A lot has been written the lasy year or so about ‘web 2.0′, ‘the long tail’, and the changes in the ways people interact with what they see online. What does that have to do with advertising mailers? Quite a bit, according to this series on Marigold Technologies’ Direct Marketing blog:
The value of hard copy, delivered by mail:
“It’s an interesting question. And a strategic one. If I’m publishing a fee-based newsletter, is it better to email or print and snail mail it to my audience? According to Christopher Knight at Email Universe.com, it’s better to print it…if you want your reader to value it most.”
Jim Logan – Should You Print Or Email Your Fee-Based Newsletter?
Jim Logan explains the difference.
Jim Logan – 10 Tips To Improve Your B-B and B-G Direct Mail Campaigns
An article on MultichannelMerchant.com that we linked to on postalnews.com prompted a couple of responses- here’s one of them:
it’s nice to see somebody in the mailing industry trying to get it right. i am very happy to see somebody take a look at the processing side, now they need to take a look at the delivery side too….. customers too stupid to have proper sized boxes or slots, etc…. don’t forget ease of handling by the carrier, proper address placement so the carrier can read the address, size so that it fits the five shelf configuration, etc….
Now there’s an idea- (leaving aside the characterization of some of our customers as “stupid”) how much interaction do we actually have between the mailers and the letter carriers who deliver their mail?
Seth Godin makes a good point how a seemingly small difference in the return address of an envelope can alter your perception of the piece. I didn’t throw away my Google check the first time it arrived in one of those non-descript ‘Buffalo NY’ envelopes, but I remember opening it over the wastebasket, assuming it was another credit card offer.
What made me open it a little more carefully was the fact that it wasn’t standard (’bulk’) mail. A standard piece that tries to look like a confidential communication (i.e. no company or agency name in the return address, plain formatting), is an ad for sure, and likely to get tossed unopened. The same envelope sent first class is pretty likely to be either good news or bad news- either way you gotta open it.
The other piece in Seth’s picture actually is first class, but it’s just a higher level ad- the phony endorsement gives it away- “Business Mail- Penalty for Tampering”. (So personal letters are fair game for ‘tampering’? And even if there were, would anyone mistake this for a personal letter?)
