Why You Should Personalise Your Direct Mail Campaigns

Direct mail can be surprisingly effective, even in today’s Internet-driven world – a 2017 study found that approximately 42% of people read or scan direct mail sent to them. 54% of respondents to the same study said their preferred way to receive updates or coupons was via the mail.

However, direct mail is most powerful when it is personalised.

In its simplest form, personalisation means including the recipient’s name within the campaign: a “Dear John” will be more effective than simply “Dear Customer”.

However, there are other ways to personalise direct mail, with tailored offers that are more likely to appeal to the customer based on their past purchases, or images that have been selected to appeal to them. For businesses using direct mail in a B2B context, personalising mail campaigns by industry can also be highly effective.

A 2016 InfoTrends study found that customers were overwhelmingly in favour of personalised mail – 29.9% said personalisation made them “much more likely” to read it, while 55% said it made them “a little more likely” to read. Direct mail is effective – but in order to stand out, including personal details can be a little touch that goes a long way.

As Dale Carnegie put it in his famous book How to Win Friends and Influence People: “Remember that a person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”