Now Reading

Reduce Your Direct Mail Costs & Impact

Paper-Based ‘Addressed Mail’

Australian businesses post millions items of promotional mail (direct mail, advertising and catalogues). This type of paper-based marketing is what we call ‘Addressed Mail’. That is, where you’re sending material to someone whose name and address is placed on the posted item.

Marketing industry experts say a 1-3% response rate is an acceptable result. This means that most promotional mailing items are potentially discarded as waste.

Paper-Based ‘Unaddressed Mail’

This form of marketing is where you don’t have the name and address of the person who’s receiving your leaflet. This has traditionally been well-suited to supermarket catalogues, or businesses targeting their local community.

This approach uses up a lot more paper. In Australia, billions of unaddressed leaflets and catalogues are dropped into household letterboxes every year.

The Australian Catalogue Association oversees the code of practice for this industry and its members are not supposed to deliver ‘Unaddressed Mail’ to letterboxes that display signs like ‘No Junk Mail’ or ‘No Advertising Material’.

Businesses, however, are not members of the Association. As a result, many ignore such signs.

A paper free direct mail approach can save your business money and give the environment a much-needed lifeline. Here are some simple tips for you to follow:

Switch To Email – Save Money & The Planet

To maximise the benefits of email marketing, you need to collect the email addresses of everyone that you deal with on a commercial basis. You then need to obtain a software package that can personalise your emails and monitor the response. There are a number of benefits to email marketing:

It’s cheaper – no stamps, envelopes, packing, paper or printing required.
Email doesn’t produce the greenhouse emissions associated with trucks and delivery vehicles used to transport postal mail.
Potentially better ROI – you know exactly who opens, clicks and acts on your email promotions.

Clean Up Your Mailing Lists

Mailing marketing material to people who don’t exist or who don’t want your information is a waste of money as well as an environmental waste. There are two simple rules to follow:

Remove people who have moved on or passed away.
Stop mailing to people who have registered themselves on the ‘do not mail’ list. For more information on how to be compliant with this, visit the Australian Direct Marketing Association.

Consider The Paper You Mail On