Rory Sutherland posted on the business networking platform yesterday (23 January) that physical direct mail continues to work “really, really well”, which confounds modern-day marketing trends.
“It makes no sense purely from an efficiency standpoint because it's a very expensive way of reaching a single person. But from an effectiveness standpoint, direct mail is often cited as one of the most successful forms of acquisition whenever I speak to a business,” he said.
“One reason is simply that it's much rarer than it was. My own children, who are in their 20s, find receiving a piece of direct mail wildly exciting. It’s not like the late 90s, which was probably the high point of direct mail volume, where in the run-up to Christmas you found it difficult to open your front door. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“One of the reasons I always recommend to clients that they test direct mail is that, because it’s so counter-cultural, most of their competitors will be reluctant to copy them.”
Sutherland went on to consider what makes direct mail “so uniquely effective”, and said he believed direct mail “creates a decisive moment through its perceived scarcity and costly signalling – something other, more indiscriminate media simply don’t achieve”.
Soon after posting, a large number of LinkedIn users from across the advertising and marketing worlds responded to Sutherland’s thoughts on direct mail.
James Watt, co-founder of BrewDog, said: “Agreed! Direct mail has a unique power to cut through the noise. At BrewDog, we leaned into unexpected tactics to grab attention and spark action. Physical mail creates a sense of rarity and importance that digital media often can’t replicate.”
Matt Lawton, global CMO at creative agency Five by Five Global, also commented: “Direct mail has the advantage of ‘kitchen benchtop durability’ which means it gets considered multiple times over the course of a couple of days.
“Do I bin it? No, not yet. Why? I don’t know! It’ll stay there till I get time to sit with a cup of tea and have a biscuit and a bit of a think and a tidy up.”
Meanwhile, Oliver Lythgoe, chief marketing officer at international engineering organisation The Fetis Group, said: “I read a book about this back in the day, and it said that the responses were even better if the envelope was coloured, or the address was written by hand, if the letter enclosed had a hand written post-it attached, and many more.
“Certainly, in these days of AI generated mountain-of-mediocrity mass emailings, serious businesses need to find a new (old) way to cut through.”
According to JICMail data for Q3 2024, 6% of mail prompted a purchase in Q3 2024, with nearly half of those purchases transacted online. 15% of mail prompted a discussion and 9% prompted a website visit.
