Colour Direct Mail Will Reverse Response Decline

The positive impact that colour print can have on direct mail marketing and communications is discussed by Tim Delahay, the chief executive officer of DSTi Output.

The positive impact that colour print can have on direct mail marketing and communications is discussed by Tim Delahay, the chief executive officer of DSTi Output.

Have you heard the one about the man who opened an envelope and read the insert instead of the letter? No? Well, neither have I or 31 million other people in the UK that just throw the inserts included in their financial statements straight in to the bin.

This, coupled with the news that direct mail levels continue to drop due to poor response rates, surely means that the time has come for businesses to look at getting more out of the transactional mail opportunity.

Just as television went from black and white to colour, to interactive, the technology and more importantly, consumer demand, is now there for full colour transactional mail.

So, whether companies are sending out a statement, invoice or reminder, they should remember the three Cs - colour, clarity and convergence.

Recent independent research highlights that the public would prefer to receive their transactional mail in colour as they find it easier to read and generally more appealling.

However, that is all well and good, but how can marketers use this to their advantage? The good news is that the technology is now in place that allows businesses to send out fully personalised colour transactional mail - each with tailored marketing messages.

Now, for those in market sectors where clarity is of utmost importance (and in recent times this has been a particular bugbear in the utility sector), using colour to highlight key points and to make the statement easier on the eye, has already been implemented by a number of companies to great effect.

Colour and clarity are all nice to have, but the real opportunity is converging the information contained in the inserts and direct mail pieces directly on to a statement.

Companies that have made the switch have seen typical response rates uplifted from two per cent to as much as 20 per cent.

Switching to this new method also saves trees as well as cash.

Did you know, for example, that the 375 million inserts that are included in financial statements every year and go straight in to the bin unread is equivalent to 125,000 trees worth of paper? The big argument against making the shift is cost.

However, if companies consider that 80 per cent of the cost of producing direct mail is postage, then significantly reducing the weight by eliminating or reducing the amounts of inserts, will provide cost savings, which more than offsets the additional cost of printing colour rather than mono statements.

So, as consumers become more and more frustrated by the ever increasing amount of junk mail going through the door, companies should think about how to make the most of the opportunity when they have their customers' attention.

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