. . . that’s what Keith Wiser reckons the audience was thinking at the start of his latest presentation, which sang the praises of direct mail.

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at a DM conference in Johannesburg. I was given the topic ‘The Future of Direct Marketing & How to Optimise It’.   

Before waxing lyrical about all the tricks of the trade for squeezing every drop of response out of a mail pack that I have leaned over the last 28 years, it seemed to be important to start with a more fundamental question. ‘Does direct mail have a future?’

Hence the title of this article. As I laid out a picture of the current DM landscape, that’s exactly what I seemed to be . . .  barking mad. And, since most of the audience were probably far more interested in finding out about Twitter, Facebook and USSDs, I was even more concerned that they would see me as some sort of dinosaur. (Even more of a problem when you reach my advanced age!)

Mind-blowing numbers

Here are just a few of the facts I spread before my audience:

• South Africa has a population of 45 million. There are 37 million unique cell phone users with 57 million SIM cards in circulation. What other medium can offer such reach? Hence, it is anticipated that advertising on cell phones will reach R2 billion a year by 2013.
• Vodacom, the leading cellular provider in SA, sends 14 million ‘Please call me’ messages every month.
• Taking a more global perspective – more than 100 million videos are viewed every day on YouTube; Flickr contains more than 3.6 million images;  the human race is spending more than five billion minutes every day on Facebook; the month-on-month growth for Twitter in February 2009 was 1,382 per cent. The numbers are mind-blowing.
• Meanwhile, mail in the USA in 2009 decreased by 28 billion pieces. Mail volumes in Europe in 2008 were down to about the levels seen in 2001. These downward trends are predicted to continue until they possibly flatten round about 2014. 

Business guru, Gary Hamil, made reference in one of his books to the given wisdom of Native American Indians. It was this: “When the horse is dead, get off”. 

Direct mail may be a little like jazz. Since I am in the mood for quoting, Frank Zappa said: “Jazz is not dead. It just smells funny.” And so my friends, in spite of all the above figures from the digital Funderland, mail is not dead.  

Far from it; it is still an important medium.

• In spite of the decline Americans still mailed 170 billion pieces of mail in 2009. 
• Europeans in 2009 mailed close to 80 billion pieces of mail.
• Against all the trends, mail in South Africa last year increased by around four per cent.

These are still highly impressive figures.

During my preparation for the presentation I came across an interesting piece of research carried out by The Print Council and Pitney Bowes in the USA in 2008. I know that anything that happened longer ago than a week last Friday is suspect, but results of this research probably still has something to tell us.

• 85 per cent claimed they open and read selected pieces of mail every day.
• 55 per cent reported greater enjoyment from reading regular mail versus email.
• 75 per cent claimed they closely examine their mail for coupons and special offers.
• 40 per cent said they had tried a new product after receiving direct mail.
• 70 per cent said they had renewed a business relationship after receiving direct mail. 

In one of my DMI articles a couple of months ago I made reference to TransPromo. In the context of this article I think it’s worth revisiting the subject. 

For those of you who missed that article or are still unaware of what TransPromo is, here’s a definition. 

TransPromo is the combination of traditional transactional documents (such as bank statements, utility bills, telecoms statements) with highly tailored marketing messages based on the customer’s buying habits, preferences and known or potential behaviour.

If that seems like a bit of a mouthful, try this: TransPromo is one of the most successful direct mail channels I know for delivering the right message to the right person at the right time, via statements. 

Once again, some recent research carried out in Europe revealed that while 73 per cent of credit card offers are discarded without being opened, less than five per cent of statements suffer the same fate. 

Put another way, that’s an open rate in excess of 95 per cent. The same research revealed that consumers spend an average of two to three minutes reviewing the statements they receive: 20 per cent spend more than five minutes. Many come back to them more than once. And for those of you who want to raise the spectre of e-statements, more than 40 per cent of those interviewed still preferred the old hard copy statement. No wonder I find this channel so exciting.

Without getting into great detail, there is so much we can do to optimise our responses from mail. In the conference presentation, I made reference to some of the lessons from Claude Hopkins’ book Scientific Advertising, better use of analytics, GIS overlays, research and eye tracking software, to name a few. So here’s a final misquote from my presentation: ‘I came not to bury direct mail but to praise it’.

Postscript

Here’s another little snippet about SA and the World Cup I have learned since writing my last article. During the period of the World Cup we can apparently expect an influx of 40,000 hookers. If that’s true we shall require 114 jumbo jets to get them here. My first thought was to wonder how this figure was arrived at. Why not 39,742 or 41,578? This might be significant because we could be several jumbos shy, leaving a couple of the girls stranded on the runway. 

My second thought was to contextualise this against the anticipated 500,000 football fans that will be in the country. That’s a ratio of hookers to fans of one to 12. With so much sex on offer how on earth are these poor chaps going to have time to watch the games? 

Which led me to my third thought. Had we planned this better we could have saved a huge amount of money. All we had to do was bring in the fans and the hookers and screw FIFA.

Keith Wiser is founder/CEO of 5th Dimension, based in South Africa. Email: KeithW@5thDimension.co.za