Distance selling retail sector deck (Private Life of Mail)

Editor's Notes

• #45: Mail flows through the household – it is passed around, discussed and displayed in more ways and for longer than previously thought. And rather than being opened and read on the doormat, we saw that participants interact with their mail, fitting it in around their daily life, even revisiting mail later in the day. The IPA Touchpoints survey shows that on average adults read their mail for 22 minutes a day. This compares to magazines, read on average 14 minutes per day. However, with magazines, attention is split between editorial and advertising. With mail, 100% of attention is on the advertising content itself.
• #46: People not only spend time reading advertising mail, they can take their time with it; we’ve seen that they typically keep it around the house for more than two weeks. In fact, many advertisers report that results from mail come in for 3-6 months or even more. So mail not only gives brands more time in customers' hands, it gives them more time in their homes. Mail can be a constant presence for a considerable time
• #47: Recent data from Kantar Media’s TGI study shows that 80% of adults kept some mail that companies had been sent to them in the last four weeks. But people not only give mail time in the home, they also give it a specific space. Data from IPA Touchpoints 5 confirms that 69% of people have a specific place in the house where they store advertising mail such as coupons, catalogues, brochures and vouchers – all of which helps to keep your message in the household longer.
• #48: Those display areas are particularly important – keeping your message visible, like a poster space in the home. We noticed how mail was used as functional decoration, occupying a designated space in a room. The follow-up survey supported this, with 39% of people saying they had a dedicated display area for mail, which was usually the kitchen (51% of people who have a dedicated area). So mail doesn’t just deliver the message, it quite literally nails it to the wall. By thinking creatively about ways to encourage people to display your mail, it can become visible to everyone in the household.
• #49: Mail not only moves around the home, it also moves from person to person. An average of 23% of all mail gets passed around other people in the home or household, extending the reach of your message beyond the named recipient. And this increases to 29% when it’s a brochure from a company which the recipient has bought from before. Sharing is, understandably, more common in shared households. But since the inhabitants of shared households tend to be younger, this has particular implications for the audience for mail. For example, according to IPA Touchpoints 5, there is evidence to suggest that 15-34 year olds are: 42% more likely to find mail memorable than the UK population as a whole 71% more likely to trust the advertising mail they receive So, if a mail piece is a conversation starter, it might not only get additional people seeing it, it can potentially get your brand talked about over and over again.
• #55: Behavioural marketing experts have investigated the importance of touch in human psychology. Multisensory stimulation seems to alter the way the brain processes messages – often making processing quicker. Physical contact results in what psychologists call the ‘endowment effect’ – a sense of ownership over an item which makes people value it more highly. Scientific experiments have shown that people value something they can see and touch 24% more highly than something they can only see. Meaning that the physical nature of mail gives it a sense of importance as well as influencing how they feel about the sender.
• #56: A 2013 article in Scientific American showed that there is still a strong preference for reading on paper, driven by the physical properties of mail. And this preference for reading on paper does in fact translate into a preference for advertising mail over email communication. For example, we discovered that 63% of people say that they are more likely to take mail seriously, compared to just 18% of people for email. But not only does mail give a better impression of the company than email (55% vs 25%), people also feel more valued when they receive mail rather than email (57% vs 17%). .  
• #59: So why are people’s brains reacting in such a uniformly positive way to advertising presented in a physical medium? Well, it could be that stimulating more than one sense speeds up the brain’s ability to process information. For example, in learning experiments performance is consistently better when vision is accompanied by sound, when compared to just vision alone. And the same applies to touch because it appears that the tactile effects of mail do something similar by making the absorption of messages easier, potentially making them more memorable. In Kantar Media’s TGI survey, 80% of respondents say that they can remember seeing or reading some advertising mail sent to them in the last four weeks. And when we asked about advertising mail that the respondents found useful or interesting, 60% said that it helped to keep the sender’s brand top of mind.
• #60: Mail delivers a stronger brain response, on these measures, than tv or email. This response to mail is also universal. Whilst different indicators are stronger for different age groups, the overall effect remains strong regardless of age.
• #61: Mail creates a stronger brain response than tv or email. In a multimedia campaign, how can we get mail to work the most effectively with other media channels like tv and email? We found that placing mail last, after TV and email, generated the maximum effect in our Neuro-Insight research.
• #62: So, we have seen the role mail plays in people’s homes and how it impacts positively on the heads and hearts of consumers. What our research also shows is that mail is highly effective at delivering return on investment (ROI), performing not just in terms of sales and direct response, but also on incremental reach, efficient growth of market share, brand switching and cost per new customer acquisition. But mail also helps in getting new audiences to engage and respond so it can make a significant difference when integrated into multi-channel communications planning. We believe it is important to demonstrate the impact mail has on the full range of marketing and communications measures and to see how these lead to tangible business results.
• #63: We commissioned BrandScience to conduct a meta-analysis of advertiser econometric models – 401 cases (56 of which used direct mail and 42 of which used door drops), each representing one year with an average of 3 campaigns per year. They discovered that mail’s ROI performance is strong and that it is similar to television and above that achieved by most other media channels covered in the analysis. Door drops also deliver excellent performance – around the same level as OOH (out of home / posters). Of the 56 cases using direct mail, we found that mail and door drops did well versus other channels, and that both deserved to be included/considered in their own right.
• #64: When mail was included in an integrated plan, total communications revenue ROI jumped from £4.22 to £4.73 – a 12% increase. The inclusion of mail particularly showed increased revenue ROI from campaigns using TV and print. This is in line with the neuroscience research where we saw a strong interaction between mail and TV. 
• #65: Adding mail to the mix also delivers new responsive audiences. This is not just from media multiplier theory. Royal Mail consumer research shows us that different people like to be communicated with through different channels at different points in the customer journey. In our Mail & Email research for example, we found that 68% of people prefer companies to use some communication by mail. With mail added to the mix, in our Digital and Mail: Part 1 research, we could identify that 13% more consumers visited the sender’s website, 21% more consumers made purchases and 35% more consumers redeemed coupons or vouchers .
• #66: The BrandScience analysis focused on ROI, but we also wanted to confirm that mail delivered on other commercial measures. Peter Field, an independent marketing effectiveness consultant, analysed the IPA Effectiveness Awards case studies data and compared the metrics between campaigns that used mail and those that did not. The analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Awards databank identified that campaigns that included mail were 27% more likely to deliver top-ranking sales performance and 40% more likely to deliver top-ranking acquisition levels, than campaigns that didn’t.  
• #67: Furthermore the results of this analysis showed that where mail was included it drove market share growth with 3 x the efficiency of those that did not include mail. A brand spending the same amount of money on two campaigns, would therefore experience three times the amount of market share growth from one that included mail than one that did not.
• #68: The Salvation Army, working with Mike Colling & Company (MC&C), increased investment in both mail and door drops over 5 years. By integrating mail with digital and broadcast media, and by accurately attributing results and understanding the roles each channel plays in the media mix, MC&C increased The Salvation Army’s net income and profitability. MC&C were awarded silver at the IPA Effectiveness Awards 2014, to follow their DMA Gold for Media Strategy in 2011.
• #69: Title master allows for up to a maximum of 3 lines of title copy red, blue and orange. If less than 3 lines are required the unused text boxes should be deleted. All additional info copy dates etc are in black.
• #70: Title master allows for up to a maximum of 3 lines of title copy red, blue and orange. If less than 3 lines are required the unused text boxes should be deleted. All additional info copy dates etc are in black.
• #77: Red is always the colour used to sign off as Royal Mail.