Going in search of a marketing blog I stumbled upon http://www.drewsmarketingminute.com/, specifically their post on direct mail posted on November 15th 2013. It comments on the growing popularity of direct mail for promotion, due to the decrease in mailbox traffic in general.
I found the post interesting, because my roommate loves checking the mail. I’m not entirely sure why he derives so much pleasure from it, but hey, whatever makes him happy…I’m not here to judge.
Whenever he comes back with any sort of mail he makes a loud announcement. It’s actually fairly rare for us to receive things in the mail, which got me thinking…when I was a kid we would have massive stacks of mail delivered daily: bills, coupons, letters etc. However when we receive mail now, it’s a big deal. Whenever we receive coupons via mail we’re also much more likely to hold onto them and actually use them versus receiving similar coupons via e-mail (which are normally promptly deleted). The blog was right, at least in my case, in it’s assumption that flyers would be greeted much more warmly due to the overall decrease in “mailbox traffic”.
The blog suggests numerous traits that might make your advert more appealing in the mailbox. Briefly skimming through my own stash of flyers I found that nearly all the flyers I kept were shaped differently and brightly coloured which followed the blog’s suggestion to “be odd”.
I started to ruminate over the flyers. If all the companies were “odd”, did that make all the flyers normal? What could companies improve upon to become kings of junk mail? Obviously further innovations will arise if this market continues to be an attractive means of promotion.