Direct Mail: A History – Now And Then

Most of the principles of marketing have been with us for years and years, and in that time what has really changed is the methods. In their number and in their nature, marketing campaigns today are more varied than they ever have been. But they are still linked in to that same old end goal – making people want to buy a product or pay for a service by using persuasion techniques that convince them that that thing is likely to improve their life or give them something extra. Even direct mail, which has overtones of a very modern kind, is something that has been practised for many years.

The core principle of direct mail is that it should cut out the middleman. In so many advertising and marketing campaigns much of the money involved goes to an advertising agency who create the marketing material and often identify where it should be placed. Direct mail is designed to go from the seller to the customer and encourage the customer to spend money on the products and/or services of the seller. There is no agency involved to do this. The aim is that the marketer, or the seller, will reach out to customers without having to spend an undue amount of money and will therefore get a return on their investment.

One of the obvious drawbacks of old-fashioned direct mail – prior to the advent of the Internet, specifically – was that even once you had got to your customer they had to decide to come back to you, and in order to encourage such a physical reaction from a potential customer there needed to be more time devoted to persuasion. Even if the first mailshot got a lot of people’s attention, it may have taken a while longer to get them to commit to returning to you with a view to making a purchase.

The Internet has made for a boost to direct mail campaigns, as the marketer now has the added option of email. If you have a marketing campaign planned and want to get it in the eyeline of the potential customer, it is much easier to do this by sending them an email. Assuming you can persuade them to take notice of the email you can include a link in the body text, which need only be clicked to take the customer to a sales page. From there they can spend their money.

It is not that we are lazy as a species – although some of us are, certainly. The reason that this more instant, more virtual form of direct mail has been such a godsend for marketers is simply that it provides less opportunity for the customer to be distracted or for them to fulfil their need somewhere else. It allows the salesperson to get more quickly to a point where they can close the sale and ring it up. This leaves more time to hone everything else, and is a major reason why direct mail is now more popular than ever.