Is your business inadvertently generating badwill?
Every year, billions of pieces of direct mail are created and stuffed through our letter boxes and into our offices. But what the direct marketers fail to account for is the hidden cost the recipient incurs. This is a problem not just for individual companies but entire sectors which invest in direct marketing.
Take financial services. The expected response rate is typically 4% which means 96 items per hundred are wasted. But for those 96 recipients, an item of addressed mail from, say, a bank needs to be safely disposed of in order to avoid identity theft problems. This requires access to a shredder (at a cost) or allocation of time to manually tear it up or dispose in some other way. Any of these options require conscious thought + money or time, expenses for which there is no gain or benefit to the recipient whatsoever.
It’s no wonder that customers have such a low opinion of financial services. And as they receive direct mail on a daily basis, they have constant reminders of the waste of time and money, incurred by not just the marketer, but themselves as well. Which if you think about it is a pretty good way for an industry to annoy an entire population. No wonder they struggle to engage people!
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