The Resurgence in Direct Mail and the Facebook Boycott Marketing Trend

With lower costs and new ways to track and measure, you should add direct mail campaigns to your marketing mix. Even when the FB Boycott ends

Polly Wong

July 23, 2020

PostFunnel, in partnership with Belardi Wong, is presenting you with this insight on the resurgence in direct mail as well as the role of the new Facebook boycott. Belardi Wong, a direct marketing agency, manages some of the most successful direct mail and acquisition programs across the United States. From a direct response marketing company in 1997, the agency has grown into providing digital and direct marketing solutions to complete the entire customer journey.

This summer, we have seen more than 400 companies join the Facebook boycott. When you take a close look at these companies, you see many global brands and huge retailers who did not build their businesses through Facebook advertising. But for the truly native DTC brands, Facebook is a channel that is hard to walk away from. That’s partly why, at the same time, these DTC brands are aggressively testing across channels to be less dependent on Facebook.

Most senior marketers today understand that it takes an integrated marketing mix across channels to drive continued growth. We know that smartly orchestrating your messaging frequency across channels – both offline and online – increases response rates and supports customer lifetime value growth. This is where the huge resurgence in direct mail comes in.

At Belardi Wong alone, we have launched more than 200 brands successfully into the mail. And we can identify several reasons why direct mail and catalogs are making a significant comeback.

First, digital marketing is more competitive, expensive, saturated, and promotional than ever. While we see strong ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) from Digital CRM, new customer acquisition online is harder, especially for niche or high-ticket fashion or home brands. Simultaneously, you can mail a catalog for $0.55, including postage. Suddenly, when compared to expensive CPCs, print becomes increasingly viable.

Still, there’s plenty of room to grow here. While the number of companies in mail increased 300%, there has been a much larger decrease in average circulation per mailing – as much as 500%. And while it partially explains the financial challenges with the USPS, it might also mean there’s some room to maneuver with your mail strategy in the search for its sweet spot.

For example, ten years ago, a traditional cataloger who might have mailed 3MM catalogs in a single drop, might only be mailing 500K now, and new mailers tend to mail between 200K and 400K in each mailing. While there are more companies in the mail than ever, mail volumes overall are still down. Does it also spell a bit of space for customer attention for you to grab?

Secondly, in many ways, direct mail and catalogs are not what they used to be. Today, they are above all a channel drivers to support eCommerce and retail store sales. This has led to fundamental changes in creative best practices. New trends now include more storytelling through headlines, less item density, fewer pages, and more white space, and aspirational photography. The goal is simple: interest consumers enough to drive them online or in-store to shop.

Reason #3 – There are a few aspects of print that you simply can’t replicate in digital: 1) the physical real-estate to share your brand story and product, 2) 100% open rate – the consumer has to hold it, see what it is (including parts of your messaging) if even to toss it in the (hopefully) recycle bin, and 3) the level of transactional-based modeling means that we are not just building look-alike models but shop-alike models, driving higher conversion rates and more valuable new customers.

Additionally, applying the right technology and tactics to track and measure direct mail campaigns allows marketers to execute them in a much smarter, more uplift-driven ways than ever before. Read more about it here: A direct mail campaign can make an extra $1 million. Here’s how it can actually be measured.

Data is critical to direct mail success, which is why it is so important to integrate your direct mail response information with your CDP/Single Customer View. It’s a crucial, basic tactic that allows you to track customers by source and to understand differences in lifetime value by the source of acquisition, among other attributes. It also helps to understand the role that print plays in the CRM funnel, especially for customers not engaged in email. Ultimately, the data analysis allows you to optimize the marketing mix across channels and maximize ROI.

Whether the Facebook boycott will fade away soon, or become a more sustained stance, we predict diversifying your marketing mix with direct mail will only become more crucial for brands.