Since the mid-1990s, lumpy mail and other dimensional mail have been important strategies for breaking the boundaries of direct response statistics. And there is no doubt that they have worked very effectively. Open rates have been higher; response rates have been higher; and the ROI is higher, despite the extremely high initial investment in packaging and product.
Lumpy or dimensional mail has been particularly targeted at B2B mail, where the audiences are relatively small but the benefits are large, so the higher investment can more easily be justified.
Lumpy favorites are many. Many of them sound like direct response reruns of the cheesiest items in the 1950s sales repertoire:
* The Round Tweet – “I knew you hadn’t called me back because you didn’t have a Round Tweet, so I thought I’d send you one.”
* A packet of cinnamon candies to present a “red hot” offer.
* A band-aid to suggest that, unlike what the competition offers, mine is not a “band-aid” solution.
* A small packet of aspirin because this offer will “end your worst headaches.”
And yet they have been working. What drives the response? Nostalgia? Do you need to laugh during the work day under pressure? The questions that people raise about these programs, despite their clear success, come from several directions:
*Use of resources. The response rate may be higher, but does it justify the environmental cost of discarded shipping boxes, discarded Round Tweets?
* The impact of changing postal regulations. When these strategies took off, standard envelope and package sizes didn’t benefit as much from lower postal rates. Now, bulky, dimensional mail can cost much more to deliver, impacting ROI. MSP in Pittsburgh came up with a smart and light plan for a pre-convention mailing: They sent a logo-colored cocktail napkin to priority contacts offering “a drink on us.” The contacts who came to the booth (many!) received bottled water.
* The difficulty of choosing inserts that will draw positive attention to your overall message. Not all business owners can create inserts that represent their company in a memorable and good way. Boxtopia did a big campaign for an IT company that wanted to reach a small number of C-level executives in construction: each pack contained a framed, limited-edition print of a watercolor painting commissioned especially for the campaign. The ROI was extremely high. Rob Anspach, who teaches vendors how to catch “the big fish,” included a Swedish fish candy with a letter and wrote “Have you seen my fish?” For him, it brought big sales.
Despite questions and hurdles from the post office, direct mail still reaches the audiences we want to target. The challenges are not new: What letter, in what package, with what insert (if any) will this particular group of people respond? And our increasing ability to precisely target our mail allows us to focus these larger, relatively expensive packages on the people or companies from whom we most reasonably expect the greatest profits.
Clever use of lumpy mail continues to deliver excellent profits. Our job is simply to be smart about how we use it.