It’s a fact of life. We tend to get comfortable with the way we do things and sometimes don’t consider alternatives, even when we know those alternatives are more effective. This is true for marketers, as well. In the last 15 years, marketing has migrated to digital channels, making email and social media marketing the norm. Marketers have become comfortable with digital forms of marketing and continue to use them, despite data indicating that personalized direct mail is more effective than either email or social media advertising.
Research conducted in 2019 by Demand Metric, a marketing software company, indicates that 91% of marketers use email advertising and 81% use social media advertising. Indeed, these two channels are the top choices for marketers. It’s something of a mystery, then, that these same marketers place email and social media at the bottom in terms of effectiveness. For example, while 81% of marketers use social media advertising, only 55% consider it to be effective.
Even more perplexing, 89% of marketers believe dimensional direct mail (a mail piece that is not flat, such as a box or padded envelope) is effective for reaching their target audience, yet only 42% use it, and 75% believe that an oversized letter is effective, but only 9% use it.
Direct mail has been used for at least the last couple of centuries. Beginning about 30 years ago, digital marketing became the shiny new marketing toy, and there was much discussion about whether print was dead. However, in recent years, marketers have discovered that when direct mail is used as part of a multichannel campaign, both response rates and ROI improve significantly.
It’s important to note that the best results occur in multichannel campaigns (in general, the more channels, the better the results) when combined with personalized direct mail. 80% of participants in the Demand Metric study reported seeing improvement in their multichannel campaigns when direct mail was added to the channel mix.
Stepping out of our comfort zone is not always easy, but the evidence is clear that direct mail, particularly personalized direct mail, when added to a multichannel campaign, can produce powerful results.