Is snail mail the way of the future?
Every now and then, I go through my emails and set up a pile of filters to delete the email newsletters and other things that I simply never read – I set the filter to delete them – gone forever! I know I am not alone in doing this.
I send email notifications out to an organisation I am associated with and the average open rate is around 50% and the experts in the digital marketing space tell me that 50% is a really good result. I would say, compared to what?
A couple of years ago I went on a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) tour in Manila and Clark in the Philippines. It was certainly an eye-opening experience. One of the things that struck me was at the end of the tour when we visited a BPO company who did the work for a few very large Australian companies. The local person said that a number their client companies were going back to snail mail as the return on investment was much higher. They had been doing email marketing for many years and watched their response rate drop and drop. Once they reverted to snail mail, the conversion skyrocketed.
Just yesterday, I was at a meeting where a guy who runs a data business servicing many companies made the comment that he was noticing that more and more businesses were now switching back to snail mail as their email response was so low. I think it’s because we all get so many emails, it has become almost impossible to manage them all.
Of course, so many businesses no longer have snail mail addresses for their clients and prospective clients so their challenge is to find a way to get the addresses. This where the older people in business have a bit of an advantage as they grew up in the snail mail era and know how to make it work – copywriters are becoming more important again! My friend James Bull, one of Perth’s best copywriters will be happy!
I am going through exactly the same dilemma right now except that over the years I have made a conscious effort to always get the snail mail address of everyone on my database if I possibly could. Fortunately, my CRM allows the entering of snail mail addresses! I have some colleagues whose CRM does not.
It’s a work in progress. I’m moving cautiously but the results do seem to be more effective than email.
We’ll wait and see.
David works with leaders and organisations to get more results faster.
He speaks mentors and consults.