Direct Mail has the opportunity to be the marketing channel of choice for the next few years after several years in the doldrums, guests at an HP seminar to introduce its new Advantage 2200 inkjet press were told.
Demand for print dropped after the introduction of GDPR as brands were concerned about the hefty fines for infringement said Ben Briggs, managing partner of Join the Dots agency. “But over the last 18-24 months we have seen some brands come into mail.” This is especially true of the charity sector where during lockdowns, face to face events and donations were impossible.
Briggs was on a panel with fellow advocates of direct mail: Carl Kirkby, head of CRM and loyalty at Waitrose; Alec Bartlett, creative director of Paper & Pixels and Mark Cross, engagement director of Jicmail.
Jicmail, which provides data and measurement of how mail is used in households so that print has the same data behind it as television and radio, is playing a key role in this renaissance. “With data on how mail is used it should improve its attractiveness and should inspire creativity. We will be able to provide insights in terms of creativity and planning,” Cross says.
That will emerge from a Measurement Matters conference staged by PWC in coming weeks where the results of a pilot by Jicmail into the use of mail and its effectiveness will be published.
Mail, however, is already on the marketing agenda according to Bartlett. But it is about relevance and the offer architecture to drive response. And with a younger generation, mail can also be about brand building rather than just driving traffic to websites and transactions.
With a nod to HP’s inkjet and Indigo presses, Kirkby said that the marketing sector is only now catching up with what this enables. “It’s about getting the mindset and the data in the right place,” he explained. “Using this we can make the experience more relevant to you as a customer and increase the speed to market.”
This leads into marketing automation where the Jaguar Land Rover button campaign is held up as the perfect example. Those receiving the pack would press the button to activate a test drive. Its success proved that marketing automation can work if the experience is seamless to the user. “It was a bit of a game changer, taking mail into the ‘phygital’ era,” said Briggs.
It showed that print can be part of the new thinking for how brands communicate with their audience, proving, said Kirkby, that direct mail can be used for brand building rather than just to gain a response.
However, it is not going to fall into the industry’s lap. There is a skills and experience gap across the sector. A generation of marketers may perhaps have not come across direct mail and do not understand how it can be used effectively, let alone the impact of changing formats, the use of finishing or even different papers.
What can help is getting those involved in a room together to discuss how to generate that extra 0.5% response rate that divides a successful campaign from the crowd.
