DM and e-Mail Marketing Growing in UK

Direct mail marketing has lost none of its popularity, especially for financial services companies. But are they going to take up digital? In the face of an advertising recession, direct mail has been showing continual growth, with spending in the UK rising 4.6% in the first quarter of 2003 and total expenditure at £658.2 million, according to the DMIS, which provides direct mail figures for Royal Mail. But that’s not necessarily bad news for digital marketing. Again, according to Royal Mail, 42% of marketers using direct mail also use email marketing, and this figure rises to 50% among the top 500 advertisers. More marketers and agencies are realising that digital media, such as SMS and email, can enhance their use of direct mail in an integrated campaign. ‘We see email and SMS as complementary to the established strengths of mail media,’ says Tim Rivett, head of advertising markets at Royal Mail. The company is so confident of this that it has launched two email-marketing services, which equip advertisers with tools to develop and run email-marketing campaigns they can integrate with direct mail. Users of direct mail should ensure their interactive communications, whether web or email, are consistent with the mailings they send out, in terms of branding and message. For example, if mailers include a web address, this should take users to a splash page relevant to the message or offer being communicated rather than to the company’s generic homepage. In theory, companies which rely on direct mail for a large part of their marketing activity should also be investing in digital media to enhance the effectiveness of their mailings. ‘A lot of heavy direct-mail users are either using or considering using email,’ says Rivett. According to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), the biggest spenders in the sector are financial services and home-shopping firms. ‘Home-shopping companies, such as Argos and Next, use email a lot and very effectively,’ he adds. ‘Financial services companies are slowly getting into email, but they are very concerned about potentially damaging their brand by taking it into a new environment. On the other hand, email makes home shopping really sing.
(Source: Revolution, Charlotte Goddard reporting)