Direct Mail Dying? Not With Young Response High

Paper mail volumes may be declining, but there's a sign that direct mail is nowhere near extinction: the high response rates of younger adults. In the introduction to the Direct Mail chapter of the Direct Marketing Association's 2014 Statistical Fact Book, Laurie Beasley, president of Beasley Direct Marketing, Inc., reassures anxious direct mailers, "An encouraging sign for direct mail marketers is that very young adults, 24 and younger, are among the most mail responsive groups today." Why? Because getting paper mail is a life experience that it is becoming rarer and rarer in the digital age, Laurie posits. Young millennial adults are not as desensitized to receiving vast volumes of paper mail addressed to them, tailored to them, as were their parents and grandparents. So what was once a mundane activity is now an uncommon and slightly exciting experience. Everything old is new again apparently, and that's good news for direct mail. See Laurie's comments at http://thedma.org/advance/saturday-stats/saturday-stats-getting-mail-is-a-life-experience/

Personalization Key to E-mail's B2B Success

E-mail continues to be a medium of choice for business-to-business (B2B) digital marketing because of its effectiveness, says Patrick Kehoe, worldwide director of product marketing at HP Exstream, in a recent interview with eMarketer’s Rimma Kats. But Kehoe added an important caveat: "E-mail can be an effective delivery device, but it isn’t always an effective delivery device. You have to make sure that you’ve got the right messaging and the right personalization in it. If someone perceives that the content is not relevant to them, then they’re likely to ignore that message. We all get bombarded with hundreds of e-mails a day, and marketers’ focus needs to be to make sure that you’ve got the right subject lines, the right messages and the right content. Making it personalized helps reach specific individuals." Personalization is what sets B2B e-mail apart from many other digital options, including emerging channels such as LinkedIn and Twitter, Kehoe notes. "You can make e-mail so that it reaches out directly to an individual, and you can tailor the messaging and content for that person. That’s really tough to do when you’re using Twitter," he tells Kats. See the whole interview at http://www.emarketer.com/Article/B2B-Perspective-EmailStill-Medium-of-Choice/1010972