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Veterans like me know that response to our direct mail is never going to be what it was decades ago. Among the prime reasons....
• Cluttered mailboxes
• Distractions from other media (and particularly now online media)
• The ageing of America – young people don’t respond to direct mail
Hmm, maybe. But I just discovered another reason. Here’s how –
My wife and I moved into a new condo community last November and we’ve made a lot of friends. In mid-November, we decide to throw a holiday cocktail party and invite about 20 of the couples.
“Let me do the invitations,” I said. “After all, I ought to know something about getting response.”
We pick out the 20 couples we know best, so I know the list is pretty good. The offer is pretty good, too – free food and drink and you don’t have to take your car. It’s a Sunday night, so you don’t have a conflict with Saturday big plans and you can even watch the first football game on Sunday.
OK, now for the package. I go buy holiday postcard stationery at Staples. (I don’t get a thing for product placement here). I write the invitation as a funny poem, and I personalize each of the invitations with the couple’s name.
We put the invitations into high quality 6"x9” envelopes and write out each couple’s address. Our address label serves as the corner card.
The invitations go into the mail on Tuesday morning. Mid-day Wednesday, my wife calls me from her sister’s upstate home, asking about response. With a wife like this, who needs clients?
“Nada,” I say. “We only mailed them yesterday.”
Thursday goes by with no response, and I’m beginning to worry about how good the copy was. Maybe I can blame lack of response on the Post Office.
Friday we get our first two responses and they are positive. My wife returns from upstate and over the next three days asks those she runs into about the party. “Invitation?” some of them ask, “we don’t remember seeing an invitation.”
My wife probes further. In her next life, she will undoubtedly return as a fearless investigative reporter. She finds out that some of our new friends/neighbors don’t bother visiting their mailboxes (clustered an average of 100 feet from their front doors) every day, or every other day for that matter. Some of our invitees only check their mailboxes every third or fourth day.
Aha! So we can make sure we have the right list and offer, develop superb creative that stands out in the mailbox. But if we can’t get recipients to their mailboxes, that’s a problem, isn’t it?
I’m not a highly-paid consultant for nothing. My recommendation here: let’s get the Direct Marketing Association to pressure the U.S.P.S. to use a small portion of the next postage increase for a consumer campaign. This would be a “Visit your mailbox every day it’s good exercise and good for the economy (and good for the mental health of mailers)” campaign.
Yes?
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Comments
I am old enough to remember when mail delivery was the most eagerly awaited part of the day. And I had to walk three blocks to the post office and unravel the combination to get my mail.
Posted by: Lewis Green | 11.21.06
Lewis, you're dating yourself here! I, too, remember anticipating the mail, especially when that was the only way out of town friends could communicate with me. Long distance calls were prohibitive during the days of monopoly phone companies!
Lee, I think part of the problem is apathy regarding basic etiquette. Ask anyone who's made a wedding, a Bar/Bat Mitzvah, a sit-down dinner, etc. and you'll likely hear about guests who never RSVP'd - at all!
Saying they receive so much direct mail that they missed the invitation is an excuse, I think. Even though some direct mail marketers are now sending their pieces in invitation envelopes without a return address (tricky), it's pretty hard to miss an upscale, printed invitation to a wedding or a special event.
I remember counting out my cousin and her husband for my son's Bar Mitzvah when they never answered the invitation. Imagine my surprise when they decided to show - and that was for a sit-down luncheon! There are place settings, table placements, etc. It's just rude and inconsiderate.
Unfortunately, this behavior has become quite common.
Posted by: Elaine Fogel | 11.21.06
Lewis, it seems you got the major point of my post. It's that going to the mailbox has moved from being both a necessary and pleasurable activity to an occasional nuisance. In 1964, when I broke in, advertising mail gave people something to do. Then people no longer looked at it that way, but they went to their mailboxes anyway for their bills. While practitioners of direct mail had to get in the "important mail" pile, at least there was mail. Now most of us get our bills online so there is no attraction to draw us to the mailbox.
Posted by: Lee Marc Stein | 11.21.06
For the record, cars of teenagers in my town still seem to enjoy mailboxes for the sport of whacking them with baseball bats occassionally...and I know the snowplow on my street seems to love the sport of taking mine out at least once a winter, as well.
That being said, you're right, Lee. Snail mail doesn't seem to have the same signficance it once did. As a kid, we used to wait at the end of the driveway for the pleasure of meeting the mailman on his daily run. And even 10 years ago, when I was working as a home-based freelance writing, a highlight of my day was waiting for the mail to come...there might be a check for an article therein, or a magazine that had published my stuff.
These days, I confess I'm more like your neighbors in the condo association -- I have to make an effort to check the mailbox. Times change -- and so do we.
p.s. Love this line, "With a wife like this, who needs clients?" : )
Posted by: Ann Handley | 11.21.06
Lee, as I was reading your hilarious story, I was thinking you were going to go in the direction of the new, and unfortunate, trend of people not RSVPing to party invitations. This has been bothering me for a number of years now, because it makes party planning difficult--and it seems to rude to me. OK, just another gripe about how the world is going to hell...The older I get, the more I sound like my mother.
Posted by: Ruth Stevens | 11.22.06