Direct mail is alive and well and the United States Postal Service wants to help you send more of it.
That’s the message U.S. Postmaster General Jack Potter brought to attendees of the Chicago Association of Direct Marketing’s DM Days on Wednesday.
“We’re interested in every dollar,” he said. “Gone are the days that we are going to sit on our monopoly.”
Towards that end, the USPS has done things like enhance its Web site, to allow more companies to do business with the postal service online. And it is installing numerous self-service postal centers around the country, including 24 in the Chicago area. The automated kiosks will allow users to do 80% of what they can do at a post office without human intervention.
A customized mail initiative, to help mailers utilize more unusual and creative formats, has already been successful for some companies, such as Krispy Kreme. The doughnut chain saw an impressive 11% response rate of people bringing a doughnut box they received in the mail into a retail outlet and make a purchase.
The Postal Service is also working to become more fiscally sound by trying to attain pricing flexibility. “We need to be able to project costs and adjust rates on an annual basis,” he said, noting that this would avoid the “rate shock” that hits many mailers when there’s a rate increase.
The ability to make infrastructure changes is also needed, he said, which may include closing some post offices that are inefficient. The USPS currently has some 2,500 post offices that serve less than 200 people, and over 4,500 that make less than 200 deliveries a day.
Not above playing to the hometown crowd, Potter noted the city’s history and companies like Montgomery Ward, declaring that “Chicago is a hub of the direct mail industry. For my money, this is where it all began.”
Hard copy direct mail is here to stay, he said, “because it works.” Business-to-consumer direct mail sales in 2003 generated $423 in revenue, and are projected to hit $577 billion by 2007, an 8% annual growth rate. Potter doesn’t believe predictions about the end of paper catalogs, noting that many online orders are generated by the receipt of a print catalog.
According to USPS research, 44% of direct mail is read by customers, and only 6% of advertising mail is considered “objectionable.”
Mail is intrusive, he conceded. But in the eyes of most consumers, unlike telemarketing and spam, mail is not “obnoxious. That’s the advantage we have.”
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