Direct mail continues to prove its mettle in omnichannel marketing strategies by driving digital engagement, with new figures revealing the channel is fuelling a major year on year rise in website visits, account look-ups, web searches and app downloads.
That is according to the results of Jicmail’s Q1 2026 study, which reveals the channel continued on its growth trajectory as a “Super Touchpoint”; combining high levels of physical engagement with increasingly powerful digital outcomes. Some 9.4% of mail items prompted a website visit in Q1, a record for the first quarter of the year.
This growth in digital response extends beyond website visits. The data shows that account look-ups, web searches and app downloads prompted by mail (including direct mail, door drops and business mail) all increased year on year, reinforcing mail’s role as a driver of measurable, performance-led outcomes.
Supporting this trend, 56% of all purchases driven by mail were fulfilled online in Q1 2026, a new record since tracking began, underlining the increasingly powerful role that mail plays within omnichannel customer journeys.
Alongside these quarterly results, Jicmail has released its full year 2025 Response Rate Tracker dataset, significantly expanding the industry’s understanding of mail effectiveness at a campaign level.
The Response Rate Tracker is a dataset which sits independent of the core Jicmail panel and consists of anonymous mail campaign performance data submitted by 15 industry organisations, including PDV, Go Inspire, Join The Dots, Epsilon, Whistl, Sagacity, PSE, Connexance Choreograph, The Letterbox Consultancy, Herdify, The Specialist Works, Go Direct, DBS Data, and Paperplanes.
The Response Rate Tracker includes benchmarks for response, ROI, cost per acquisition (CPA) and average order value (AOV) for cold and warm direct mail and door drops, and, for the first time, partially addressed mail.
Based on nearly 5,000 campaigns, this dataset provides advertisers and agencies with robust, campaign-level benchmarks that can be used for planning, forecasting and performance validation.
Early findings from the 2025 dataset highlight strong performance across the mail channel, including continued growth in both warm and cold retail direct mail response rates (up 26% and 21% year on year respectively). The return rate for mail ranges from £2.00 for partially addressed mail, to up to £11.50 for warm direct mail (targeting existing customers).
Jicmail director of data leadership and learning Ian Gibbs said: “The Q1 2026 data highlights the continued evolution of mail as a Super Touchpoint channel that seamlessly bridges physical and digital. At the same time, the release of our full year 2025 Response Rate Tracker provides the industry with an unrivalled view of campaign-level effectiveness, enabling better planning, benchmarking and optimisation.”
Jicmail engagement director Mark Cross added: “These latest results, together with our new geoplanning tool and latest response rate tracker, bring to life the unrivalled quality of engagement and effectiveness from mail.
“A richness not available elsewhere, such as with an outstanding average of 229 seconds spent with catalogues; the highest attention levels to direct mail in Britain revealed in Oxford and Cambridge; recycle rates at a hugely impressive 89% and with year on year maintenance of £12+ return for retailers from warm mail and decreasing cost per acquisition from cold. Quite a dashboard of results.”
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