WRITTEN ON April 8th, 2011 BY chris AND STORED IN General, Leaflet Distribution, Targeting

Tags: cost, mail, marketing, post, royal mail, unaddressed mail

Businesses and organisations that invest in direct mail as a form of marketing to consumers will have been dismayed by the latest inflation busting increases to the price of stamps. For marketeers or public bodies operating on reduced budgets it really could not have come at a worse time.

It is our view here at Link Direct that these hikes will actually push more firms towards targeted ‘unaddressed mail’ which provides much better value as it is delivered by hand. Link Direct specialises in unaddressed mail marketing and we have a team of more than 30,000 deliverers nationwide who can deliver your leaflet. In fact the hike in stamps comes at time when unaddressed mail is becoming more and more effective at targeting specific groups of people thanks to advances in technology.

Our newly developed SMART –Drop software is right at the cutting edge of these advances. It presents a real alternative to direct mail.  SMART-Drop is already delivering major door drop results for high street names and the SME market. As an example one well known soft drinks manufacturer recently used SMART-Drop to support its products around supermarkets.  Its main target market was 18-25 year olds and SMART-Drop was used to identify areas of the UK where large numbers of this age group lived. The results produced predictably high results in towns and cities with universities. Using SMART-Drop the client was able to pin point with increased accuracy where this age group lived in those areas. As a result the client dramatically reduced the number of leaflets it needed to print. Instead of printing and delivering 100,000 leaflets to reach 39,000 of the target market, the client printed and delivered 43,000 leaflets to reach 36,000 of its target market slashing production and delivery costs.

We believe this is the future of mail marketing – technology is allowing us to be more precise and have much greater impact.

Moreover independent data is backing up our theory that unaddressed mail marketing is becoming more effective and more widely used. New figures published in Marketing Week show that unaddressed mail marketing is actually growing – and fast. In 2010 the top ten biggest unaddressed advertisers spent £38.8m, up from £27.2m in 2009. The 43% increase compares with the 7% uplift widely forecast for the entire advertising market in 2010.

Furthermore the British Marketing Survey recently found that leaflets through the door led to a near 7% response rate in the quarter - the highest of all forms of advertising - with its nearest rival, TV, on 4.9%.

Unaddressed mail or ‘leafleting’ together with many old inventions like the car, the camera or the phone may have been around a while but far from becoming a dinosaur it is actually becoming more popular with advances in technology.

So if you are thinking of switching from direct mail to targeted unaddressed mail why not call us for an informal discussion? Or come to our SMART-Drop seminar in London on May 17. More details can be found on our blog page.