The average person receives 121 emails per working day. So working an average of 7.5 hours equates to 16.13 emails per hour to read assess the value and digest. It’s a noisy space for marketers to try and cut through that volume of communications. So having asked the opinion of some trusted marketing connections on LinkedIn I thought it would be interesting to see if there was any appetite for printed communications. If everyone else Zigs you should Zag seems an interesting concept.

So is it tactically worth trying direct mail instead of email marketing, something that is clever and engaging, possibly even humorous is likely to be retained and even shared.  Now some figures published in 2018 by the DMA indicate that over half of all direct mail 57% is opened. When you couple this with the fact that 70% of the UK say they receive too many emails is there a case for considering direct mail? At first glance it would appear to be a big yes!

However it has to be said that numbers from the DMA seem to indicate that the ROI on email is higher than print but is definitely considered less memorable. It would be fair to think that on that basis direct mail might be a viable option for higher ticket items, or when trying to build your brand, or when trying to reach a smaller audience. If the click rate on email is somewhere around 0.014% and you are targeting 500 people with a B2B campaign then your ROI looks pretty miserable no matter how cheap the cost of the campaign.

Certainly the feedback that I had indicated that print still had its place and is received positively. Is it time we all consider a new approach? There is definitely something to be said for producing an innovative printed personalised communication.

It’s probably fair to say that if the budget will allow a multi channel approach will be the most successful tactically giving you the opportunity via print to prime your audience with memorable content before engaging with them via digital channels, but if email is delivering zero results maybe its worth Zagging!

Roy Roberts