The organisation’s new Annual Door Drop Industry Report 2021 found that around two door drops were delivered to customers on a weekly basis last year. On average, one person in the household saw a door drop and it was interacted with an average of three times.

Revenues over the year fell significantly amid the pandemic conditions, from £214m in 2019 to £143.5m in 2020, while annual door drop volumes were down from 4.1 billion in 2019 to 2.7 billion last year.

DMA director of insight Tim Bond said: “While the coronavirus has had a significant impact on the door drop industry, reducing overall volume and spend, the power of print has continued to resonate with customers. Insights from JICMail highlight the continued and, at times, increasing power of print in engaging customers and driving commercial actions.”

The outbreak of the pandemic in early 2020 and the first full UK lockdown led to a stop on many major advertisers’ activity and the DMA said this effect was particularly felt through the whole of the second quarter.

While things recovered to some extent in the second half of the year, uncertainty over local and national lockdowns, as well as businesses that had no option but to close, meant volumes remained lower than would have been expected.

“Looking forward to 2021, we expect these metrics to make a strong recovery, but organisations will no doubt still be impacted by the ongoing pandemic,” said Bond.

“One thing that is for certain in uncertain times: whether it’s engaging new customers or fostering loyalty in existing ones, door drops continue to be an effective, tactile and scalable marketing channel.”