Recent statistics released by the Direct Mail Association show that direct mail not only is seeing an increase in its response rates when compared to direct mail stats over the past ten years, but direct mail is also beating out its digital counterpart — email — in the percentage of people who respond.  According to the DMA study, email receives about a 0.12 percent response rate, while direct mail sees a 4.4 percent response rate.

In addition, according to Yory Wurmser, Director of Marketing at Media Insight at the DMA, “Depending on how one crunches the numbers, direct mail has a response rate of up to 10 to 30 times that of email messages — and this number increases when compared to online display ads,” says Wurmser.

It is speculated that one of the reasons for digital mediums to have such a low response rate is simply because of volume.  The number of direct mail and print messages is much lower than the number of digital messages a consumer will see throughout the day — from texts, to email, to social media — consumers are constantly ‘online.’  Print becomes a break from staring at a digital screen and because of that, direct mail’s read rates are increasing and, in turn, seeing a higher response rate.

Finally, print is still proving to be more exciting.  A Print in the Mix study found that about 60 percent of people enjoy receiving product and service information via direct mail.  This statistic remains true across all demographic ages, including the 18 to 34 audience. The study also found that a little over 50 percent of people agreed that they “pay more attention to direct mail messages over digital marketing messages.”

Timothy Freeman
President
Print & Graphic Communications Association