Royal Mail direct mail compaign
Malcolm Oliver, a management consultant specialising in marketing and strategy in financial services, on why he likes Royal Mail’s continuing campaign to attract small businesses.
The brief: The introduction of the postal preference system, which lets people opt out of all direct mailings and has the requirement that companies obtain consent to include someone on a mailing list, has done much to reduce the volume of irrelevant “junk” mail that we receive. But direct mail still has an image problem, with many potential senders wary of exposing their customers to unwanted mailshots and deeply sceptical of the claims and motivations of the agencies that produce them.
This campaign aims to boost demand for Royal Mail’s services in an increasingly competitive market and encourage small businesses to send more direct mail by convincing them of its effectiveness.
The campaign: A continuing series of press advertisements and mailouts supported by a website. The latest, named “The importance of marketing in an economic downturn”, consists of 500 words, which begin by emphasising the need to maintain -or even increase -advertising and research before going on to promote direct mail as an effective marketing tool.
Why it works: There is a nice symmetric resonance in a direct marketing campaign promoting direct marketing, but Royal Mail’s programme focused on the needs of small and medium-sized businesses has a rather deeper purpose -to convince them that it is an effective part of the marketing mix and should command a greater share of their advertising wallet.
Although we all like to say how much we hate it, Royal Mail is a trusted brand and the campaign builds on this. It demonstrates that trust by offering a balanced perspective and intruding only as far as the customer wants. So the message is not that direct mail is the most important weapon in the marketing arsenal, but rather that it is a key element of an integrated and balanced communications plan.
So the “importance of marketing in an economic downturn” mailout emphasises first the need to maintain both advertising and research to establish how customers’ needs and expectations are changing because of the downturn. Only then does it promote the value of direct mail as an accountable tool in a responsive marketing campaign.
About 500 words of well-written prose are enough to demonstrate the case for direct mail. There is an impressive website that includes an interactive market research programme, an excellent report and a one-to-one follow-up from Royal Mail’s account teams. It looks nice, too.
