I was interviewed the other day on an Australian television business show, Lateline Business, and I made a brash prediction. You can see the six-minute clip or read a transcript of it here. The question I was asked was: "What about the industry [direct marketing] generally: how important today is going digital, the whole online space to direct marketing?"
And my unequivocal answer was as follows: "It's indispensible. There's going to be no non-electronic direct marketing within 10 years - none."
Now what I meant by "non-electronic direct marketing" was not "offline" (obviously, I would have just said "offline"). What I did mean, however, is that even offline direct marketing would only be viable if it were supplemented and buttressed by electronic tools, such as Web sites, email, and other communications channels. In my own view of the future, there will still be occasions to send out letters, including glossy brochures and samples, and there will be reasons even for sending out "broadcast" mailings. Nevertheless, I don't think any sophisticated direct marketing campaigns will continue to operate solely by post within about ten years, maybe 15.
Of course I could fudge this controversial prediction bit, and say that there will still be "computer assisted" database marketing being conducted via postal mail, because after all a computer is "electronic," but for the purpose of this blog post, let's just play devil's advocate, and take the extreme view. Already, within my own admittedly biased circle of acquaintances, I don't know ANYONE who would rather have postal mail than email. However, I do see an uneven adoption rate in electronic message processing on the part of consumers, with relatively new or not so sophisticated users of email worrying about the burden of a cluttered inbox, while more skilled users have better spam filters and sometimes get their inbound email automatically sorted into folders. Others use multiple addresses to ensure personal and business remain separate.
The cause for this trend toward the electronic is not just the decreased cost of it, relative to postal documents, but also the increased consumer demand for it. No one wants irrelevant, interruptive marketing messages in any venue. Relevance will always win out in the end, and I predict that within a few years nearly everyone will want all their truly relevant messaging in e-form, and will consider physical documents to be more of a nuisance than a help.
Go ahead, tell me I'm nuts. I've been called worse.
Lets start with disclosure : I am currently undertaking some work with eCircle, one of the top Email Service Providers in Europe.( I see, you're thinking, this guy is well up for the ''There's going to be no non-electronic direct marketing within 10 years - none." )
This work generally revolves around helping clients maximise their email programmes ( Definitely, he thinks it's dead now)
But here's the problem, I actually love the sound of mail dropping on my doormat in the morning, and yes, I'm sure my desktop could probably mimic that sound once something came into my inbox, but it wouldn't be the same thing. And then how could a digital message replace the sight, feel and even smell of a good quality piece of direct mail ?
And to pick up on one the points made on another comment, my daughter loves to read her Puffin Club magazine that comes around every quarter, that drives her online to play games and choose her next physical book to read - she also has a Nintendo DS with books on it but that hasn't replaced her books - including her collection of 1970's , 80's and 90's Comic Annuals. She's 12.
And back to me again - lets take email: I think its a great medium for maintaining relationships but am still to be convince that it works well for customer acquisition - the numbers don't stack up. And although Social Media is fast becoming the fashionable acquisition tool, I believe physical media still have a massive part to play.
Old media dying off? I still have a massive international car brand client that still successfully uses Fax for marketing communications for goodness sake!!
I'd have to agree with Fiona. I know countless people who would confess their preference for paper mail, even though it's old, slow and expensive.
If direct mail is on the way out, why are innovative services like www.sendoutcards.com doing so well? They provide an online portal to generate direct mailers in the form of cards for just a $1 each. Although this cost is many times that of email, the ROI for businesspeople that use these services to keep in touch with clients I'm told is incredible. Many are now using printed cards to keep in touch with their more important, 'higher value' clients, leaving email for their less important, low value clients.
None can deny the convenience and benefits of email and online communications. But let's get real. Both can work wonders at the right time and in the place. Sometimes email is better, other times direct mail provides better bottom line results. In most cases the two media channels complement, don't compete, hence the rise and rise of highly successful cross-channel campaigns which provide better returns than either email or direct mail does alone.... As many have said before me It's not the media channel that's important, it's the message...
I read your article with interest - particularly your comment that you "don't know ANYONE who would rather have postal mail than email". Nobody? Not a soul? Really? Okay I'll confess up front that I do work for a postal service (which is engaged in both physical and digital delivery) but like some of your other respondents, I don't think paper is going to go away in a hurry and, judging by both the formal and informal research we've conducted, people still love receiving real mail and use it for reference more often than they do their electronic mail. There's something about reaching into your letterbox and finding real mail that you're happy to receive (yes, targeting is vital) with your name and address on it. Someone has put in the thought, time, effort and money to send you something tangible and (hopefully!) creative that you want to know about. Perhaps you've also heard about the offer on the radio or seen it on TV or a billboard and perhaps you'll receive a follow-up email about it. It's all part of that lovely mash-up called media channel integration....and long may it last.
When I worked for International Paper in the 1980s everyone told us, "In 10 years there won't be any need for paper, now that we have computers." But we also observed that the first device everyone bought right after they acquired a computer was a printer! Yes, I've got a Kindle, but I also buy books. Yes, I scan breaking news when I'm on line, but I also read two newspapers a day. Yes, I make all my presentations with PowerPoint, but everyone still wants a hard copy. There are great shifts in the roles of the various media of course, but as Malcolm Auld notes above, paper isn't going away anytime soon. Certainly not in my lifetime.
A companion question is, "How much of a Post Office will we have left in the U.S. in 10 years, and will paper direct mail even be viable?"
I don't know of any available data on this, but I'm wondering whether catalogs are already close to the end of practicality. This might sound like a discriminatory statement, and I don't mean it that way, but before long offline customers may be too expensive to reach. Which would further hasten the imploding of the Post Office. In fact, personal mail may become too expensive for consumers as the commercial mail volume continues dropping and more of the expense burden shifts to birthday cards and letters to gramma.
Would anyone like another dollop of optimism?
Don,
I think that you are wrong. It's not 10 years it's 5 years or, if you are under 20 it's yesterday.
Paperless has long been technologies' nirvana! Reality is that as technology be comes more pervasive, we consume more paper than ever, in business especially - despite natural resource concerns being higher than ever!
In direct marketing, from experience in B2B, email and electronic "mail" delivers one third of the results than paper communications. Of course there is a cost differential that means for some margins electronic is the better choice.
However the real difference is the respondents profile - electronic responders are typically younger, more tech savvy while traditional direct attracts an older profile, more senior, more clout and money in our case.
As electronic becomes less trustworthy due to abuse, security, spam etc in ten years I see more strategic use of "paper" albeit not the old DM pack integrated with online, email, SMS, social and other media.
In my view, rumours of mail demise "are greatly exaggerated."
G'day Don
As an Aussie who has also interviewed you, I always enjoy your opinions. And I both agree and disagree with this one.
Yes the move to digital is inevitable, but history has shown that rarely do new media replace old media. We're reading more books than ever before, breaking box office records at the cinema, paying hundreds of dollars for tickets to see 60+ year old rockers at outdoor concerts in record numbers, watching television on large flat screens in home theatres. And we've walked around with ear-plugs in our ears listening to transistor radios, boom boxes and Walkmans for decades before the iPod.
User content has been the dominant content in most media for ages, talk-back radio is highest rating radio, letters to the editor one of the most read part of the newspaper, reality shows and sport the most popular television shows and word of mouth has always been the best way to influence decisions and spread gossip and opinions.
What we're seeing with digital media is nothing new. It is simply long established behaviour exercised in different channels, to more people we don't know, faster than ever before - but more measurable.
As Confucius said "mens natures are alike, it's their habits that drive them apart" - we're just seeing some new habits driven by old behaviour.
Regarding death of mail I'm yet to find any marketing executives in my seminar audiences who want more e-mail traffic in their in-boxes. You are obviously far more organised than most.
Thanks to productivity tools in the B2B world – crackberries, wireless laptops and the like – a complete layer of gatekeeper (secretaries and personal assistants) has been removed from business. People are no longer important enough to have secretaries. They can do their company’s business correspondence on their own time.
I have an e-mail marketing software business used by companies in over 30 countries and we’re seeing newsletter open-rates declining.
The point is that there has never been a better time to use well crafted, creatively personalised direct mail to reach executives, than in the digital age. They have to open their own mail, so it's now easier to reach them with relevant printed correspondence and it's even more powerful if linked to a PURL as the response device, as it gives web metrics to mail.
We have a number of banks that have wine clubs in Australia and they moved to digital statements. The wine clubs immediately started to suffer, so they’ve moved back to mailing catalogues to save themselves. And whenever the largest wine club in Australia sends e-mail offers, up to 98% of orders are placed over the phone, not by return e-mail or website.
Mail is an excellent aquisition media, while digital is an excellent retention channel.
And while the cost of digital communications is cheap, there's been very little tracking of the piss-off factor of those who delete rather than open. I'm already getting Russian models chasing me on Twitter every couple of days - obviously poor targeting - but a complete waset of my time to delete them.
People follow fashion and digital is the new black, but fashion comes and goes. The smart marketing executives I speak with are simply integrating their digital messages with other media and measuring what works and what doesn't.
Personally I hope mail and catalogues stay around in my lifetime - my 7 year old daughter loves leafing through the toy catalogues and highlighting what she wants. She also goes online to play games, compete with other kids around the world in maths competitons, plays Wii with her brother and sits on my lap while I read her a book. She uses lots of media, as do we all. And she loves to receive printed postcards from family and friends. She's already establishing her habits.
But here's a fact you may not be aware of - more people in the world have used lead pencils than the internet. And manufacturers are producing them in lots of colours and our schools are encouraging our kids to use them before they teach them how to use a computer. And if all the users of pencils in the world were a country, they'd be bigger than Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Youtube and every social network combined. In fact you'd need a damn planet to keep them.
Gotta go now, need to Tweet, Facebook, Linked-in and connect this article to my networks - whoever they are.
Keep up the good work.
Malcolm Auld
www.malcolmaulddirect.com
Physical, printed direct mail pieces will never go away. Consumers are more likely to respond to something they can touch, than they are to an email. The internet is a powerful and necessary tool for tracking the success rate of your direct marketing campaign, but on its own, it does not guarantee a high response rate.