Seventy Four Percent of Marketers Agree Direct Mail Is More Effective than Email, According to Lob Survey

Lob’s annual 2023 State of Direct Mail Marketers Insights finds investment in the channel is increasing in 2023 as consumers report regularly reading direct mail

Lob, the leading direct mail automation platform, released its 2023 State of Direct Mail report, in partnership with Comperemedia, to understand how enterprise marketers use direct mail to drive growth, how they measure the impact, how marketing budgets are changing, and what the future holds for direct mail. The study found 74% of marketers believe direct mail delivers the best ROI, response rate, and conversion rate when compared to other channels, including email.

The report surveyed 250 marketing professionals who work at North American companies with more than 1,000 employees across financial services/banking, eCommerce, retail, healthcare, insurance, and nonprofit. Sixty-four percent of respondents say their companies conduct business through both online and physical locations with most stating their mail volume ranges from 100,000 to 100 million mailpieces annually.

Marketers are responding to consumers’ openness to direct mail by investing more in the channel—despite recession rumblings and tech layoffs.

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Report findings include:

• Fifty-eight percent of marketers have more marketing budget allocated to direct mail in 2023 than they did in 2022:
  • 69% of marketers have up to 25% of their total marketing budget allocated to direct mail
  • 20% of marketers have 26-50% of their total marketing budget allocated to direct mail
  • 11% of marketers have more than 50% of their total marketing budget allocated to direct mail
• 81% of marketers who use a software platform for direct mail agree it delivers the best response rate of all channels their company uses today. This shifts to 70% for respondents who do not use a software platform. Marketers who automate direct mail reap the benefits of better response rates as the result of being able to create more targeted, personalized, and trackable campaigns.
• The need to measure and manage direct mail spend is increasing. Thirty-six percent of marketers struggle with poor response rates and 32% report bad address data. Only 40% use a technology platform to execute direct mail campaigns, which can solve for some of these issues and improve targeting, improved data tracking, and high-level personalization.

“We are seeing a growing trend of marketers increasing their use of direct mail, and this report underscores that notion,” said Ritu Kapoor, CMO, Lob. “The key learning we see in the data is the power of automation and technology in direct mail efforts. Those who are using direct mail platforms and integrating and measuring those campaigns holistically with digital marketing investments are seeing the most value.”

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