3. DEVELOPED IN 8 STRANDS
3
Ethnography
Post ethnography survey
Multisensory Communications: review of academic literature
Tactility
Values: Best Mail
Mail and Digital 1 & 2
Neuroscience
ROI/Effectiveness metrics
4. Mail in the Home
Mail in the Heart
Mail in the Head
Mail in the Wallet
Case Study: The Salvation Army
Summary
Appendix
THE STORY OF THE PRIVATE LIFE OF MAIL
4
6. MAIL GETS OPENED – AT HIGH RATES
6
Statement, bill or information update
Brochure from a company they have ordered from before
Letter – promotion or special offer
Letter – about a product/service they don’t have
Leaflet without an address about a product/service
Leaflet without an address about a promotion/offer
Brochure from a company not ordered from before
83%
71%
69%
60%
59%
54%
54%
OPEN
Source: Royal Mail MarketReach, Ethnographic Quant, Trinity McQueen, 2014
7. 7
MAIL’S JOURNEY ISN’T OVER WHEN
Adults read their mail on average for 22 minutes a day.
IT HITS THE DOORMAT
1.15PM: Collects mail and brings it into the
home with other bags and belongings
1.30PM: Opens mail whilst doing other jobs
2.15PM: Opens parcel
2.30PM: Uses laptop to get details on a piece
of mail received
5.30PM: Uses laptop again to get further
details on the piece of mail from earlier
8.30PM: Brings catalogue into lounge to read
Source: IPA Touchpoints 5 (Data based on Monday – Saturday morning); Royal Mail MarketReach, Media Moments, Trinity McQueen, 2013
8. PEOPLE GIVE MAIL TIME
Mail is kept for extended periods, creating a constant presence in the home.
17 daysfor mail
38 daysfor door drops
45 daysfor bills and statements
8Source: Royal Mail MarketReach, Ethnographic Quant, Trinity McQueen, 2014
9. 9
AND SPACE
80% of adults kept some mail that
companies had sent them in the last four
weeks.
‘The Holding area’ where it is kept
before being dealt with
‘The Pile’ for mail that has been read
and will be revisited
‘The Display area’ for useful or
important items (local information,
time limited offers)
Display Area
Pile
Holding area
Source: TGI, Kantar Media, 2014; Royal Mail MarketReach, Media Moments, Trinity McQueen, 2013
10. MAIL GETS DISPLAYED
39% of people have a dedicated display area for mail in the home
10Source: Royal Mail MarketReach, Ethnographic Quant, Trinity McQueen, 2014
11. MAIL IS SHARED
An average of 23% of mail is shared within a household.
11
Brochure from a company I have ordered from before
Statement, bill or information update
Letter – about a product/service they don’t have
Brochure from a company not ordered from before
Leaflet without an address about a promotion/offer
Letter – promotion or special offer
29%
24%
25%
23%
22%
21%
SHARE
Average of 23%
of mail shared
within a household
Source: Royal Mail MarketReach, Ethnographic Quant, Trinity McQueen, 2014
12. Mail brings a brand into the home where it is not just kept, but
often displayed and shared
It extends reach to additional individuals
It’s seen multiple times
SUMMARY
12
13. MAIL IN THE HEART
CREATING AN EMOTIONAL
RESPONSE
13
15. TOUCH CREATES A POWERFUL
When people can both see and
touch something, they value it
24% more highly than if they
can only see it.
Over a third of people say that
the physical properties of mail
influence how they feel about
the sender.
15
EMOTIONAL RESPONSE
+22% +24%
2.75 2.73
3.36 3.38
0
1
2
3
4
5
Psychological ownership Valuation
VISION ONLY VISION AND TOUCH
Participants were asked to subjectively grade ownership and value on a 7 point scale.
Source: Peck, Joann, and Suzanne B. Shu. The Effect of Mere Touch on Perceived Ownership. Journal of Consumer Research, 2009; IPA Touchpoints 5, 2014
16. PEOPLE FEEL VALUED AND HAVE A
BETTER IMPRESSION OF THE BRAND
16
The emotional impact of mail versus email
I am more likely to take it seriously
It gives me a better impression of that company
It makes me feel more valued
63%
57%
55%
18%
17%
25%
(% True of Mail vs. True of Email)
MAIL EMAIL
Source: Royal Mail MarketReach, Mail and Digital Part 1, Quadrangle, 2013
17. MAIL IN THE HEAD
HOW MAIL IMPACTS THE BRAIN
17
19. THE BRAIN RESPONDS MORE STRONGLY
Mail had a much more powerful overall impact on the key measures of the
neuroscience study than email or TV.
TO MAIL THAN TO TV OR EMAIL
Source: Royal Mail MarketReach, Neuro-Insight 2013 19
168
202
172
127
165
130
105
113
100
0
50
100
150
200
250
Engagement Emotional Intensity Long-term Memory Encoding
Indexvs.'Normal'restingbrain
MAIL EMAIL TV
20. 20
IN A MULTI MEDIA CAMPAIGN
SEQUENCING MAIL LAST MAXIMISES IMPACT
Source: Royal Mail MarketReach, Neuro-Insight, 2013
Mail after TV and email
100 100 100
112
101
106
126
121
110
80
90
100
110
120
130
140
Engagment Emotional Intensity Long-term Memory
Encoding
Indexvs.responsefromfirstexposure
MAIL SEEN FIRST MAIL SEEN SECOND MAIL SEEN THIRD
Engagement
22. 22
MAIL DELIVERS ROI
Mail ROI showed a strong channel performance in BrandScience cases
Revenue Return on Investment of clients using direct mail
Source: Royal Mail MarketReach BrandScience, 2014
0
2
4
6
8
£
RROI (Revenue ROI)
23. 23
Total ROI increased 12% when mail was included in the mix.
MEDIA MULTIPLIER EFFECT
MAIL CREATES A MEASURABLE
Source: Royal Mail MarketReach, BrandScience 2014; advertiser cases including mail versus cases without mail.
4.22
4.63
5…
4.73
4.93
6.31
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Total Comms TV Print
RROI
RROI-NO MAIL RROI-WITH MAIL
24. 24
MAIL DELIVERS NEW AUDIENCES
Adding mail to the mix opens up new responsive audiences. When mail is
added to the schedule
versus email on its own
Source: Royal Mail MarketReach, Mail and Digital Part 1, Quadrangle, 2013
25. 25
INCLUDING MAIL DELIVERED TOP-RANKING
Campaigns that included mail
were:
27% more likely to deliver top-
ranking sales performance
40% more likely to deliver top-
ranking acquisition levels
SALES AND ACQUISITION PERFORMANCE
Source: Royal Mail MarketReach, IPA Databank Meta-Analysis, Peter Field, 2013
+27% +40%
45%
30%
57%
42%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
Sale Acquisition
%Clientslistingtopperforming
improvements
RROI - NO MAIL RROI - WITH MAIL
26. 26
WITH MAIL IN THE MIX, MARKET
SHARE GREW 3x MORE EFFICIENTLY
Mail included in multi-channel campaigns drove market share growth with
3x the efficiency versus non-mail advertisers.
2.9xMarket share growth
for all clients
3.4xMarket share growth
for service sector
Comparing market share growth per 10 Extra Share of Voice points (ESOV) shows the increase in efficiency of advertising plans including mail.
Source: Royal Mail MarketReach, IPA Databank Meta-Analysis, Peter Field, 2013
27. MAIL IN ACTION
The Salvation Army: an award-winning charity case study
THE SALVATION ARMY
27
28. 28
THE SALVATION ARMY GREW NEW
DONORS BY 262% IN 5 YEARS WITH
Source: Royal Mail MarketReach/Mike Colling & Company. Awards: IPA Effectiveness Awards, Silver 2014; DMA
Bronze Award, Best Use of Direct Mail 2012; DMA Gold Award, Best Media Strategy 2011.
Background:
The heart of The Salvation Army’s fundraising is a 6 week
marketing campaign before Christmas, during which they recruit
all their new donors. However, this had been the approach for
years and was tiring.
Solution:
The Salvation Army added both TV and search and
simultaneously more than doubled investment in mail volumes.
Cold mail volume increased +270% to 5.4m while door drop
volume increased 158% to 9.6m.
Results:
The number of new donors recruited grew by 262% and total
donations grew by 48%. £9.5m of immediate incremental income
is projected to become an additional £24.8m over the next five
years, as many new donors give again.
MAIL AT THE CORE
29. 29
MAIL REACHES NEW DONORS WITH
Use door drops for reach; cold mail for precision
PRECISION. NO WASTAGE
69%
52%
49%
52%
55%
97%
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
120%
TV Press Inserts Search Doordrop Address mail
% NEW DONORS
Source: The Salvation Army data, analysis by MC&C
30. 30
MAIL WAS KEY FOR ACQUISTION
The Salvation Army used net cost per new acquisition and other key
metrics, rather than just campaign ROI.
£122.89
£57.54 £56.37
£52.80
£31.88
£22.53
£2.08
£0.00
£20.00
£40.00
£60.00
£80.00
£100.00
£120.00
£140.00
Press Doordrops TV Inserts Radio Direct mail Paid search
COST PER NEW DONOR 2010
Source: MC&C/The Salvation Army, 2010
31. “Direct mail, both addressed and unaddressed, has the unique
capacity to generate more engagement, response and income
per thousand from consumers exposed to it than any other
medium. In these days of attention scarcity that’s a huge value
to advertisers. When properly integrated with broadcast and
digital media its benefits are amplified”.
Salvation Army IPA Effectiveness Award entry, MC&C, 2014 Silver
THE SALVATION ARMY LEARNINGS
31
“Mail forms the absolute backbone of The Salvation Army’s
direct marketing fundraising operations.”
Julius Wolff-Ingham, Head of Marketing and Fundraising, The Salvation Army
33. Mail brings a brand into the home where it is kept, displayed,
and/or shared
Its tactile qualities have powerful emotional and rational impact
that can be identified and proven
Mail makes your message more memorable
Mail drives successful return on investment
When used in integrated campaigns, it can provide a
measurable media multiplier effect
Mail delivers top-ranking sales and acquisition growth and
efficient market share growth
SUMMARY
33
Mail flows through the household – it is passed around, discussed and displayed in more ways and for longer than previously thought.
And rather than being opened and read on the doormat, we saw that participants interact with their mail, fitting it in around their daily life, even revisiting mail later in the day.
The IPA Touchpoints survey shows that on average adults read their mail for 22 minutes a day. This compares to magazines, read on average 14 minutes per day. However, with magazines, attention is split between editorial and advertising. With mail, 100% of attention is on the advertising content itself.
People not only spend time reading advertising mail, they can take their time with it; we’ve seen that they typically keep it around the house for more than two weeks.
In fact, many advertisers report that results from mail come in for 3-6 months or even more.
So mail not only gives brands more time in customers' hands, it gives them more time in their homes.
Mail can be a constant presence for a considerable time
Recent data from Kantar Media’s TGI study shows that 80% of adults kept some mail that companies had been sent to them in the last four weeks.
But people not only give mail time in the home, they also give it a specific space.
Data from IPA Touchpoints 5 confirms that 69% of people have a specific place in the house where they store advertising mail such as coupons, catalogues, brochures and vouchers – all of which helps to keep your message in the household longer.
Those display areas are particularly important – keeping your message visible, like a poster space in the home.
We noticed how mail was used as functional decoration, occupying a designated space in a room.
The follow-up survey supported this, with 39% of people saying they had a dedicated display area for mail, which was usually the kitchen (51% of people who have a dedicated area).
So mail doesn’t just deliver the message, it quite literally nails it to the wall.
By thinking creatively about ways to encourage people to display your mail, it can become visible to everyone in the household.
Mail not only moves around the home, it also moves from person to person.
An average of 23% of all mail gets passed around other people in the home or household, extending the reach of your message beyond the named recipient. And this increases to 29% when it’s a brochure from a company which the recipient has bought from before.
Sharing is, understandably, more common in shared households.
But since the inhabitants of shared households tend to be younger, this has particular implications for the audience for mail.
For example, according to IPA Touchpoints 5, there is evidence to suggest that 15-34 year olds are:
42% more likely to find mail memorable than the UK population as a whole
71% more likely to trust the advertising mail they receive
So, if a mail piece is a conversation starter, it might not only get additional people seeing it, it can potentially get your brand talked about over and over again.
Behavioural marketing experts have investigated the importance of touch in human psychology.
Multisensory stimulation seems to alter the way the brain processes messages – often making processing quicker.
Physical contact results in what psychologists call the ‘endowment effect’ – a sense of ownership over an item which makes people value it more highly.
Scientific experiments have shown that people value something they can see and touch 24% more highly than something they can only see.
Meaning that the physical nature of mail gives it a sense of importance as well as influencing how they feel about the sender.
A 2013 article in Scientific American showed that there is still a strong preference for reading on paper, driven by the physical properties of mail.
And this preference for reading on paper does in fact translate into a preference for advertising mail over email communication.
For example, we discovered that 63% of people say that they are more likely to take mail seriously, compared to just 18% of people for email.
But not only does mail give a better impression of the company than email (55% vs 25%), people also feel more valued when they receive mail rather than email (57% vs 17%).
.
So why are people’s brains reacting in such a uniformly positive way to advertising presented in a physical medium?
Well, it could be that stimulating more than one sense speeds up the brain’s ability to process information. For example, in learning experiments performance is consistently better when vision is accompanied by sound, when compared to just vision alone.
And the same applies to touch because it appears that the tactile effects of mail do something similar by making the absorption of messages easier, potentially making them more memorable.
In Kantar Media’s TGI survey, 80% of respondents say that they can remember seeing or reading some advertising mail sent to them in the last four weeks. And when we asked about advertising mail that the respondents found useful or interesting, 60% said that it helped to keep the sender’s brand top of mind.
Mail delivers a stronger brain response, on these measures, than tv or email.
This response to mail is also universal. Whilst different indicators are stronger for different age groups, the overall effect remains strong regardless of age.
Mail creates a stronger brain response than tv or email.
In a multimedia campaign, how can we get mail to work the most effectively with other media channels like tv and email?
We found that placing mail last, after TV and email, generated the maximum effect in our Neuro-Insight research.
So, we have seen the role mail plays in people’s homes and how it impacts positively on the heads and hearts of consumers.
What our research also shows is that mail is highly effective at delivering return on investment (ROI), performing not just in terms of sales and direct response, but also on incremental reach, efficient growth of market share, brand switching and cost per new customer acquisition.
But mail also helps in getting new audiences to engage and respond so it can make a
significant difference when integrated into multi-channel communications planning.
We believe it is important to demonstrate the impact mail has on the full range of
marketing and communications measures and to see how these lead to tangible
business results.
We commissioned BrandScience to conduct a meta-analysis of advertiser econometric models – 401 cases (56 of which used direct mail and 42 of which used door drops), each representing one year with an average of 3 campaigns per year.
They discovered that mail’s ROI performance is strong and that it is similar to television and above that achieved by most other media channels covered in the analysis.
Door drops also deliver excellent performance – around the same level as OOH (out of home / posters).
Of the 56 cases using direct mail, we found that mail and door drops did well versus other channels, and that both deserved to be included/considered in their own right.
When mail was included in an integrated plan, total communications revenue ROI jumped from £4.22 to £4.73 – a 12% increase.
The inclusion of mail particularly showed increased revenue ROI from campaigns using TV and print. This is in line with the neuroscience research where we saw a strong interaction between mail and TV.
Adding mail to the mix also delivers new responsive audiences. This is not just from media multiplier theory.
Royal Mail consumer research shows us that different people like to be communicated with through different channels at different points in the customer journey. In our Mail & Email research for example, we found that 68% of people prefer companies to use some communication by mail.
With mail added to the mix, in our Digital and Mail: Part 1 research, we could identify that 13% more consumers visited the sender’s website, 21% more consumers made purchases and 35% more consumers redeemed coupons or vouchers .
The BrandScience analysis focused on ROI, but we also wanted to confirm that mail delivered on other commercial measures.
Peter Field, an independent marketing effectiveness consultant, analysed the IPA Effectiveness Awards case studies data and compared the metrics between campaigns that used mail and those that did not.
The analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Awards databank identified that campaigns that included mail were 27% more likely to deliver top-ranking sales performance and 40% more likely to deliver top-ranking acquisition levels, than campaigns that didn’t.
Furthermore the results of this analysis showed that where mail was included it drove market share growth with 3 x the efficiency of those that did not include mail.
A brand spending the same amount of money on two campaigns, would therefore experience three times the amount of market share growth from one that included mail than one that did not.
The Salvation Army, working with Mike Colling & Company (MC&C), increased investment in both mail and door drops over 5 years.
By integrating mail with digital and broadcast media, and by accurately attributing results and understanding the roles each channel plays in the media mix, MC&C increased The Salvation Army’s net income and profitability.
MC&C were awarded silver at the IPA Effectiveness Awards 2014, to follow their DMA Gold for Media Strategy in 2011.
With TV included, door drop response was uplifted to a level that supported a significant increase in volume of activity.
Door drops worked for reach mopping up response and addressed mail worked for precision finding new donors.
When using mail for acquisition, before mailing, the new names are deduped against the client database to ensure any current clients do not receive ‘acquisition’ mail. Therefore, the campaign represents almost 100% accuracy in only reaching prospective new customers.
The other media cannot eliminate wastage in this way, and so, as above, larger proportions of the audience reached are currently customers who technically can be reached with a crm programme i.e. in a more efficient way. Often ‘new’ cost per acquisition is not considered or results analysed as such. Instead with an overall cost per acquisition or ROI this efficiency can be hidden. (see the next slide)
The primary objective for The Salvation Army was the recruitment of NEW donors. Mail performed poorly on year one ROI due to high costs per contact. However, when measured directly against the objective of acquiring net new donors, it was the most effective generator. Being the second most efficient channel, it was also the largest volume source of net new donors. As seen on the previous slide, the individual level targeting inherent in the channel meant 97% of new donors recruited by mail were new to the organisation, compared with an average of 50% from other channels.
So addressed mail gave the best cost per new acquisition of all channels apart from paid search. Paid search was restricted to brand and advertising terms only (no generic search) – so there was only a restricted volume available at this level of efficiency. Other channels generated income from current donors as well as from new ones and so were a more expensive way of achieving this than directly targeting current donors.
Mail then remained the backbone of the campaign and its volumes increased 2.7x over the five years. MC & C was able to demonstrate, in their IPA Effectiveness Award winning entry, how they successfully mixed together an integrated campaign using other channels like TV and digital with mail and doordrops to maximum effect.