The influx of digital marketing has made direct mail more powerful

A new marketing campaign by Royal Mail is unsurprising in its efforts to make us send more letters, but it does reveal an interesting insight: that the influx of digital marketing has made direct mail more powerful.

Because we are not inundated with it, unlike emails, it can make a campaign stand out that much more. And it can be more effective in its targeting, because it doesn't face a spam filter in trying to reach its audience.

They claim that people value something they can see and touch 24% more than something they can only see. Also that mail has a more powerful effect on long term memory encoding than other media - 32% more than email and a whopping 72% more than TV. And interestingly, that when mail is included in the marketing mix, the total communications ROI is increased by 12%.

Royal Mail's 'Mailmen' and the 'Private Life of Mail' was an 18 month study into the role mail plays in people's lives. The ground-breaking research included over 800 hours of CCTV footage from the households of 12 ethnographic study participants and a neuroscience and tactility study featuring more than 200 people, so it's definitely worth a read: www.mailmen.co.uk