For years I’ve been collecting mail, because yes, it’s been part of my career. But that only gives me a partial picture of what’s going on at any one time in the universe of direct mail and marketing. So I’m always on the lookout for surveys, reports, and studies about mail, as well as print, marketing, retail, and whatever else that seems like it may offer some new way to understand the environment(s) that we and our customers all operate in.
As a quick aside, I have to tip my hat to Denise Gustavson and her team here at PI for their outstanding work producing The 2025 Printing Industry Census. It’s a fun and interesting read that’s about us, very visual and engaging. And hopefully, it will help guide how companies in the industry hire and grow their workforces.
To help remember what stood out to me this year, I went through my desktop folder of PDFs. Here’s a quick look at three of the top direct mail studies that I read this year, and why they were relevant to me.
1. In a time of digital ad clutter and fatigue, mail can be a profitable alternative. Let’s start with an article by Colorado State University business and marketing professor Jonathan Zhang, published in the Fall issue of MIT Sloan Management Review. In “How Direct Mail Delivers in the Age of Digital Marketing,” he relates how he conducted a range of studies, tests, and surveys involving brands, marketing executives, and consumers. In one experiment, he paired with an e-commerce beauty/personal care company to test and measure Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) for mailed catalogs vs. the digital ad platforms of Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
Direct mail catalogs yielded an average order value of $75, well above the 3 retailers, the highest ROAS by far (55%), and the lowest per customer acquisition cost of $37.50.
I love the empirical research that went into his work here, so if that’s your thing, I recommend checking all of it out.
Read the rest of Paul’s column on Printing Impressions, a publication of PRINTING United Alliance, ASI’s strategic partner.
