Direct Mail
With direct mail, you can target customers or prospects to build long-term relationships. Direct mail is personalised, powerful and engaging. It also gives brands the opportunity to be creative and attracts attention in a unique and multi-sensory way.
What is direct mail?
Direct mail is a form of direct marketing. It's addressed marketing mail sent to a targeted audience of customers or prospects to advertise a brand, its products or services. Mail can form an essential part of a marketing strategy, working on its own or with other forms of media. Campaigns with mail in the mix are 52% more likely to report Return on Investment (ROI) benefits.* Campaigns are also 75% more likely to report profit uplifts and 65% more likely to report market share uplifts when mail is included.*
* WARC Driving Effectiveness with Direct Mail
What are the benefits of using direct mail?
There are many benefits of using direct mail as part of your marketing or communication channel mix.
Physical connection
Proven to drive epic results
Can be a sustainable choice
Targeted and engaging
Creative and unique
Trusted among all age groups
Examples of Direct Mail Campaigns
Below you can see some direct mail case studies and success stories.
HelloFresh has recipe for winning new customers using targeted direct mail
HelloFresh significantly expanded its customer base by effectively targeting Homemovers with direct mail. Partnering with PSE, they used Royal Mail Homemover data in their September direct mail campaign.
Key to this success were unique QR codes and interactive voucher cards, driving customers online to explore HelloFresh’s offerings. This innovative strategy led to a 64.5% uplift in response rates and a 26% improvement in CPA. This success has made Homemover targeting a year-round strategy for attracting new customers.
Virgin Media tackles high customer churn with data-driven mail
Virgin Media tackled high customer churn by redefining value through a tailored direct mail campaign. Research revealed that discounts alone wouldn't change perceptions, so they upgraded 91,000 high-risk customers’ packages with extra benefits. The campaign, featuring a distinctive red envelope and the message 'Just because,' effectively conveyed genuine value.
This strategy significantly reduced churn and achieved a remarkable return on marketing investment (ROMI) of 179:1, showcasing the effectiveness of targeted direct mail in enhancing customer retention.
How to create an effective direct mail campaign
A practical step-by-step guide to help you produce a successful direct mail campaign. We have developed this guide to offer you expert advice and practical steps to help you create effective mail campaigns.
Other formats of mail marketing
As well as direct mail, there are other formats of mail marketing or advertising that brands can use within their media plan. These are listed below.
Door drops
leaflets and flyers
Door Drop marketing, otherwise known as ‘door drops’ include mail formats like flyers, leaflets and postcards. These are perfect for local and large-scale campaigns. Door Drops are unaddressed, scalable and a cost-effective way to get your brand into people’s homes, they’re even used by 80% of the UK’s top advertisers. Read more
Partially Addressed Mail
Partially Addressed Mail is optimised and effective for customer acquisition. Rather than targeting individuals, brands can send mail to groups of households based on their postcode and interests. You can either ‘top-up’ customer rich postcodes or target like for like postcodes of similar geodemographic profiles. It's an affordable way to find new customers. Read more
Catalogues and Brochures
Catalogues and brochures are brilliant for brands because they inspire purchase ideas and effectively convert interest into sales. They foster long-term customer engagement and stand out in a crowded digital landscape, offering a memorable, tangible experience. Read more
Why leading brands use direct mail
As a marketing channel, direct mail has huge advantages for brands. It offers flexibility, because the format and audience can be tweaked and targeted as needed. You can pinpoint the exact people you want to target using your own valuable first-party data or you can get some help with targeting using trusted third-parties. And it provides exceptional creative possibilities, making it ideal for storytelling.
Direct mail excels at building customer relationships. It becomes part of the home and is engaged with 4.2 times on average. 45% of direct mail stays in households for a month or more. So it’s not surprising that it drives further activity: 33% of direct mail leads to commercial actions, whether that’s purchasing, going online or visiting a store.
