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Did You Know?

Australian businesses spend hundreds of millions of dollars posting business-related paper documents each year.

According to the AFR, “business related letters accounted for about 4.2 billion of the 5.6 billion mail items” that Australia Post carried in 2007-8. ¹

According to the newspaper, 15 per cent of this was promotional mail (direct mail advertising and catalogues).

The cost to send hundreds of millions of promotional items like this through the post is signiﬁcant. Much of it could have been sent by email at a far lower cost.

There are two types of direct mail advertising, more commonly refereed to as “junk mail”:

Addressed Mail

This is advertising material that is sent from companies with your name and address on it. This is delivered by Australia Post.
Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on this type of advertising.
Moving it to email is a major money saver for any business.

Want to stop deliveries of direct addressed mail to your household? Click here for details.

Unaddressed Mail

This is advertising material that is delivered to your house without your name on it.
This includes supermarket and department store catalogues, ads for tradespeople, real estate agents, etc.
Some people ﬁnd this kind of advertising useful, but the reality is many people don’t even read it – much of it goes unread into the garbage or the recycling bin.

References:
¹ Australian Financial Review: ‘Paper cut could hurt Australia Post’s bottom line’, pg.3 (29/07/09)

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