This, for the first time, has enabled the organisation to assess how responsive consumers are to acquisition vs retention-based marketing strategies with mail.
Response data derived from over 1,000 campaigns has revealed an average warm mailing response rate benchmark of 10.9% and a cold mailing benchmark of 1%.
JICMail said the 10.9% response rate reported for warm direct mail highlighted the value of speaking to current customers in the mail channel, when the ability to target using third party cookies is waning in an era of heightened privacy compliance.
It added, though, that practitioners should be wary of simply regarding warm mail as a more effective channel than cold mail, as brands cannot grow without acquiring new customers, and understanding the effectiveness of the mail channel in driving acquisitions is critical to campaign planning efforts.
A 1% response rate of cold mail compares favourably to that seen by many other channels, it added.
Based on the results of 1,017 anonymised campaigns provided by industry players Join The Dots, Epsilon Abacus, Ginger Black Analytics, Sagacity, The Letterbox Consultancy, and DBS Data, JICMail said its first release of the Response Rate Tracker is billed as a pilot study.
This proof of concept study is designed to galvanise interest from the industry, expanding the pool of submissions and increasing the representation of benchmarks across industry sectors and mail types.
The Response Rate Tracker also reports on the average Return on Investment (ROI) of warm and cold direct mail, revealing results of 13.5 and 4.4 respectively. Average Order Value (AOV) and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) benchmarks have also been made available across four different industry sectors – retail, finance and insurance, medical, and charity.
Consisting of 83% retail and online retail campaigns, JICMail said the database is currently skewed towards this sector but that future releases should look to redress this balance.
By providing campaign-centric response rate benchmarks, JICMail said it has been able to supplement the output of its panel-centric metrics, in which a sample of 1,000 households a month self-report their interactions with, and response to, mail.
An average Response Rate Tracker figure of 5.1% across warm and cold mail combined, is closely aligned to the 5.6% response rate reported by the JICMail panel, which it said provided a powerful validation exercise for both independent data sets.
The Response Rate Tracker is designed to assist planners and mail practitioners in setting targets and KPIs for mail campaigns.
JICMail said the benchmarks themselves are a starting point for target setting which should then be iterated upon using a unique set of brand, market, and consumer factors that acknowledge the nuance of individual campaigns with different objectives.
Ian Gibbs, JICMail’s director of data leadership and learning, said: “We’re delighted that our cohort of trusted partners has chosen to participate in the first release of Response Rate Tracker.
“The findings have provided a great confirmation of the existing response numbers reported by our longstanding panel, while at the same time enabling JICMail to offer a fresh perspective on the power of warm and cold activity for the first time.”
JICMail’s panel data for Q4 2022 revealed that more mail was opened, read, and retained over the Christmas trading season than at any other point during 2022.
