Promoting Direct Mail – The Experience of the Nigerian Post
Promoting Direct Mail – The Experience of the Nigerian Post
Read MoreTag: direct mail
Homeserve switches to TNT Post
TNT Post confirms that Homeserve, the home emergency specialist, has switched from Royal Mail to TNT Post. The contract is to handle over 100 million mail items a year. Homeserve uses both TNT Post’s Premier and PremierSort services. Premier is used for the majority of items that Homeserve hands over to TNT Post including marketing mailings and policy and renewal documents. By the end of the year TNT Post expects to have handled more than 8 million items for the company in just 3 months.
Read MoreRoyal Mail practices what it preaches and encourages media integration
Royal Mail has launched an integrated business to business campaign to demonstrate the power of combining direct mail and digital media.
The integrated campaign called “Meet Mr Complete” features direct mail and a microsite both created by Proximity London. It centres on the idea of integration being a more complete way to communicate with customers. Recent research by Royal Mail revealed that integrating digital advertising with direct mail campaigns can increase customer spend by almost 25 per cent.
Meet Mr Complete targets more than 5,000 business people to demonstrate that using digital and direct mail together achieves greater impact with consumers.
Activity begins with a personalised direct mail pack designed to look like a computer desktop. Inside each pack are instructions on how recipients can fold the mailer to create their own origami Mr Complete man. To encourage further engagement with the campaign a unique personalised web address is printed in each mailing which will take recipients through to an individualised Meet Mr Complete microsite.
Once online customers are guided through their own personal site by Mr Complete; an interactive 3D animated character, who demonstrates the benefits of integrating direct mail and digital media. Mr Complete finishes the journey by offering a follow up phone call from a Royal Mail media expert.
The campaign concludes with a final direct mail pack with a hand-crafted Mr Complete origami man personalised with the recipient’s name and reminding them of the positive brand benefits and increased campaign effectiveness that integrating direct mail with their digital offering can bring.
Read MorePostal rates rise; union negotiates over its future
The cost of a regular stamp goes up today from NIS 1.50 to NIS 1.55. Bulk mail rates have dropped a bit, but most of the 78 different postal charges have increased significantly.
Few of the changes made by the Communications Ministry, however, have found favor with Israel Postal Company workers who have been threatening a strike but hope that negotiations with management over the next few days will lead to a compromise.
The union has been struggling with the ministry for a year and a half, demanding that bulk mail rates be cut significantly to win customers away from private entrepreneurs who are offer cheap but profitable services in the Dan Region, while the Postal Company has to provide services throughout the country, including in the periphery, where services operate at a loss.
The union says Communications Minister Ariel Attias has yet to produce a general license setting down what services the Postal Company – which was established last year in place of the Postal Authority – may offer. The union also wants a “security net” for the employees, 450 of whom have been sent on early pension in the last three years. The workers claim management wants to fire hundreds more in the next two years. The union is also demanding that management allow the company to offer many more financial and marketing services to make up for the loss of income from their hoped-for significant reduction in mass mailing rates.
Read MoreACMA believes USPS should be very concerned about catalogue cuts
The executive director of the American catalogue Mailers Association (ACMA) told a congressional subcommittee that the U.S. Postal Service should be very concerned about many catalogers who have been forced to cut prospect mailings due to exorbitant postal rate increases.
ACMA Executive Director Hamilton Davison testified before the House Subcommittee on Federal Workforce, Postal Service, and the District of Columbia on Oct. 30 during a hearing titled, “Will Increased Postal Rates put Mailers Out of Business?”
The response that should alarm the Postal Service the most, Davison testified, is that “catalogers are deciding to cut prospect mailings – a vital source for new business and the key to the industry’s continued growth.” Cutting prospect mailings today “limits postal revenue tomorrow,” he added.
Standard Mail flats were hit hard by the May 14 postal rate increases. “It’s been brutal,” Davison said. “We expected 9 pct -12 pct; we got 20 pct-40 pct. This put enormous pressure on the entire catalog industry.”
The latest postal rate hike was established according to the old rules of the U.S. Postal Service for rate cases. And the historic Postal Reform bill passed 11 months ago is supposed to preclude these types of prodigious increases.
The bill that passed, also known as the Postal Reform and Accountability Act – includes a rate-increase cap that ties future postage increases at or below the rate of inflation (Consumer Price Index) and strict criteria regarding conditions for emergency rate increases.
Read MoreMER Magazine
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