No need to consult a crystal ball to find out what’s on the horizon for direct mail marketing. The Winterberry Group has interviewed hundreds of executives in the direct mail industry, including marketers, service providers and marketing technology providers, to produce a white paper about direct marketing trends for 2007. The paper is titled Vertical Market Trends in Direct Mail and the Impact on Production Service Providers 2006. It makes four predictions of particular interest to direct mail marketers:
- Complex multichannel campaigns will become the industry standard. Marketers will make use of data warehouses to tailor offers, moving beyond simple personalization of messages to “relevance” campaigns that match offers to individual recipients’ needs.
- Direct marketers will pay more attention to list hygiene and postal optimization. This is seen as a move to offset postal rate increases.
- Catalog marketers will react to rising mail costs by maintaining or increasing mailings, but sending out smaller catalogs. Interviews found that this is already well underway in B2B and retail marketing verticals.
- Marketers will increase their use of direct mail for branding campaigns. This trend is already apparent in financial services and banking marketing.
Keeping up with the findings from reports such as this is essential to keeping up with — or getting ahead of — the competition. As you work on your 2007 campaigns, please don’t hesitate to contact us to talk about what’s new in lists and list performance.