Avoid the perception of irrelevance through your Marketing

E-mail and direct mail marketing has been a common staple of most businesses marketing plans in the 21st century, utilising either as a form of relatively cheap promotion in hopes to increase brand awareness and sales. Unfortunately with the rapid growth of these channels in recent years, people have grown accustomed to ignoring them or running tasks to eliminate such as downloading third-party extensions for Adblock and spam filters. This means most of your money is proverbially going down the drain.

The nature of email and the speed at which messages on it can be delivered for no cost might be one of the downfalls. It’s very easy to overwhelm a customer with constant email comms especially when a large percentage of competitors are also using it for communication l.

A Forbes survey in 2021 found that 66% of businesses claimed that Email marketing was their most important marketing tool while 79% of firms claimed to be using email l.

Hubspot has estimated that 306 Billion emails are sent daily. This leads to a lot of marketing ending up listed as spam or simply being unopened, with click-through rates averaging at around 3-5% in certain industries. The average UK household receives 22 generic ‘spam’ direct mails per year.

Email spam

It could be clear to understand that with the easy-to-send nature of email there would be a lot of marketing content sent out on the channel frequently. One of the key reasons for the ease of use is automation. 87% of B2C marketers leverage automation to trigger their email marketing strategy. (HubSpot Blog Research, 2021).

Marketing channels using automation worldwide as of June 2021

(Statista, 2021)

Automation is not inherently bad and can be used in a meaningful way. However, when automating email marketing there has to be sensible logic in the way that it is done. When sending a daily or weekly email that is generic to all consumers they are likely to feel overwhelmed and indifferent to the marketing that is being sent their way, especially if you send 3-5 comms to the same customer in one week. Here at Paperplanes, we have refined our contact approach over time with customers only receiving one effective communication in 30 days!

Email marketing dependency results in spam

A possible reason that email marketing has a dependency on high volume could be due to the low click-through rates mentioned previously. This is combined with the fact that 50% of people buy from marketing emails at least once per month. (SaleCycle, 2022) means that there are clearly some positive results from email marketing.

Even though 50% of people buy from email marketing once a month doesn’t necessarily mean that these individuals needed to receive 20 to inspire a purchase! Brands should do more to understand what message makes a difference.

Less effective Results

Source: (Campaign Monitor, 2022)

The clickthrough rates for Email marketing are very low. With a 2.3% average across the listed industries. Proving that spam and frequent marketing don’t always lead to high engagement from consumers.

Junk mail

The Oxford languages dictionary defines Junk Mail as “unwanted or unsolicited advertising or promotional material received through the post or sent as email”. It’s safe to say that any mail that is labelled as Junk isn’t valuable to a consumer and is detrimental to the marketers sending such mail.

Junk mail leaves a bad impression on the consumers which are receiving this mail as they are going to build some level of resentment or will see the firm sending this mail as unprofessional and lazy in their marketing methods.

How it makes its way into inboxes

Despite there being filters which catch some of the spam, 15.8% of all emails go missing or have been caught by popular spam filters (Email Tool Tester, 2022) a lot of spam mail ends up in inboxes.

Emails that are sent in an unsolicited manner such as cold formats are usually filtered as spam and don’t make their way into inboxes. It’s much more likely that the spam received is from a website you might have visited for an account that was created. Many times there are small tick boxes that are hidden which have to be checked in order not to receive email marketing.

This makes it difficult for consumers to avoid email marketing they would rather not receive. At the same time, this is a frustration for email markets that are receiving low response and engagement rates from their audiences.

Customer Frustration

Customer frustrations can be common with e-mail marketing. As many people use their Inboxes daily and often for important matters such as banking, payments and professional careers.

Having an inbox flooded with marketing messages can cause frustration and can lead to many emails being marked as read without being clicked through. It’s also reported that 40% of consumers say they have at least 50 unread emails in their inboxes (HubSpot, 2020) demonstrating how much email marketing isn’t getting the potential return on investment that it could be getting.

With more appropriate email marketing frequency done in a programmatic way, email marketing could see better response rates and returns on investment.

Programmatic Direct Mail (PDM)

Programmatic Direct Mail takes a different approach to customer acquisition. By mailing customers who have a reason to be mailed with content which is actually relevant to them. Leaving a basket abandoned, making a next purchase which is in line with their previous purchases or mailing customers to re-subscribe to a service that they were using before is much more effective when one well-tailored and the well-timed direct mail piece is used for delivery as opposed to other methods.

Clients utilising PDM with Paperplanes were able to achieve:

300% increase in website returns
50% more time spent browsing pages
9.3% of all abandoned baskets recovered
30% stronger basket value

Appropriate volume/frequency

Paperplanes takes a more consumer and eco-friendly approach to direct mail marketing through sending mail to consumers at the right times.

As a result, Paperplanes direct mail sends volume is lower than traditional methods. Saving the consumers from being overwhelmed with too much marketing, the clients who are marketing and hence have less spend on mail marketing with better results and limits impact on the planet. By avoiding unnecessary mail sends Paperplanes to use less paper in our process keeping the environment green.

Get in touch to test a programmatic direct mail campaign and see for yourself how we can attain better results and responses than traditional mail with up to 80% less sends volume.