Mail is loved despite 'junk' image

Deep-rooted scepticism about so-called “junk mail” is leading many people to claim they don’t like mailshots when in fact they are inadvertently opening them and interacting with them, according to the latest tranche of results released from “The Private Life of Mail”.
The findings are included in a next phase of Royal Mail MarketReach’s “Mailmen” campaign, launched late last month, and form the basis of a direct mail campaign, devised by Publicis Chemistry.
The mailshot has been created to promote the findings of the study looking at how people interact with mail, called Mail in the Heart. The campaign targets over 9,000 marketers and agencies.
Interestingly when asked about attitudes to mailshots, 62% claimed to reject all of them, yet 64% had actually opened a piece of direct mail that day and the majority who did went on to interact with it.
The study also goes on to show that the physical nature of direct mail has the ability to drive stronger emotional associations with a brand. Scientific experiments found people said they valued something 24% more highly when they can see and touch it compared to when they can see only.
Some 55% of those in the study said that mail gives them a better impression of the company compared to 25% for email. Meanwhile, 57% cent of respondents said that receiving mail makes them feel more valued while only 17% said the same for email.
Findings from the research also showed that people believe mail makes messages feel more important, with 63% saying they take mail more seriously compared to email (18%). In addition, 71% of people said that they opened a letter or brochure from a company they have ordered from before that had arrived in that day’s mail.
The full research report can be downloaded from www.mailmen.co.uk.
Royal Mail MarketReach managing director Jonathan Harman said: “Studying the rates at which people open and interact with mail, we can see that it is much more effective than consumers’ stated attitudes would suggest. It creates an instinctive sense of value being exchanged between the sender and recipient, which the latter may not be aware of.”

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Mail is loved despite ‘junk’ image

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