Town Money Saver Blog

The fact we live in a digitally driven world may have you thinking that there’s no longer a place for traditional marketing methods like direct mail but have you stopped to think about what your customers value the most?

Many brands make the mistake of assuming their customers would prefer to receive emails from them but recent findings from Royal Mail’s ‘The Private Life of Mail’ report suggests different. Below we’ve explored some of their key findings and what it means for direct mail and email marketing strategies.

Millennials becoming the principal drive in today’s economy, made businesses reevaluate the way they communicate and reach out to this demographic. Young adults ages 18 to 34 in the U.S. connect with brands in a very different and more engaging way than any other older age groups. It is expected to believe Millennials who were raised on the Internet will be responsive only to a digital medium. However, a lot of studies show that Millennials are actually equally susceptible to all marketing channels, including Direct Mail.

New data suggests older and younger people share many attitudes towards advertising. A lot has been made about the gap between how millennials and their elders perceive advertising. However, according to new data from Kantar Millward Brown, there are more similarities than you might expect.

In our research about consumer trust in different advertising channels, we discovered that the most trusted channels were all traditional. Or, as the digital marketer might say — offline.

Every year, consumers spend more time using digital devices. Every year, more media is consumed digitally. Naturally, advertising dollars are increasingly flowing to digital as well. But, don’t pull the plug on that direct mail campaign just yet. New research has again shown that content on paper affects our brains in different and more powerful ways.

This blog post highlights the advantages of print advertising, including loyal readership among affluents and its perceived level of trust. And print is still a very dependable and necessary component of an ad campaign. In fact, there has been a bit of a resurgence in print advertising because advertisers recognize the fact that, in a crowded online market polluted with banner and display ads, print is a legitimate alternative for branding and engagement.

Hey, direct marketers and merchants. Stop. It’s not your problem. You can’t solve it. Many of you think the issue with coupons is your issue to solve in order to raise the average sale price. Stop, slow down, and look at one simple fact. More than 70 percent of the U.S. population will not buy your brand without a discount simply because they cannot afford to do so.

It’s a fact: the internet, digital, social have grown significantly over the last years and are taking more and more of our time. Marketing money has followed that movement towards digital. But was that unconditional shift of marketing money to digital a good idea? Probably not. There are other, lesser-known facts. Printed ads are trusted much more than digital ads, the influence of ads on social media is very low. And direct mail significantly outperforms digital.