The Junking of the Postal Service
I remember a campaign defending direct mail a while back from Boardroom Reports. They distributed a poster that said, “Only Junk People call it Junk Mail.” I was a proud direct mail marketer at the time…working for magazines that mailed millions of pieces of mail each year. Now I make my living recruiting direct marketers, though most no longer call themselves direct mail marketers.
I still see the value of direct mail. But I feel like a part of a dying breed.
Yesterday’s New York Times ran a piece that said this:
“The fact is that the primary beneficiary of the United States Postal Service today is arguably the advertisers whose leaflets and catalogs flood our mailboxes. First-class mail — items like bills and letters that require a 44-cent stamp — fell 6.6 percent in 2010 alone, continuing a five-year-long plunge. Last year was the first time that fewer than 50 percent of bills in the United States were paid by mail. There were 9.3 billion pounds of “standard mail” — the low-cost postage category available to mass advertisers — but only 3.7 billion of first-class mail.”
“One could argue that the real customer of the Postal Service is now the direct mailer; it is a channel for advertising,” said Chuck Teller, founder of Catalog Choice, an online service in Berkeley, Calif., that helps people get their names off catalog mailing lists; this requires submitting the customer numbers on unwanted catalogs that arrive in the mailbox, one by one. And the problem is not just annoyance. Direct-mail advertising generates an estimated 10 billion pounds of waste each year, costing cities an estimated $1 billion to dispose of it, according to Catalog Choice.
Ouch.
Although most of our clients have embraced multichannel marketing, direct mail and catalogs still drive substantial revenue in many cases. But I’m afraid it appears that the writing for change is on the wall. Public perception of the value of mail has changed, and we need to change, too. I’ll leave it to the mailers to figure out how to stay relevant in today’s environment.
By the way, if postal service is going to drop to 5 days per week, why eliminate Saturday and have 2 consecutive days with no mail delivery? Why not drop Tuesday?
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