Why can’t UK Royal Mail see the gold in D2D?
To casual observers there is a little bit of the Wild West about the UK door drop marketing sector. Its volumes are expanding, the market is (as yet) unregulated and the full potential of the sector is not fully tapped.
As the last truly unfragmented media channel available to marketers, it seems there’s gold left in them there hills. Experts say the UK market, compared with its European cousins, is nowhere near saturation in terms of the number of items delivered per household.
So are the key door drop distributors, Royal Mail and free newspapers, making hay while the sun shines? Not Royal Mail, if media buyers and door drop brokers are to be believed (see news, page 5; feature, page 49).
Royal Mail’s self-imposed restrictions on its D2D service – long booking lead times, a solitary delivery per day and a limit on the number of items postmen will carry – are a particular bugbear of D2D brokers and their clients.
Though free newspapers are a very viable alternative, speakers at last month’s DMA D2D conference chose to voice their frustration at Royal Mail.
They urged the postal carrier to adopt a more flexible approach to its door drop service and to see D2D as a big window of opportunity.
Will the door drop fraternity get any satisfaction? On the plus side, Royal Mail took the initiative last year to set up a dedicated D2D unit to manage the channel. The department’s manager, Ross Drake, says that Royal Mail does take the channel seriously and that the past year has been all about step-by-step improvements to the service.
Drake has his work cut out for him. Royal Mail is still a state-owned monopoly, in which a shift in mindset happens only slowly. The other hurdle is that D2D is but a small fraction of Royal Mail’s overall revenue of £9bn and so is unlikely to attract priority treatment.
How successful Drake will be remains to be seen, and to be fair to him, he is not over promising on what his fledgling department can achieve.
Yet at a time when Royal Mail needs to sweat its assets, the users of door drops are right to hope that it will recognise the cash cow potential of D2D and adopt a more commercial attitude to its service.
noelle.mcelhatton@haynet.com.
