Drop in financial direct mail skews ‘Top 100’ figures
Direct mail spend fell by nine per cent in 2004 among the UK's top 100 biggest spenders – a drop of £78.5m. Almost half (41) of the top 100 mailers reduced spend last year, Marketing Direct's Top 100 Mailers report has revealed.
However, total direct spend rose by 1.7 per cent (up £32m to £1.9bn), accounting for 23 per cent of all marketing spend, according to the latest IPA Bellwether Report.
This discrepancy can be explained by cutbacks in the financial services sector, according to Richard Roche, head of media markets at Royal Mail.
He believes the figures are skewed by cuts in the sector. "Financial services companies have a masking effect on everyone else," he explained.
2005 Top 100 Direct Mail Spenders: Mail spend down as targeting improves
Marketing Direct, p 56 06-16-2005
By David Murphy
16 June, 2005
Better targeting helped reduce mailing volumes in 2004 as direct mail took a smaller share of DM budgets.
A year ago, our 2003 Top 100 Mailers survey showed many companies cutting their spend on direct marketing in general and direct mail in particular. It's a similar story this time round. The number of companies in the top 100 reducing their spend on direct mail over the previous year has shot up to 41, with the same number spending less on direct marketing overall.
But this is in spite of figures in the latest IPA Bellwether Report, released in April, that show direct marketing now accounts for 23 per cent of all marketing spend. Why the discrepancy?
The financial services sector is the main culprit. In fact, says Richard Roche, head of media markets at Royal Mail, the overall figures are skewed by cutbacks in this sector. "Financial services companies have a masking effect on everyone else," he says. "Virtually every other sector is enjoying double-digit growth."
Other channels
If our survey, using data supplied by Thomson Intermedia, shows anything this year, it's the impact of other direct channels on direct mail. For while total direct spend among our top 100 shows a respectable 1.7 per cent increase, up by £32m to £1.9bn, direct mail spend has fallen over the same period. In 2003, the total for the Top 100 mailers was £974.8m. In 2004, that fell to £891.5m – a drop of £78.5m, or nine per cent.
Eleven companies in our table increased their overall spend, while reducing their direct mail spend. These include sixth-placed Norwich Union Direct, which increased overall spend by £7.2m, while reducing direct mail spend, if only by a few hundred thousand pounds. There were more dramatic changes at 36th-placed Alliance & Leicester (spend up £3.6m; direct mail spend down £3.8m) and 37th-placed DFS (spend up £8.8m; direct mail spend down £2.5m).
In all, 30 companies reduced both overall and direct mail spend in 2004, while 31 companies increased both. Six companies cut their overall direct budget, while increasing their direct mail spend. The most notable of these was CitiFinancial, which cut its overall direct spend by over £5m to £13m, while increasing its direct spend by £3.5m to just short of £11m.
One of the biggest cuts was at last year's first-placed MBNA, down a dramatic 45 per cent. Even so, the spend of £36.7m is enough to give the company third place in this year's table.
MBNA head of data strategy Ronnie Bagdonavicius concedes that MBNA has channelled funds into areas other than direct mail. "We've been putting a lot of effort into online activity," he says. "We've also been doing a lot of relationship building in the background with our key strategic partners. We have over 700 affinity deals in place now for a wide range of branded cards, including sports and charities, and there's a lot of associated sales promotion activity."
Like others, MBNA has been working to rid itself of the carpet-bombing image sometimes associated with the company.
"Targeting is now extremely important to us," says Bagdonavicius. "The modelling team has been working very hard on developing new modelling techniques to help us target our mailings more accurately."
Thomas Adalbert, managing director of data owner The Preference Service, notes: "There has been a massive push into online advertising and telemarketing for loans and mortgages. We have seen companies like MBNA and Capital One on a drive to cut mailings by half and become much more targeted. It's a massive change for companies who were doing 90 million mailings a year to cut back to 45 million."
You could be forgiven for thinking that Royal Mail might be upset by the prospect of falling mail volumes, but Roche says not. "If we want mail as a medium to continue to grow its share, it has to move forward and retain its effectiveness, and one of its strengths is its ability to target," he says. "When there is a greater focus on controlling costs and delivering results, then we have to support that, even if it has a short-term impact on mailing volumes."
Adalbert argues that the current fad for telemarketing cannot continue for much longer. "The telemarketing industry will collapse in the next two years because the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) is growing so phenomenally," he says. "We recently had a list with phone numbers for 21 million households. Eight million were ex-directory, and another eight million were TPS-registered."
David Coupe, managing director of Experian Marketing Services, believes there's an irrefutable logic to financial services companies using direct mail to tout for new business. "Any move away from direct mail is purely cyclical," he says. "There will not be any permanent shift, because what they sell is a complex product and they can't sell it as effectively any other way. There are certain products, especially financial products, where the British public likes to sit down and read the small print before they buy."
Heavyweight performers
As in 2003, the top 10 mailers account for a disproportionately large share of the overall spend – nearly £300m, or a third of the overall total. While this is 11 per cent down on the top 10 spend last year, it's just a percentage point down in terms of the proportion of the overall spend.
At the other end, 22 companies dropped out of the rankings, most notably Which?. The publisher finished in 43rd place last year, with a direct mail spend of just over £7m. Other notable absentees are AOL (49th last year), Oxfam (59th) and Littlewoods Extra (67th).
Of the new entrants, 14 are in the bottom quartile, but others are higher. Procter & Gamble comes in at 56 with a spend of just under £5m, while Zurich Financial Services pips it at 54 with a spend of £5.2m.
The highest entrant is Royal Bank of Scotland's Mint credit card, straight in at 30 with a spend of £9.15m. The Mint launch campaign was memorable enough to win two awards, one from the Institute of Financial Services, the second from tank!/DMA (see case study, left).
There are three new faces in the top 10. BSkyB has leapt from 26th place to eight, having more than doubled its direct mail budget from £10.6m to £21.7m. It is, in fact, the biggest direct spender overall by some way, with a total spend of £103.3m. Only Lloyds TSB (£78m) and British Telecom (£73m) come anywhere close.
Financial services supplier Goldfish moves up four places to nine, while the AA moves into the top 10 from 18th last year, on the back of a 22 per cent increase in spend to £17.5m. Loans.co.uk moves from ninth place to fifth this time – its spend of £28.3m up a third on last year.
"We advertise online and on TV, but direct mail is by far the largest expenditure," says Loans.co.uk marketing director Andy Pelley. As it is a broker, the company does not have to target prospects as accurately as individual lenders, since it sells its ability to tailor loans to clients. And its customer base, says Pelley, is atypical.
"Ads in the tabloid press tend to target the type of person who usually struggles to get a loan," he says. "But people use us much like they use an insurance broker. We're not just dealing with people who can't get a loan elsewhere."
Big movers in this year's table include Freedom Finance Corporation, up from 52nd last year to 14th; HFS Loans (22 from 66); and Egg (24 from 45). These are all outstripped, however, by Virgin Money. A new entrant last year at number 90, it has shot up to 38 this time round, boosting its total direct spend to £8.6m, of which all but £1m goes on direct mail.
The increase, says Virgin Money marketing director Trevor Field, came largely on the back of the launch of a general insurance programme in 2004, covering home, motor, travel and pets. "Regular direct mail was a big part of the launch programme to tell people what was available, and it remains important now," says Field.
There are big drops, too. Book Club Associates (BCA) slashed its direct mail budget by more than half to £13.8 million, and fell 11 places to 16 in the process. BCA joint head of marketing, Phil Haslam concedes that direct mail spend in 2004 was down on 2003, but claims the cut was closer to 10 per cent than 50 per cent.
The company, he says, adopted a "survival of the fittest" approach to the 20 clubs it runs. "We stopped recruiting into our Irish and European clubs and focused on our core UK clubs," says Haslam. At the same time, BCA also improved its targeting – pacing the timing of mailings through each quarter and targeting by genre.
"There's more lasering involved, but it is much more effective," says Haslam.
Barclays, which finished in fourth spot last year, saw its direct mail spend fall from £30.2m to £12.7m, and occupies 18th place in this year's table. Falling even further was Royal Bank of Scotland (10th last year, 52nd this), while three companies fell more than 50 places. These were AXA Sun Life, down from 21 to 71; Shop Direct Group, down from 31 to 83; and Reader's Digest, down from 14 to 67 after cutting its direct mail spend from to £15.8m in 2003 to £4.4m in 2004.
Like BCA, Reader's Digest contends that its direct mail spend was cut by much less than reported by Thomson Intermedia. UK marketing director Andrew Wilton says the company's strategy is "not to reduce DM spend, but to increase orders and to do so more effectively through more efficient targeting".
When consumers were given the option to opt out of the Electoral Roll, says Wilton, it served as a wake-up call for the company. "When the Electoral Roll was dragged from under our feet, it was a huge threat to us," he says. "But it focused our minds on the need for quality over quantity, for better targeting, and more use of external data sources."
Reader's Digest, Wilton says, now tries to make its mailings more relevant. "We have high hopes that we can harness the ever-decreasing cost of digital print to make our mailouts far more relevant. We've always done it with copy, but now we can use personalised imagery as well."
Thomson Intermedia head of insight Paul Ryan says that any discrepancies between the Thomson Intermedia data and clients' actual direct mail spend are the result of two factors. The first is that the Thomson Intermedia data is derived from sample-based panel research and so is best at gauging larger, broadly-targeted mailings. More targeted, niche mailings are harder for the panel to pick up.
He also points out that when clients make comparisons between their actual spend on direct mail and the survey data, they should note that the Thomson Intermedia figures mostly reflect postage costs. "So while some clients say they have spent more than is reported here, this is possibly due to the fact that lower postage costs are being offset by the increased costs associated with improved targeting, such as better quality data," he says.
One of the other big fallers, AXA Sun Life, says its direct mail cutbacks stem from a move into new areas of marketing activity. Its AXA Sun Life Direct (ASLD) arm is using and developing all of the key direct distribution channels.
"In the medium term, we still see direct mail playing a key role in our overall distribution strategy, although we also see DRTV, outbound telephony and the web as equally important," says AXA Sun Life press relations manager Peter Webb. "The reduction in our marketing spend is driven by a review of our product and business strategy, rather than any indication that we see these distribution channels declining."
Catalogues hold up
It's tempting to use the position of Shop Direct Group (formerly GUS) to show the continuing decline of the catalogue sector, but in general it held up remarkably well, with several catalogue companies, including Matalan, Freemans and Grattan, improving on last year's position.
Andrew Wilson, managing director of The Catalogue Consultancy, says the market is now firmly divided into two camps. In one are the "big books", like GUS, which traditionally used catalogues as a means of selling credit. As finance has become more widely available, says Wilson, their business model has "dropped to bits".
In the other camp are niche catalogue retailers such as Boden and The White Company. Their success is built on smaller catalogues targeting consumers much more precisely.
"They have been very successful, but there's a lot more slicing and dicing of the database, so, as you mail smaller sections of the database, mailing volumes inevitably drop," says Wilson.
But one home shopping insider points out that the analysis ignores the fact that some home shopping groups now have big books and niche direct catalogues in the same portfolio, and are taking a multi-channel approach to selling. "They don't mind how they take orders. If customers want to buy online from them, that's fine. If they'd rather call and order by phone, it's more expensive, but it's also a more active channel that provides another opportunity to sell."
Finance leads the way
To no one's surprise, the financial services sector, this year as last, is responsible for the lion's share of direct mail spend in the UK. Its £621m spent on direct mail in 2004 accounted for 70 per cent of all DM activity, even if the sector spend was five per cent down on the previous year.
Nevertheless, 2004 did see something of a loss of faith in direct mail among some financial services companies, according to Sean Larrangton-White, founder of financial services forum tank!.
"What we're seeing is the tail-end of a longstanding problem of overfishing in a limited prospect pool," he says. "When response starts dropping, people start to question the value of direct mail and cut back on it."
The tank! forum is attempting to resolve the situation, bringing together "15-20 major financial services companies" in a group called the Customer Contact Test Lab to analyse various factors that can influence the success of a DM campaign. One such, he believes, is the use of email in tandem with direct mail.
"It can bring a significant uplift in mail response, but only a handful of firms are doing it," he says. "We have measured it and seen an uplift of up to 40 per cent in the publishing sector."
Toiletries and cosmetics seem to have given up on direct mail. In 2003, the sector spent just under £800,000 on direct mail, but this is more than 20 times the £37,000 spent in 2004. Best growth came from the automotive sector, up 115 per cent at £7.2m, and from the electrical and household sector, up 23 per cent at £9.9m.
Acquisition not retention
Direct mail is still, first and foremost, a medium for customer acquisition rather than retention (see table, page 24).
Of the top 10 companies only one, MBNA, spends more than 20 per cent of its total spend on customers as opposed to prospects. In most cases, spend on customers is less than 10 per cent, often less than five per cent, of the total.
This may reflect the offering. Loans.co.uk offers secured consolidation loans, for example, and, as marketing director Andy Pelley says: "You don't really want to go back to people and encourage them to run their debts up again."
There are exceptions. Barclays spent £8.2m on mailings to prospects and more than half this amount, £4.4m, on mailings to existing customers.
British Gas spent £7.4m on prospects and £4.2m on customers, while NatWest spent £4.2m on prospects and £3.9m on customers.
Four actually spent more on mailing existing customers than prospects. These included Alliance & Leicester (£2.9m on prospects, £5m on customers); Tesco (£2m on prospects, £2.4m on customers); and Littlewoods Personal Finance (£515,000 on prospects, £2.6m on customers).
If the adage is true that it costs much more to gain a new customer than keep an existing one, it's odd that more companies are not using direct mail as a relationship-building channel. Likewise, if direct marketers are investing the time and effort to improve their targeting and reduce mailing volumes, it's surprising the industry finds it so hard to shake off its junk mail image.
Next year, perhaps.
HOW WE CAME TO OUR FIGURES
The data in our tables has been supplied by Thomson Intermedia using the GfK Hometrack panel to monitor UK direct mail and door-drop activity.
A minimum of 6,000 people on the panel report on the direct mail and door drops they receive every month. The panel is ABC-audited to ensure its size and representativeness.
Data is weighted by social class, ISBA region, gender and age, among other criteria, to estimate national mailing volumes. A spend figure is calculated based on the weight of the mail pack and Royal Mail's rate card to calculate total expenditure figures. These estimates do not include mailings such as statements or other customer communications, such as reward card information.
Figures include estimated print production costs and are regularly benchmarked by several hundred blue-chip companies. Door drops include any unaddressed mail, inserts in free papers or hand-delivered leaflets. Spend figures for press are deduced from ad size and rate card data.
Internet advertising estimates are based on the occurrence details collected from the top 350 web sites in conjunction with cost per thousand rates. Outdoor spend figures are based on industry supplied data in conjunction with the OAA.
TOP 100 MAILERS BY SECTOR 2004 2003 Change Finance £621,754,176 £652,876,155 -5% Retail £90,432,920 £130,255,491 -31% Entertainment, £73,129,504 £90,680,772 -19% media & leisure Education & charities £37,001,356 £34,708,924 7% IT & communications £32,900,798 £30,891,153 7% Electrical & household £9,946,385 £8,086,190 23% Automotive £7,205,701 £3,359,110 115% Government & utilities £7,047,693 £6,565,034 7% Travel £5,061,963 £4,430,363 14% Pharmaceutical £4,748,700 £4,148,280 14% FMCG £2,190,609 £7,955,273 -72% Toiletries & cosmetics £37,125 £793,247 -95% Other n/a £10,600 n/a Total £891,456,930 £974,760,593 -9%
CASE STUDY: DOGS TRUST (NO 65)
Dogs Trust, founded in 1891, is the UK's largest dog welfare charity and operates 15 rescue and rehoming centres. Fundraising income in 2004 was £19.5 million, of which, according to Dogs Trust marketing director Adrian Burder, 95 per cent came from direct marketing activity of one kind or another. "We had £12m in legacies last year, and a very high proportion of that came from people on our database," he says.
According to Burder, 80 per cent of the Dogs Trust database is female, and much younger than the typical charity database.
"Five or six years ago, we were very dependent on the traditional charity donor, the 60-year-old woman," he says. "But we have managed to bring this right down by developing products that appeal across a wider age range. Age is not really an indicator for us any more." Typically, someone on the Dogs Trust database will receive around 10 postal communications a year from the charity.
"We have a full portfolio of products, so there's a range of things we can talk about, from becoming a member to sponsoring a dog, from legacy prompts to the Dogs Trust credit card," says Burder.
"It helps keep things fresh. We like to produce direct mail that people want to open. People are getting more DM-literate, so if we can hit them with something fresh that makes them laugh, the chances of success and building loyalty among donors is greatly enhanced."
And direct mail spend, says Burder, will continue to increase in the future. "It's been increasing for the past 10 years or so and will continue to do so," he says. "It works for us, it's our lifeblood."
CASE STUDY: MINT (NO 31)
The credit card sector is pretty saturated, so any launch must find a way of cutting through the clutter. Royal Bank of Scotland's Mint card, launched in January 2004, clearly did just that, picking up two awards in the process.
The first was the award for "Most Innovative Marketing/Advertising Campaign" from the Institute of Financial Services in November. Then in February, the Mint card picked up the tank!/DMA People's Choice Award for "Best Credit Card Direct Mail".
"We were particularly pleased with the People's Choice Award," says RBS and Mint media relations manager Cristina Rebollo. "It's one of the most prestigious awards, with no submissions and 244,000 major mailings across all industry sectors in the UK over the year eligible to win." While the advertising and DM campaign was memorable, the product itself clearly played a part. Apart from the interest rate, the Mint card has a unique feature in its "mc2" shape option, the first change in credit card shape in the UK market for 37 years.
TOP 10 INTERNET SPENDERS 2004 Rank 2004 Company Place in Top 100 Mailers 1 £9,988,569 BSkyB 8 2 £9,611,564 O2 – 3 £7,558,528 Dell Computer Corporation – 4 £6,440,276 British Telecommunications 30 5 £6,263,652 AOL (UK) – 6 £5,137,513 Guardian Newspapers – 7 £4,311,519 Microsoft – 8 £3,814,674 Capital One Bank 2 9 £3,533,061 eBay – 10 £3,267,127 Tiscali – TOP 10 DOOR DROP SPENDERS 2004 Rank 2004 Company Place in Top 100 Mailers 1 £23,306,490 BSkyB 8 2 £21,105,664 Alliance & Leicester 36 3 £20,284,440 Norwich Union Direct 6 4 £18,428,996 Somerfield – 5 £13,859,968 Hillarys – 6 £13,705,121 Lloyds TSB Group 1 7 £12,438,937 Sainsbury's 63 8 £10,682,654 Tesco 61 9 £10,398,942 Churchill 34 10 £9,797,049 Capital One Bank 2 TOP 10 OUTDOOR SPENDERS 2004 Rank 2004 Company Place in Top 100 Mailers 1 £30,859,076 Lever Faberge – 2 £13,554,081 O2 – 3 £13,044,000 Masterfoods – 4 £12,662,135 COI – 5 £12,567,509 United International Pictures – 6 £11,727,699 Ford 82 7 £11,486,843 BT 30 8 £10,951,981 BSkyB 8 9 £10,279,856 BBC – 10 £9,024,883 Warner Brothers –
CASE STUDY: READER'S DIGEST (No 67)
Reader's Digest cut its spending on direct mail in 2004, but that's not a sign that the medium is losing its appeal, according to marketing director Andrew Wilton. "Direct mail accounts for by far the largest share of the business and that will almost certainly remain the case," he says.
Reader's Digest has been experimenting with digital printing in an attempt to make its mailing more personal. It has also put a lot more effort into profiling its database and targeting offers more closely at sections of it.
"The cost of digital printing puts a lot of people off, but we cannot allow the cost to put us off," says Wilton.
This drive for personalisation is part of a bigger picture, he adds.
He believes there is still a lot of work for the DM industry to do to rid itself of its 'junk mail' image.
"It's a label we need to lose, but there's a lot of work to be done.
It rests with companies like us that have been at forefront of the industry to work hard at being good corporate citizens, use suppression files, and do what we can to reduce waste."
