clients, view mail as an integral part of a modern integrated media mix. It has a unique role to play in creating long term and valuable customer engagement, with that value often being harvested via digital channels. The recent research from Royal Mail sheds valuable light on how mail interacts with other channels and its ability to create and sustain measurable growth.”
Mark Cruise, head of print management, BSkyB
“Let’s not lose sight of the world in which DM has to compete. Costs and response rates have to stack up against other media. Print suppliers are continually looking for ways to make efficiencies in our DM but if Royal Mail gets permission to arbitrarily raise prices, DM will lose favour even quicker than it gains it. Brands, be they average or brilliant, know what they want to send out and when they want it to land but I am not as sure that we all know how to effectively make it more personal or how to use our data as well as we should.”
Danny Narey, operations director, Adare
“I believe that DM’s image has never been more clearly defined than it is now; it gets into the home, physically, and is therefore the most invasive of the channels. It owns a space on the doormat that is no longer so littered as it once was, which creates even more cut-through and frankly, if you consider the growing number and diversity of digital channels which are, increasingly, being received on a smartphone or tablet, you have to conclude that DM is by far the rifle-shot to their blunderbuss.”
