USPS Delivers a Custom Magazine for DMers
Think of it as a prime example of the business cliché about eating your own dog food: The U.S. Postal Service has launched a free magazine about the virtues and successes of direct mail. Entitled “Deliver”, the new magazine launched in mid-February and targets upper-level marketing executives and the agencies that serve them. The first 32-page issue mailed to 350,000 marketers at leading brands and agencies, free, in full color, and without advertising, and the service expects to put out a new issue every two months. (The magazine has no future plans to accept ads.)
“We wanted to bring new people into the direct marketing industry,” says Patrick O’Connell, program manager for promotion of direct mail at the USPS and the editor of “Deliver”. The problem was how to engage advertising and marketing decision-makers at large companies in talking about direct mail in a way that has meaning for them. It’s not an idea you can sell in a postcard or even a mailer. And we decided that the perfect medium was a publication which talks about direct mail, how it works, why it works and how it needs to be integrated into their marketing plans to make their TV, print and Internet advertising much more successful.”
Stories in the premier issue include three multi-page features on how to incorporate direct mail into larger marketing campaigns—from birthday cards for Southwest Airlines’ Rapid Rewards program members, to use of customer data for relationship marketing (including customized mailings) at Harrah’s Casinos, to the U.S. navy’s use of highly targeting mailings to fill specific job needs in its work force, such as medical staff, construction engineers and clergy. (The Navy campaign is managed by the Campbell-Ewald advertising agency, a division of Draft, which is also responsible for producing the USPS’ consolidated advertising and marketing materials, including “Deliver”.)
Then there’s the matter of leading by example. One of the articles in the first issue of “Deliver” makes the point that a custom publication offers the opportunity for a “soft sell” of a company’s products or services—provided it has the look and feel of a real magazine, with attractive design and arresting content. That could also be a description of “Deliver”—but O’Connell says the motivation for producing the magazine went beyond reminding chief marketing officers how good custom publishing could look if done well.
The Navy recruitment campaign is interesting, O’Connell says, because it so closely coordinates all the marketing initiatives—TV, print ads, online and direct mail—to drive traffic and enlistments. “They’ve integrated all of their marketing activities around one central theme, ‘Accelerate Your Life’. So the TV ads look like the print, which looks like the direct. And they all drive into either the recruiting office or the online site.”
While the USPS publication is aimed primarily at large corporations’ direct mail efforts, some of the ideas contained in it have applications to companies without multimillion-dollar commercial budgets or huge customer loyalty programs. One article, for example, lays out the benefits that catalog mailings can exert in driving traffic to a Web site. The piece cites recent research by comScore and the USPS that showed that consumers who received a printed catalog were twice as likely to buy online and spent 16% more than those who didn’t get catalogs.
Direct mail is too often an afterthought in a marketing campaign, O’Connell says, and that’s unfortunate, because of all the channels, direct mail offers the most measurable ROI—not necessarily the strongest, but the easiest to categorize as either successful or not, and therefore the easiest to tweak for success. “Mail does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to marketing,” O’Connell says. “But many advertisers look at it as a one-off event: “We need to move this single product, so let’s do a short mail campaign.’ What we’re trying to do here is to promote the notion that, if you’ve got a great TV or print campaign, it’s worthwhile to start thinking about using direct mail.”
