Even though the United States Postal Service is reporting a significant decline in the volume of mail we all know from the contents in our mailboxes that we still seem to get plenty. It’s clear that direct mail marketing budgets have been slashed in many cases, but of course as some companies pull back from sending mail others see that as an opportunity to send more. We decided to research which profit and non-profit organizations are currently sending the most mail.
Top 10 For-Profit Mailers
56% of all the top 50 mailers in the U.S. are for-profit ogranizations. Several of these are large publishing companies athat sending publications, renewal notices, and other offers to the public.
- -Publishers Clearing House – This household name in the sweepstakes industry makes over $620 million dollars a year through publishing and distributing millions of magazines and other publications. They are the overall largets user of direct mail in the U.S.
- -The Economist Group – With revenues north of $516 million this is another publishing giant. They publish under the brands of The Economist newspaper, The Economist online, Edonomist Intelligence Unit, and a few more.
- -Conde Naste – You may not be familiar with this massive publisher with revenues of $454 million per year. They own some of the most subscribed to magazines in the World (GQ, Vogue, The New Yorker, etc.).
- -Direct Brands – Like Conde Naste, you may say Direct Brands, Inc. who? Well they have revenues of $402 million per year with services you will recognize (Columbia House, Book-of-the-Month Club, etc.).
- -Consumers Union – This company has revenues in excess of $249 million per year on sending direct mail, you may be more familiar with Consumer Reports.
- -Omaha Steaks – With revenues of $200 million per year this company has made a bundle off of selling mail order mouth watering meats. Now that’s mail with some sizzle to it!
- -Rodale – Has revenues of approximately $136 million per year and publishes magazines like Men’s Health, Runner’s World, and Prevention.
- -Hachette Filipacchi Media – Another massive magazine publisher with revenues reported at $123 million from magazines like ELLE, Woman’s Day, Car and Driver, Road & Track, and more).
- -International Masters Publishers – This publisher is well known for Recipes & Cooking, Wildlife & Nature, Home & Leisure, and similar categories of publications. They have annual revenues of $230 million.
- -Boardroom – This is another publisher for a list that is most well-known for their Bottom Line newsletters in the subject areas of Personal, Health, Retirement, Natural Healing, and Wealth. Their revenues could not be reliably collected.
Top 10 Non-Profit Mailers
44% of all the top 50 mailers in the U.S. are non-profit ogranizations that are either soliciting for donations or attempting to collect on pledges via mailers.
- -Smithsonian Institute – They generate donations/revenue of $532 million per year.
- -U.S. Fund for UNICEF – They generate donations/revenue of $454 million per year.
- -Habitat for Humanity – They generate donations/revenue of $356 million per year.
- -The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society – They generate donations/revenue of $269 million per year.
- -March of Dimes – They generate donations/revenue of $248 million per year.
- -World Wildlife fund – They generate donations/revenue of $180 million per year.
- -Paralyzed Veterens of America – They generate donations/revenue of $109 million per year.
- -Humane Society of the U.S. – They generate donations/revenue of $102 million per year.
- -Alzheimers Association – They generate donations/revenue of $95 million per year.
- -National Wildlife Federation – They generate donations/revenue of $83 million per year.
It’s always interesting to see who is using the mail more frequently as a means of communicating with the American public. The biggest surprise is that in this list of the 20 top mailers, that are no banks or credit card companies. Judging by the mail I get every day, that’s a surprise.
shared by our friends at changeofaddress.org
Hi Michael,
We would love to share with you an article that we just posted on our own blog! “Top 20 U.S. Direct Mail Marketer” (http://www.changeofaddress.org/blog/2010/top-20-us-direct-mail-marketers/) would be an interesting story for your readers to check out and discuss on your blog, so we hope you will consider sharing it!
Thanks so much for your time, and have a wonderful day!
Sheryl Owen
Strategy #5) Tracking and Reporting for Success
Every sale in your company should be recorded where the sale came from. EVERY SALE!! If you miss this trick you will throw 3/4 of your annual direct mail marketing dollars in the trash.
I know it feels like you drive your own fate and 'shoot from the hip' with your 'gut instincts' but don't be so vain that you don't track the number of sales and value of each from every thing you sell.
This applies to direct mail as well. Every redeemed piece should be recorded in your CRM tools. CRM tools you say? If you don't know what they are or don't have them in place you and your job are at serious risk. It's the year 2010 - get serious.
The strongest businesses around got there by using math, reports and tracking sales. So how are you going to come anywhere near them if you don't know where your wisest marketing dollar was last year.
Here are some things you should be tracking.
What brought the customer in? Did they see your sign or did a friend tell the to check you out? Did they see your ad n the paper or were they just at the store next door and liked your window display. Whatever it is you want to focus some effort there.
How much did they spend? If the people than randomly walk by your store spend an average of $20 per visit, but the people that drive to your store directly spend $100; you'll want to spend more time on your direct mail and print ads since they earn you more money.
Who are your multi-trip customers? If you have customers that return to your business time and time again would you know who they were? Identify loyalty and reward it! Then give them an offer for them to bring a friend. Birds of a feather do what?
Who are your top spenders? If they like your products why do you wait for them to randomly come in? Personally invite them for something they would like. It's really simple if you take action.
Your best Direct Mail Marketing strategies start with you understanding your clients and learning how to market to each type of client. If you are not tracking anything how will you ever do that?
Step up; it's not a game you want to lose.
I'm sitting down with a client the other day and we are discussing the direct mail giveaway offer and the size of the mailing list. One of the people at the table says, "We'll if we're mailing 10,000 people we need to reduce the size of the offer, we cannot afford to give that much away". This is a typical answer from a newbie.
Strategy #4) Don't be stingy with your offer
The entire idea is to make sure you offer everything you can to each individual where you maximize profit and results. This is what personalization is all about. If one guest is worth offering $20 to get them in and another person is worth offering $100 to, you can do that easily with variable data printing. If you only offer $20 to both people you usually eliminate the response from the $100 guest and your company is full of $20 guests.
As far as "Everyone showing up" You have to ask yourself how many people are really even paying attention to your offers. Direct mail is a numbers game and the more you water down your offers the fewer the number of people that really even care.
Let's say for example I was giving away a free car and I mailed 1000 people to give them away. I would only likely have to give away 50-60% of those at most. First off there are a huge percentage of people in your database that don't read direct mail at all. The there would be skeptics, then people that forget to respond, etc. So you might get a 50-60% response with a free new car.
So when you take your $50 offer and decide to lower it to $15 you are likely taking your 3% and cutting it down to 1% or less. You are also drawing in a much cheaper crowd. If $15 is important to someone they are not likely wealthy enough to be a good customer buying all your goods and services, are they?
Make sure you use your customer historical sales to manage to offer everybody the most you can, based on what they average to spend. Then you get sales from all levels of your customers and not just the cheaper ones. Don't guide your business smaller and smaller by catering to your cheapest of customers by getting cheap on your offers.
But then again don't offer the best you have to your cheapest customers either. I hope you are tracking your customer sales and building offers based on their value. I truly hope you are!
I just got off the phone with Network Solutions; they called me about some services I let expire. It seems that even the formidable web domain registrar has decided not to count on email broadcasting. They've instead moved to reduce lost sales through direct marketing like normal brick and mortar businesses. They actually picked up a phone and called me.
Email Sucks for business communication. You are rarely sure if your customers received it and if they did they may have just deleted it. Sure, it works some of the time but with all the filters and trash that ends up in your email box nobody can count on it as their only form of communication. Dot-com businesses are smart enough to finally give in to the real world reality.
It is just as true today as it has been since before the internet existed, direct sales and direct marketing are still the most effective form of sales today.
It doesn't stop with Network Solutions either. Last week (the reason I thought to Blog on this) I received a call from Ebay. I had a bad transaction with a seller and I had to file a Paypal claim. Not only was I able to reach PayPal.com on the phone every single time I called, Ebay also called me after the transaction to see if they could help smooth over the relations with the seller. No, Really... They called me.
I was fascinated as to why they called me and it turned out that they are trying to protect the reputations of sellers that sell high-ticket items. But I was most impressed by how Ebay worked to smooth out relations AFTER I was already paid back by PayPal.
Now not all dot-comers have "stepped into the light" when it comes to picking up the phone but I have felt a lot of this lately. I have had positive real world conversations with Network Solutions, Ebay, PayPal and facebook. I still have had no luck even finding a phone number for google adwords though.
added: I have also received direct mail from Microsoft, Yahoo, Ebay and more..
In Direct Mail Marketing we usually have a product we want to sell and we try to find the best way to sell it. We then work every trick and angle we can think of to develop the best response possible. Have you ever thought that maybe this is backwards?
Strategy #3) Sell what your database tells you to! 
Do not tailor your database to your offers, tailor your offers to your database. You need to send things your customers want, not just what you want to sell.
This is where direct mail tracking pays huge dividends. On every mailing and every promotion you ever do you need to find ways to track and record sales and all sales details on each person. This is the only way to develop what each individual likes about your products or services. Information is King!
An example is trying to sell coats to people that buy shoes. Sure you can likely sell some of them coats but for best results sell them more shoes. Then, if they like black shoes; quit trying to sell them blue ones. If they don't like laces, promote shoes without laces to this particular person.
Variable data printing makes this easy!
Why are you pushing coats on your shoe people, anyway?
Sure, maybe you have an inventory of coats to sell too. But you should make those a secondary offer that follows directly behind what you know your customers like first. "Buy 2 pairs of [insert favorite shoes here] and be entered to win this fabulous coat." Then when they are buying all these shoes, you get them to try coats on and tell them about the coat sale this weekend too.
If you do not have the data to know what your customers have bought and how to personalize with variable data printing, you are at the right place here at CSG Direct, Inc.
There is a huge separation in businesses that track sales and those that do not.
If you do not track your customers preferences you are going to lose in your competitive marketplace. You will lose! Your competitors will win more sales with less money. You will win fewer sales and spend much more marketing dollars to do it.
I don't care how clever you think you are there is no intelligent way to send 1 broad message to appeal to everyone in your database marketing equally.
Sure, people have been broadcasting single messages through all forms of media since the beginning of time but that doesn't make it right. If you're going to be lazy you will get lazy results.
Strategy #2) Segment Your Mailing List into groups
You would be surprised how you change your offers and promotions just based on what you see in your database. I highly recommend that every marketing manager look into your database personally so you know what you're working with. As you are digging through your database ask yourself these questions:
- How many are female?
- How many are male?
- What are the age groups in our data?
- How many of these are "locals"?
- How many are from out of town?
- Which groups spend the most?
- Which groups visit us the most?
- What are the 5 most popular purchases?
- What are the 5 most profitable purchases?
- Who is making these purchases?
This should be the consideration you make before you do any form of direct marketing. Why? Because you can do this with direct mail and you cannot do with the rest of your marketing budget. Because it will get you better results!
Once you have your database segmented into 3-5 different groups you need to create offers that directly appeal to each group. Spend time talking to people in those groups about what they really want and what would get them to buy again. Then plan your marketing to that group accordingly. Do this with each group you plan to market too.
I know this sounds obvious, pretty logical and a no-brainer but I cannot tell you how many people just swing from the hip. When you are busy and short handed it is easy to just blast something generic out and hope for the best. In this case it would be best to just identify 1 group and design your campaign around that group directly instead of sending the same offer to 5 groups.
If you do not have enough data in your database to break it into segments we can append data from other consumer databases to yours for you. This dynamically changes what you know about your customers and helps you target your direct marketing correctly.
When you have been in direct mail for 20 years you get to see a lot of direct marketing success and failure. Both are valuable lessons! Avoiding the common mistakes is often still considered a great success. Unfortunately that is the ceiling for most people.
When the most you get out of your campaign is "no-failure" then you really aren't going to see the great success direct mail is known for. So, if I am going to share the best 5 direct mail marketing tips I must start out with the most important one.
Strategy #1) Use a Direct Mail Marketing Company.
Use a direct mail marketing company not just the cheapest printing bid you can find. You can find some real great deep values in real direct marketing companies! In the history of getting what you pay for; the cheapest direct mail project is usually the least effective too.
If you have a $2000 budget don't spend your time trying to get it cut to $1700, spend your time trying to get $3000 in value from it. You can do that with direct marketers, not from printers.
You must keep in mind that Direct Mail Marketing is the only form of marketing that has proven to create perpetual income. Companies for decades have turned $3000 into $5000 or $50,000 or more in sales and income. Are you choosing vendors that know how to help you get to those results or just price shopping print?
You may or may not have experienced these kinds of results.
Many of our customers achieve this every single month.
I know what you're thinking. This all sounds so very self-serving and maybe we're just trying to justify you spending more. This is far from the truth. I can easily demonstrate for you that 90% of the vendors you can get bids from are not worth spending a dime with. I've got 5 tips to show this to you with but the next tips will likely have much more math in them. Let's start with the obvious.
Direct Mail Companies are primarily a labor force with labor as their #1 expense. As you get your 3 bids what you are primarily getting bids on is labor and equipment usage. Our Rent, Electricity, labor and equipment leases are our industries costs. When you get a lower bid you are almost always first and foremost using the least experienced labor to get that price.
For example, here at CSG Direct we have 25 individual 
employees that have been certified by the US Postal Service for mail-piece quality and mailing standards. This means that your service representative, our graphic artists, our quality control department and even our folder, inkjet and press operators are all US Postal Certified employees.
What is the cost and benefits of that? MANY!
First off the most expensive part of direct mail is mistakes. When we have staff in every single department experienced and trained to help you avoid those mistakes - they don't happen!
So how is the lowest bid company managing all that for you? Sure they might reprint it for you free if they make a mistake but that ruins timelines, wastes huge sums of postage money and makes you look bad in front of your boss for choosing them.
Pit our experienced, trained and certified employees versus the industry average of temp labor and basement-kept half-capable $8.50 employees. We Win! ..and You Win!
Plus our staff has decades of
database marketing experience,
seeing direct mail successes and failures. We will be showing you how
to tier mailings, test offers, personalize your mailings and more.
All most printers can do is reduce their bid, they cannot add value or increase your responses. Which is really why you're doing direct mail in the first place ~ to get sales and response.
Keep your head in the game - it's not broadcast-print, IT'S DIRECT MARKETING !
Let's talk about the value of experience with Direct Marketing. The Direct Mail and printing industries are broken up into many niches. You have tabloids, newspapers, invoices, fulfillment, brochure printing, foil or die cutting and of course marketing to name a few.
What is your vendors' primary service? Ours is direct mail marketing but so often we are forced to bid against a brochure printing house or cheapashellpostcards.net. These vendors have absolutely no concern or experience in direct mail marketing and you want to give them the job because, as their only tool to get the job; they low bid the project.
You will not become the hero of your firm by showing them how you saved $200 but the phone isn't ringing. Too often this is why people say, "We tried direct mail, but it didn't seem to work". If you can get a direct mail marketing company for a price anywhere near that of a mostly print oriented company - jump on it !!
So, the first rule of thumb and our #1 tip is to make sure you are using a direct mail marketing company. The good ones are actually a lot harder to find than you might think. You found some pros right here at CSG Direct so get a direct mail quote and get to know us. If you get the chance to sit down with us the difference will be crystal clear.
Remember! You're Marketing Right?
At least with CSG Direct is it !!
Even as new forms of direct marketing emerge in this new era, direct mailing is still setting the bar in response, results and accountability in marketing. Most every other media cannot get you out of the most expensive parts of marketing - prospecting. In Fact, most advertising dollars wasted on broad shotgun prospecting.
Direct Mail is very focused on sales and generating revenue.
Experience will tell you that there are 2 levels of marketing.
The first level is the most expensive and that is to find out who is interested in your product or services. Prospecting or acquisition marketing is where you spend money to broadcast who you are to the public and see who responds with interest in your product or service. This is commonly done with Television, Radio, Newspaper, Billboards, Websites, Yellow pages, Magazine ads, Telemarketing and sure Direct Mail of course too (however it is more direct, personal and accountable in prospecting).
The second level of marketing is what you do with all the customers and prospects that contacted you with any level of interest. This is where all your long-term income is made. You see, once you have a list of people who like what you do you can build long-term relationships with a direct sales approach. This includes direct in-person sales, tele-sales, direct mail and email. (I will save social networking for a later topic - it follows email)
That is the proper order for results too:
1) In-Person sales cost the most and sell the most.
2) Tele-Sales still utilizes personality and relationship but you are easily pushed into voicemail hell.
3) Direct Mail is something they have to see and touch and they can save it and share it with others in the home or office. They can keep it for later too. Direct mail costs much less than in-person or tele-sales but you can sell a proportionally less amount too.
4) E-mail, currently the lowest form of marketing. Sure, if you have a relationship and are working on projects with a client it is great. But for sales and marketing it is the easiest to avoid, delete and annoy.
So the main point is that long-term SALES happen in a DIRECT approach not in broadcast prospecting or print ads. So decades of experience say you build a comprehensive database (or many) with as much detail as you can. Then you send very specific offers to very specific people. You then follow that up in-person, via telephone and personal emails too. IN THAT ORDER FOR BEST SUCCESS!!
Only go back to prospecting when you have maximized your current list of interested customers and prospects. Why would you go talk to 1000 people that are not interested when you have 100 that are and you haven't sold them anything yet?
We can help you build a business plan for successful marketing too! Your first step is to contact us or let us give you a direct mail quote to start.
Mathematically speaking, National Change of Address (NCOA) is one of the most valuable services any Direct Mail Services company can offer you. With over 17% of the population moving per year many of today's businesses are using mailing lists that are from 17-34% useless to begin with.
Most people send direct mail using Presorted Standard postage in order to save large sums of money in postage. The backside of this is that any pieces mailed to someone that has moved are thrown away by the US Postal Service. This is because "Presorted Standard" (old 3rd class) doesn't include address forwarding the same way 1st-Class does.
So, if you don't get back the return-mail pieces with yellow stickers like you do with 1st-Class Postage, your mailing list begins to expire over time. But 1st-Class costs 50% more to send.
So if your boss says they want a better response from their direct mail, tell them NCOA can help you find where all your people have moved. That is what NCOA is afterall. It is the national Postal registry of every change of address database of every form submitted by moving people. Your database is compared to this database and your movers are identified, flagged and updated.
On average, even a "clean" mailing list has 3-10% moves. That is 3-10% of your print costs, your mailing costs and your postage costs being thrown away. At CSG Direct we let you know where your people have moved BEFORE your mailing goes out.
We are a USPS NCOA Link Limited Service Licensee and have been doing NCOA for about 5 years now.
We got into NCOA because it helped our clients achieve greater marketing results. The US Postal Service has seen great results and is making the service mandatory within 95 days of mailing. They spend too much time and money trying to find people for your .44 cents so they are making cleaner lists a requirement.
From me to you, behind the scenes a technology revolution is happening at the US Postal Service. Make sure you are working with a vendor that knows what's going on. There is lots to be gained when working with a Direct Mail Company ~vs~ a printer "that does mail too".
As someone that has been in database marketing for over 2 decades I have had my share of deep experience in both direct mail and email variable data driven forms of direct marketing.
Email is a dying service and is going to go away in it's current form.
We started by building our own email broadcast and link tracking tools back in the late 90's. We were in email marketing from 1995 to 2005 as an add-on to our direct mail services. Back then it was HOT and NEW and everyone wanted in, but so few people knew what they were doing so we enjoyed a decade of great prosperity.
But then in 2005 we got out all together just as a swarm of vendors and competitors were getting in. There was still a lot of money to be made in email after we got out but we recognized the fight those vendors were entering into.
There is a real ugly truth about email marketing that the companys buying the service do not know that definitely hurts them. When you send even 1 message it has to go through multiple firewalls, mutliple virus scans, multiple email processing rules and multiple spam filters.
If it makes it past all those gatekeepers and lands in your prospects in-box they can tag you as SPAM that very second. That action affects all those same gateways and spam filters for each message that follows it.
Then, 10 minutes later you send an email to your customer to ask them about an order you are working on and your email message gets blocked by their spam filters. All because now you have been recorded as a spamming company. I guess the rule of thumb is if you don't want to be treated like garbage marketing, don't put your message next to the garbage in someones inbox.
We saw this coming, it was getting bad years ago and the writing was clearly on the wall. Email results are also at historical record lows too. Low responses and a technical nightmare are not a recipe for success.
I have been talking about this for months with my peers but I guess I decided to blog about it today because I spent 3 hours removing an email virus from someones computer. What a pain in the ass and an uneccessary use of everyones time. There are so many other ways to communicate that don't risk your entire it investments.
As someone who manages a firewall, one of the biggest security breaches we deal with on any given day is EMAIL. Email my friends, will not be around in it's current form and I would not invest any current dollars moving in that direction. For real electronic success you should chase SEO combined with social media like facebook marketing as well as others growing in popularity.
Then, really get to know your direct mail program. Direct mail is the most courteous of all forms of non-electronic marketing. It is still also the most focused, trackable, adjustable, shareable, savable, copyable, calcuable form of marketing.
But beware, there are spammers in direct mail too. There are more spam marketers in direct mail than there are true direct mail marketing companys. These vendors will make you look bad and get your message thrown away just like email can be.
Nothing makes me sadder for a company then when I lose a bid by $100 to a printer and that company loses thousand$ in response and the direct mail information that comes with it. Lowering their prices is the only tool in a printers bag compared to a real direct mail company that offers full service and full results.
Find out where your vendors core focus is. If they are primarily a printer or a print broker, forget about it. Find database junkies, variable data printing and response pros. That is our niche, that's where real direct mail lives and breathes. Experienced direct mail people know it and their businesses thrive off their direct mail results.
Real direct mail marketing isn't broadcast print, it is made up of multiple data sources, multiple data-relevant messages, calls to action, results tracking and offer adjusting based on results.
You don't get that from a printer, that's direct mail baby.