My view is that a marketing plan should use a variety of mediums.
Paul Hunt is a marketing consultant
The jig is up for trash emails, as on 25 May 2018 GDPR should bring us a welcome relief from the clutter blocking our inboxes on a daily basis. It will, fingers crossed, at last call into line companies who loosely use our data.
However, with all this focus on GDPR, it's easy to forget the value that direct mail (physical mail)can bring to your communications with customers and remember, you don't need to have consent for postal marketing.
Surely email though is still the most efficient?
My view is that a marketing plan should use a variety of mediums and I personally know that doing this brings greater rewards and the danger in this digital age, is that we get sidetracked that everyone wants to interact with us online.
Don't forget that you can very accurately target customers and have transparency regarding the results when using direct mail, so it's not a blunt tool whose results are ambiguous.
So, why increase your use of direct mail:
- Some customers you can only reach by mail (very relevant with an older demographic)
- The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) did not issue any fines in 2017 for use of direct mail
- direct mail has been found to prime other forms of media like emails etc. and so increase the eventual response rates of campaigns
- Unaddressed mail i.e. door drops, have been found to stay in homes for up to 38 days and be frequently revisited
Direct mail has been around in some form for around 500 years, it's value is as much as ever in this digital age.
