Sherri: Welcome to Cahoots Commentary, where we share our comments about what to do and most importantly, what not to do in your nonprofit communications. Thanks for joining us. Our topic for this commentary is direct mail is dead. So, is it dead or alive? 

Dee: I would say definitely alive. I think that, you know, just with the whole trend of the digital world and technology, that people felt that they needed to get on the boat that was progressive and that basically was like, “Oh, all the paper stuff is dead”. And now we see that everything is, uh, cycling back to— 

Sherri: Everything old is new again. 

Dee: Everything old is new again. Yeah. And so it’s all recycling back to the things that cause just more sensory— 

Sherri: Tactile. 

Dee: Right. Tactile, smell, size, light, everything. 

Sherri: I agree with you, Dee. And the reason I know we hear it’s dead. We hear directly from our nonprofit clients and ministries who go, “Oh, direct mail doesn’t work”. That’s usually the statement we get. Not that it’s dead, it just doesn’t work. And nine times out of 10 when we dig a little bit deeper and we ask them more questions and more importantly say, “Can you show us the piece that you sent”? It’s usually pretty brutally, uncomfortably honest about why it didn’t work.

They don’t have a call to action. They don’t even have a website on there. They just are kind of talking to themselves instead of who they’re supposed to be talking to. The layout graphically sometimes looks really mediocre and kind of moochy, where if you looked at it, you’d go “eh”, you disregard it. It looks kind of like junk mail. And the biggest reason it doesn’t work is they only send out one. And they think the whole world’s going to be at their doorstep going, “Oh, we need you. We love you”. But that’s just not how it works. 

We generally know that what’s motivating the fact that they think direct mail is dead is they don’t want to spend the money on it. It hasn’t been budgeted. They think it’s going to cost too much. Most of the time it’s because they’re not sure how to do that, how to go about it. And to a certain extent, we know as an agency, creatively, we get hired for that very purpose of “How do we do this? We’re willing to give it a shot, but we don’t know how to design it. We don’t know how to write it. We don’t know how to print it well.”  

And that’s viable. We can see. But that doesn’t mean it’s dead. It just means that it may not be economical and it has to be something you have to budget for. You simply do. And it needs to be part of a bigger plan.  

Katie: Right, and what’s important to consider too is talking with printers and getting good bids and making sure you’re asking a lot of different people because prices change frequently. 

Sherri: Frequently, yeah, like COVID.  

Katie: But printers are very willing to work with folks, especially nonprofits. So it never hurts to reach out and see what the options are. They can find stuff within your budget. That’s one reason why it helps to come with a budget. You present them and say, “Here’s what we have. What can you do?”

Folks are very willing to work with you. So that’s worth double checking. And not just assuming the prices you had years ago are the same as now. Because that’s not always the case. There’s been efficiencies added in. It’s worth checking out. 

Sherri: Well, efficiencies: gang printing. Now that takes a lot of planning. What gang printing is, is if you have a parent sheet of paper, which are great big, they’re the ones that run through presses, or not even great big, maybe they’re 11 by 17, that you can print more than one. Let’s say, direct mail postcard or direct mailer at one time going through a press.  

If you’re using a printer that’s using big presses, you can sometimes, for just a little bit more, print four direct mailers that you’re going to use throughout the whole course of the year. Have them all ready to go on the shelf. That’s how you know they’re going to get dropped at the right time and see huge cost efficiencies there.  

But you have to plan ahead. And generally speaking, and this gets into full integrated communications, you’re going to have a campaign. Typically, all of those are going to be designed along a certain theme, which again, is perfect for reach and frequency, but direct mail is a huge foundational component of any good integrated marketing mix when you’re doing, especially appeals, when you’re appealing for money. 

Dee: Yeah, I think there are many economies on the design side as well. When it comes to the planning of the piece, like if you’re going to run a bunch of different mediums on your messaging, if you do all of the artwork at the same time, you can literally take an image and reposition it for posts or resize it for ads. Everything. Email. So when you’re doing that and you’re doing it in one setting— 

Sherri: We call it “kachunk, kachunk, kachunk”. 

Dee: Right. So you can just keep going and you can resize everything. Everything gets done at the same time. So they’re not individual projects every time you call for a different layout. 

Sherri: Well, and switching it up every time is just not good advertising or promotion either. So if you’ve got a graphic designer on your staff, or if you use one freelance or if you use an agency, having a campaign that’s got a layout, that’s got themes, that has the standardized storytelling, you know, direct mail’s a big piece of that.  

The other thing that people don’t realize, and it’s really important, is direct mail does some things that yes, email can do these to a certain extent, but like you said Dee earlier, the tangible aspects, if I get a direct mail appeal in the mail from an organization or a ministry that I support, I’m not going to just immediately toss it because I’m part of their community. And so if it’s done well, it’s compelling. It’s got a teaser on the outside of the envelope that makes me go, “Oh, what’s that about opening it and reading it?” 

What happens is about two or three things: one, if it compels me to give or to volunteer or to come alongside or go to an event, it can go into my bill pile or my planning pile. In other words, I’ve retained it for something. It’s also a referral tool.  

If it’s storytelling, it’s got an appeal and it’s talking about something that happened with this organization or this cause that’s compelling, the likelihood is exponentially greater of me taking it next door to my neighbor and going, “Joan, I know that you’re really passionate about environmental stuff. I want you to see what I just got in the mail”. That the referral tool part of direct mail is huge. It’s got shelf life.  

Dee: Also, just the fact that 72% of all consumers engage with mail. Right out of the gate, you know, it starts with that higher percentage of who’s actually participating in that particular messaging.  

Sherri: Exactly. And it’s the only thing from an advertising and marketing standpoint where you can know that you know that it actually got to the audience that you’re trying to get it to. It went to their home. So even they go, “Yeah, but they’re gonna take it and just toss it.” Well, if you’re really engaged in a good relationship with that donor or that person that’s on your list, they’re not going to just toss it.  

But if it looks kind of, you know, sickly and it really doesn’t communicate well and it doesn’t have good story and it, I can’t clearly understand what you want me to do and  you don’t have a website on it or a response vehicle, then of course you’re not going to get the kind of response.  

Kate: You have to make sure it’s relevant to your audience. 

Sherri: Yeah. And if they’re your audience, it should be relevant. But sometimes if you’re doing copycat, we see that a lot too. “Oh, let’s try it this way because such and such organization did it and they got like a really great response” and you go, “Because it was perfect for them. Not because it’s perfect for you.” How you communicate is a big deal. 

Dee: We always talk about shelf life of our pieces. Generally speaking, a piece of direct mail has been shown that it has, like, a 17-day lifespan in the home. And then we get to things that are more, like, periodicals or magazines, and then they increase to three months or sometimes even more. You think about the collectors of National Geographic. 

Sherri: Right, I was just in an office last week that had a stack of them that are like three years old, but they’re relevant. You look at what’s on, again, presentation is everything, you look at what’s on the cover of it and you go, “Yes, I do want to see what the top 25 pictures were in National Geographic for last year.” But it does that.  

And that, by the way, in case some of you don’t know what we mean when we’re referencing shelf life, it just means that when somebody gets it, how long do they hang onto it? Do they, you know, literally put it on the shelf and keep it or save it or want to pass it on or do something like that. And that’s what shelf life is, and that’s what you’re always going for. 

Dee: The other thing too is you have to take into consideration how many people are in the household in my house. I have this little clip on my counter and I put mail that is important to our family in there, and everybody that comes through the house, my kids are grown and out of the house and when they come to visit, they go through all my mail that’s in the little clip. 

And so you have to look at that and say, you know, not only am I getting the message, but everybody within the household is getting that message as well. The other thing that’s really important is we, a lot of times, granted when you get a direct mail piece, you do have a split decision of are you gonna throw this out? Are you going to keep it? 

But the nice thing about direct mail pieces is they do come directly into your mailbox and you do take them into the house and then you’re sorting them. So you do see them for a certain amount of time and either you decide to engage with that or not. So you can throw it out. But the good thing about a direct mail piece is you can’t block it. So that is a direct, as you said before, a direct access into your home or your household. And with some of the digital stuff, a lot of people just turn it off. And they never even see any type of imaging. At least you’ve gotten an image or an impression. 

Sherri: Dee, I think you told us about some research that was done recently that helps us really understand its effectiveness too. Right. 

Dee: They did FMRI’s and they’re the same type of imaging that you get with an MRI, but it has to do with how the brain functions. And so what they’ve found basically is that they’ve measured people responding to digital messaging and they’ve responded— 

Sherri: So like an audio, listening to a podcast or something? 

Dee: Audio or messaging on the computer. And they’ve also done testing with people who pick up a direct mail piece, something in their hands. And what they’ve found is the percentage of engagement and response and brain activity is way higher with the direct mail piece because it’s engaging more of the senses. So every time we send out a message to anybody and it engages, you know, your audio, your, your vision, taste, smell, tactile, everything, it’s going to give you a higher percentage of response. 

You just get better psychological response, brand recall is way higher than on digital. I think we even, I think we did some research quite a ways back where we were trying to determine, the client wanted to know what was better to do: a print magazine or a digital magazine. So we went back and did some studies and stuff on it and found out, I think it was up in 30 percentile, that with a tactile magazine the messaging was recalled, like almost up to, I want to say 30%. 

Sherri: Yeah, 30%. And it had a longer shelf life. 

Dee: And at that time too, there were a bunch of issues that dealt with downloading and it was, it was kind of crazy because it was very difficult to get those digital magazines to the audience. Which is not the case anymore. But now I think our mode is, you know, doing both because now it’s economical enough to do both. 

Sherri: We say direct mail is just the start, and then it’s your blog post is the same thing. And you can send it out on social, you can keep a video with it. It’s integrated communication which is always, you can take one story and take it through almost every single communication channel that you’ve got. And I think, Kate, you brought up a really good point too, is the fact that the mail needs to be relevant to your audience. And the other thing direct mail can do, is you can localize it. 

Katie: Mm-hmm. Localization, meaning having somebody’s name in the piece. They’re not just talking about addressing on the front. The actual piece on the inside can have localization. What the printer can do is leave a spot where you can input somebody’s name or something else that’s specifically relevant to them. Sometimes you’ll see this with shopping and things like that. Like if I’ve bought a certain thing, sometimes, especially you’ll see this in email, but you can do it in print as well. They’ll list something maybe that I’ve bought or that somewhere I was, but in the cases of nonprofits, even just including somebody’s name in the actual piece can mean a lot. It means that you’re in their system, you know who they are. It’s personal. 

Sherri: Yeah, like, “because you came to our gala last year”. Many printers now have got the capacity to be able to localize that in line when they’re printing and you know, does it cost more? Well when you talk to somebody that personally, the cost is more than recuperated in what the outcomes and the return on the investment is where somebody looks at it and they go, “they know me”. 

Katie: And on average it really doesn’t add that much cost anyway because they’re already running it. It’s going through the presses. The system already has it in there and so it’s actually very cost efficient and in combination with what we were talking about with good layout and all those things, it will save you a lot of money to plan ahead and think about it. Like I’m saying, talk to your printer, they have options to do these kind of things.  

Dee: I think too, the two other big factors are you can do segmentation. With different messages just like you can in email or a lot of the other digital advertising and you can also limit costs by postage. Having different, like, a nonprofit status so that can save some money for you in the right postage. 

Sherri: You know, that’s that we hear a lot of negatives and it’s understandable like, at recording of this commentary, postage first class is 75 cents. That’s a lot a piece. 

Katie: And they’re raising it every year it seems like. 

Sherri: Or every month it feels like, yeah. Our direct mail providers keep sending us all these emails saying “it’s going up, it’s going up”. And we go, well what’s new? But it’s faster.  

Dee: So buy a lot of forever stamps.  

Sherri: Yeah, forever and ever, buy forever. But when we hear that direct mail costs too much, most of the time the reason is because the nonprofit organization or ministries or whatever, and you do have to be a nonprofit, aren’t familiar with nonprofit bulk mail. And that is a massive difference. But it does take a little bit of extra work. But goodness, the savings is dramatic. 

Katie: Yeah, once it’s set up, it’s really easy. The last thing you want to do is use first class stamps on every piece. And we understand that because you can’t afford it. But after a certain quantity, is one thing that’s important. The nonprofit discounts, you have to send a certain amount. I think it’s— 

Sherri: 250. Yeah. I think you have to have 250 recipients for nonprofit bulk. 

Katie: For nonprofit bulk, yeah. And they have some other programs too for less than that.  

Sherri: First Class Presort is a good one that doesn’t limit the number, but it still drops the cost exponentially. 

Katie: Yeah, that’s another thing your printer can do. They’re already doing it for the most part. It just takes certain list hygiene, meaning you have to look through your contact list and make sure that fields have a certain name, but they’ll walk you through that. But that alone can save you costs just by doing that kind of sorting. But as far as the nonprofit bulk, once you have it set up, the printer again knows how to use these. You can use what they call an indicia, which is the pre-printed postage rather than having to get the reels of hundreds of stamps, which saves you time again because they run it through as your piece is going through so that, you know, you don’t have to get 50 volunteers to put stamps on all of your pieces. 

Sherri: And you should know, direct mail services will charge you like a couple of cents a piece. It’s really insignificant when you look at, instead of 75 cents, you’re now spending 13 cents on postage and they’re charging you 3 cents to do the direct mail handling, which is 15 cents compared to 75. It pays for itself. It’s not like it’s, “Oh it costs more to have somebody else do it for you”. The money that you save on postage absolutely pays for it.  

But a direct mail provider, and here’s a big benefit, will run your list through the US Postal services system called NCOA: National Change of Address. That means they update the addresses where people have officially changed their address through the postal service. And yes, almost everybody does that because they want to get their mail when they move. Your direct mail provider will run it through the NCOA system and update your mailing list for you so you’re not sending things out at first class to an address that’s wrong.  

You know, I think too, a real important part is how are you linking things together? You know, direct mail will let your response device be your website. A lot of people go, “Oh well nobody responded to the response card that was in our direct mailer”. And you go, “But did they go to your website?” And the majority of people are utilizing that now just simply because it’s secure. They’re going to use a credit card and they know if they go to your website it’s going to do that.  

But the direct mailer, the appeal is what motivated to go to the website in the first place because they wanted to see more of the story or what have you. Which is great. because the second they go to the website, we can track them. We know that they came, we can see what kind of activities they did in the sense of a donation or signing up for more information or reading more information. So redirecting to the website, and there’s a lot of neat ways that you can measure stuff like that. 

Katie: Yeah, you wanna make sure that it’s easy for folks too to get to your website. And there’s ways like using QR codes or using URL shorteners, right? So you don’t have a super long URL that someone has to type in. If you use a shorter URL, that’s easier and folks will be more likely to engage. 

Sherri: How do they find those, Kate? 

Katie: You can search to find them. There’s a ton. You can even find some actually built into social media. Just search for “URL shortener” or “shorten URL” and all kinds of services come up. But do look for them in other systems that you use because they’re constantly being built into things, especially databases and nonprofit management software. They’re all over the place. 

Sherri: And when someone has those, the neat part about that too and, we’re talking about is trackable when it comes into the website, you can see what they use to get there. And so that makes that uniquely trackable to the direct mail piece that they saw it. And if you use it exclusively there, that’s very easy to measure. 

Katie: Which is one reason we actually recommend using very specific URLs. We call them vanity URLs or just specific landing pages. But we highly recommend that you do something specific because, like Sherri was saying, in your analytics, you can see where these folks actually came in on. And so if you have a specific campaign, make that url like “YourOrganization.org/summer-campaign”, like, you know, make it specific if you can and you’ll see it on your analytics and you will know they came from that specific piece. That’s how you make it trackable. 

Sherri: And it’s not a matter of cost there because you can go and do that process and a lot of people don’t know. Same thing, you can go onto Google and search, how do I get a QR code? If you’ve never used them, you can get them free. They don’t cost anything. So you don’t need to go, “Oh, we can’t afford that.” 

The key on those QR codes though, coming off your direct mailer, you want the people responding to them, using them. They get their iPhone out and they put it in and it takes them to a dedicated page on your website, or it has to go at least to the page on your website that shares that same story. That’s the integrated communications where you send out the direct mailer, it sends them back to the website where they can read more about the story, perhaps watch a video on it and have that great little link that gives them the link to your donate page or volunteer page or sign up for our newsletter page. 

Another thing that, when we were talking earlier about the efficiencies of printing and all of that and gang printing, what we do often, almost all the time, especially if the direct mail piece is storytelling and it’s letting the recipient know how this organization or ministry is doing great work and they’re giving, they’re telling a story about how it worked. Well, if it is designed properly and it’s written properly so that it doesn’t date itself, I mean if you put the date on absolutely everything, just know that people are going to know that it was for August. But if you don’t put the date on it, but it’s still relevant and you try to actively make sure you’re not dating the piece in your content, you can overrun it, meaning run extra copies of it, keep them on the shelf and you can use them as leave-behind collateral. 

If you’re going to go to the next conference or you’re out introducing yourself to a new potential donor or at an event that you have, you can actually use overruns of that storytelling, of that appeal, that direct mailer, almost like a brochure. It becomes a, well, it’s a piece of collateral, it’s something that you can add to other things that you’re doing.  

And then it’s really cost efficient. Because if you’re printing 500 of something, to print 25 extra is pennies. It is so cost efficient. If you go out and are just running something for the purpose of a brochure, you’re incurring the whole cost. So if you’ve designed it well, it’s got a great campaign, you’ve got continuity in the layout and the voice that it’s written in your storytelling is the same. It can be used then as collateral throughout the year. You can just grab that piece and go, “Oh, I’m gonna go meet someone somebody introduced me to. And you know what, I’m gonna take the appeal that we sent out, the direct mailer that we sent out two months ago about Tom and all the neat things that he’s doing in his work for our organization.” 

You can use that same piece and it is really, really effective. Again, it’s tactile and, and if you’re going out and you’re shaking someone’s hand and introducing yourself, putting something in their hand is natural. Telling them to visit your website when you’re meeting with them, it just isn’t. People will take a piece of collateral just like, you know, a business card. You can’t underestimate the fact that people will still take it, put you in their contacts and they don’t need it anymore. But at least you get in their contacts.  

To sum it up, I think we’ve given some really good reasons why if you aren’t using direct mail right now in your integrated communications for your organization or ministry or church, you should really thoughtfully think about it. It is worthwhile. I’d say that we pretty much unanimously believe that, the question being if direct mail is dead, and we believe that it’s not, we think without question that it’s alive and kicking.  

Dee: Especially if you use it and integrate it with your other tools of engagement. It just doubles everything. Builds your brand. 

Sherri: Yep. Wonderful. Hey, thanks for listening. And if you’d like to learn how to make direct mail for your organization, ministry, or church, we have training courses on that and you can check those out at our website at CahootsCommunications.com.