Direct Mail – adding unique flavours to the media mix in 2024

As 2024 wraps up, marketers face the challenge of cutting through a cluttered media landscape. Direct mail has emerged as a powerful tool for engaging audiences and driving results, from record election engagement to boosting online visits. Its unique ability to capture attention and disrupt the norm makes it a key ingredient in successful campaigns this year.

Effectiveness

Written by Sonia Danner, Marketreach 09 December 2024

This year has been another hectic, demanding and exciting roller coaster year for marketers and agencies alike.

It’s been a packed 12 months taking in the Olympics and Euros, Taylor’s tour with its ‘Swiftonomics’, the UK general election and much more. But there’s been one constant challenge for brands amid all this excitement, the search for effective and efficient ways of landing a relevant message with the right audience as media continues to fragment and the buying journey becomes more cluttered.

Marketers are like head chefs; they must prepare the right campaign ingredients by assembling what’s needed to avoid bland familiarity and grab consumer attention. Over the past year direct mail has returned to the spotlight for the ‘special sauce’ it can bring to campaigns to help cut-through and connect with people.

A round up of 2024 shows how direct mail can often be the cherry on the cake for brands looking to disrupt the norm and be different.

Mail is back on marketers’ radar

Channels fall in and out of favour depending on shifts in behaviour around media consumption, cost and many other reasons. But Direct Marketing, including direct mail, is one of the handful of channels that has stayed robust over the year, as shown in the quarterly IPA Bellwether Report.

The report tracks marketer confidence and where they are investing their budget. The Q3 update showed Direct Marking ranking third for upward revisions to budgets with its strongest performance in three quarters at +9.7% (+8.9 in Q2), “signalling a continuation of this segment’s impressive growth streak”, as the IPA said.¹

Audiences respond to mail and in Q1 2024 mail-driven purchases grew 43% year on year, according to JICMAIL data. These purchases happen across distribution channels too and not just physical outlets – with 46% of the purchases made online and 32% in-store – so it can drive online visits.²

One major demonstration of mail’s unique tangibility was the UK General Election. Many commentators suggested this was the first real ‘digital media election.’ Yet voters’ behaviour told a different story. Independent research we commissioned, entitled Landslide: How mail swept the board for political parties in the 2024 General Election, with a foreword written by Andrew Marr, showed:

Mail is more likely to have influenced voting intention than any other marketing channel across all ages
It was ranked as having the highest level of engagement at 70%
It had the highest level of engagement with younger age groups - more than 80% of 18-24-year-olds said they had engaged with mail during the run up to the election, compared with 72% for social media
Mail was more than 50% more effective at making people think about their voting intentions due to its relevance and perception as trustworthy³

A new dimension in consumer attention

Attention received major attention in 2024. Consumers have so many distractions ranging from a deluge of social media notifications to their offline pursuits and interests. Getting attention matters and the topic was front and centre at Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing event in October.

We captivated a packed room of marketers with our session ‘We are Never Ever Getting Bored Of Your Ads: Why Attention Is At Your Fingertips’ (back to Taylor Swift). Amid some audience interaction through a fun quiz, the panel, including host Branwell Johnson and speakers, Marketreach Commercial Director Phil Ricketts, Founder of The Glittersphere Nishma Patel Robb and Client Planning Partner at the 7Stars Vicky Crouch-Marlow, explored direct mail’s attributes and how they make the format a valuable addition within the media mix. This included the fact that the average piece of direct mail attracts 132 seconds of attention compared with 13.8 seconds for a TV spot.⁴ As you can imagine, this was a major surprise and well-received by the audience.

Attention is a moving feast and audience interaction with mail keeps increasing. In early 2024 direct mail enjoyed a 16-second increase in attention and a 1.1% increase in frequency of interaction.

Measure for measure – partnership power

The topic of measurement continued to fuel debate throughout the year – is the industry measuring the right things or just the things that are easiest to measure?

There are plenty of initiatives underway to provide deeper insights into audiences: these include BARB’s move to begin reporting co-viewing across both linear and connected TV and the collaborative measurement pilot study involving ISBA’s cross-media audience measurement programme Origin and JICMAIL’ s mail measurement panel. This launched in November and if the pilot proves its worth then Origin will incorporate JICMAIL campaign data to help with multi-channel planning.⁵

Ian Gibbs, Director of Data Leadership and Learning at JICMAIL said: “Mail might often be planned to drive a specific response, but it can deliver audience reach and frequency as well as any other channel and getting a joined-up view on how this works alongside TV and digital is going to be an important step forward for the channel."

In the same vein, JICMAIL collaborated with Nielsen this year on a refreshed mail circulation measurement methodology.⁶ The combination of JICMAIL’s and Nielsen’s detailed data helps brands and agencies to make decisions on ad spend and campaign planning much more quickly.

Direct Mail’s unlimited creativity

Never undervalue the importance of creativity: an optimised media mix needs to feature content that intrigues and engages audiences with some ‘surprise and delight.’

To make sure we walked the talk ourselves we created some entertaining thought leadership for brands with our ‘Mail Unleashed’ video interview series.⁷ Hosted by the inimitable behavioural science guru Rory Sutherland, CMOs unpacked their experiences with direct mail with guests including Boots CMO Pete Markey, behavioural scientist and founder of Astroten Richard Shotton and Head of Brand and Marketing at SMARTY Mobile Sayed Hajamaideen.

The interview with Jack Gallon, Executive Creative Director at agency MBAstack, highlights the unlimited opportunities to be creative with mail, the ultimate creative canvas (though maybe not everyone will want to wear a recycled mail sack like Jack).

He said: “I like to think of it as free-range creative. Creative people ... want to run free among the meadows of imagination and wonder and within reason, you can pretty much do whatever you want with mail. I think that's the opportunity.”

An innovative idea doesn’t have to be over-complicated. For instance, IKEA used playful creative to reach its loyalty programme members that were becoming inured to offers and discount messages. The mailer initially seemed to be a jumble of dots and recipients were encouraged to play the dot-to-dot game to decode the message. The outline revealed a money-off threshold discount offer to claim in the nearest store.⁸

Within three weeks of going live 14,000 customers had visited stores to redeem their voucher, resulting in more than £1.6M in incremental sales.

Sustainability stays on the agenda

There is really no Plan B in terms of saving the planet. Marketers and suppliers will need to turn their gaze back to environmental impact as their businesses stabilise and we’ll be there to help them.

We’ve continued to run our sustainability-focused educational campaign called Discover The Circular Advantage of Mail, which is based on and promotes the circularity framework known as the ‘4Rs’ - Regenerative, Reinvent, Reduce and Reuse.⁹ The 4R framework is a smart application for any brand looking to review and improve its environmental impact.

We’re on a continuous journey of behaviour change to improve the sustainability of mail and want brands and suppliers to come on the journey with us. There are lots of tips and ideas for producing more low-impact mail packs in our Using Mail More Sustainably guide.¹⁰

Leveraging new tools and practices for effectiveness

AI dominated conversation around efficiencies and improvements in planning and execution this year. Mail is part of this fast-paced evolution in processes and operations and AI- powered tools can help refine direct mail campaigns.

AI-powered tools can help analyse accumulated campaign data and extract relevant patterns at incredible speed. They aid in predicting customer behaviours, identifying optimal mailing times and suggesting the most effective copy and design elements. When it comes to creative, AI can also generate copy and image variants at speed for test and learn programmes.

AI is also crucial to the fast-growing development of ‘synthetic data’, which can model target audiences and be used to forecast the impact of campaigns.¹¹

And it’s proving valuable in automating aspects of campaign management from list segmentation to performance analysis, freeing up time to give attention to the creative and enhancing the customer experience.

Other technology-driven innovations help strengthen mail’s unique ability to hyper- personalise messages. For instance, variable data printing allows for customisation of a mail piece when it’s being printed without slowing the print run down.¹²

Final thought for the year

The beauty of having a diverse media mix is that the strength of each channel has a role to play in the customer journey and at each touchpoint. Perhaps foremost among its attributes is that direct mail provides not only a high quantity of attention but also delivers a high quality of attention, if you understand what mail brings to a multichannel media plan it can help avoid the cardinal sin of a campaign – being ignored.

Read our latest report Ph ysically Irresistible to explore what marketing thought leaders think about the power of direct mail.