Direct mail is back, and it's not nostalgia

It was the original performance channel

Direct mail is older than most of the industries that now compete with it. Tiffany published what is often called the first mail-order catalogue in the United States in 1845. Aaron Montgomery Ward put out a single-sheet price list in 1872 and had a 540-page book within about two decades. Eaton's sent its first catalogue across Canada in 1884. Richard Sears started selling watches by mail in 1888, and by 1933 the Sears Wish Book was how a lot of families picked out Christmas.

Those department stores were the first performance marketers. They mailed something, people ordered, and they counted. Lester Wunderman put a name on it in 1967 and called it direct marketing.

Then digital took over

Then the internet arrived and mail started to look old. Email was nearly free to send. Paid social and search could be measured down to the click. For a long time that was a better deal, and most of the industry moved its budget accordingly. That was a reasonable call.

But everyone made the same move. Inboxes filled up, feeds filled up, and buying attention got more expensive every year. Most marketing now competes for the same two seconds on the same screen, and customers have learned to scroll past nearly all of it.

Why mail works again

A piece of mail has something a screen doesn't, which is physical presence. It arrives at the home, someone picks it up, and it sits on a counter or a fridge for days. You can't swipe past a postcard in a quarter of a second. In our experience that shows up in how people respond. They open it, they keep it, and a good offer gets acted on.

I'm not arguing mail replaces digital. Email is still far cheaper to send, and nobody should rip out a channel that works. Mail reaches people in a place with less competition and gives you one more way to be noticed. Used together, the two do more than either does alone.

The part that changed is measurement

For most of its history, mail ran on assumptions. You sent a batch, sales moved, and everyone credited the mailer. We built SnapCapture so every postcard is tied to a recipient, a scan and a conversion.

Last Black Friday and Cyber Monday, among the BirdseyePost campaigns we tracked end to end, the median postcard generated about $5 in attributed revenue per piece mailed. Some campaigns produced more than $40 per mailbox. Brand, offer and audience still decide how any one campaign does. But once you can see which households engaged and which ones converted, direct mail stops being a leap of faith and becomes a channel you can manage like any other.

That is why I see this as a renaissance. Mail works alongside digital, and now it can be measured.

History from Wikipedia's article on mail order. Performance figures are BirdseyePost campaign data.

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