WHAT CONSUMERS REALLY WANT FROM MARKETING MAIL
In a previous posting, I talked about how “Do Not Mail” proposals were misguided from an environmental, privacy, and public policy standpoint. But it’s not enough to oppose initiatives that resonate with many well-educated people who generally understand and agree with the value of mail and who intellectually understand why broad-based “Do Not Mail” registries are bad ideas.
Consumers want choice and control over their lives, and they have much more of it than ever. They have multiple entertainment choices regarding what they watch on a TV, including movies they can acquire through the mail and, increasingly, over the Internet. They can screen out e-mails, phone calls, and face-to-face sales professionals.
Mail has been a bit of an outlier because elected officials have mandated six-day-a-week delivery of everything that is properly mailed, unless recipients go through a fair bit of effort to get removed from mailing lists. Mail is not intrusive like other communications, and it is highly valued, but that does not matter. Consumers want the same ability to screen out unwanted mail that they have with the remote control device and the Tivo system relative to TV.
Unfortunately, mail screening is far more complicated than providing a remote control device. A TV program is not “delivered” until someone turns on the TV at the proper channel. A mailpiece is delivered before the recipient has any ability to know that it has come.
Technology is available to change all of this. If you authorize someone to receive and screen your mail for you, someone could scan the envelope and give you an image that would enable you to decide whether you want it. This gives the recipient the ability to express a desire not to receive something with a single click of a computer button. We offered this service after the anthrax crisis in 2001, but, ultimately, most customers did not want to pay us to screen the mail for them.
Today, there are products that allow those moving to let catalog companies and magazine publishers know what movers want to continue or start receiving. That’s easy to do for people who are moving because they interact with the Postal Service at that time, and, as a provider of fulfillment services, we can ask them some questions online or on an insert in the Move Update kit.
However, trying to reach everyone with a comprehensive list of all of what they could receive is beyond anyone’s capabilities.
I believe that, over time, consumer profiles will need to be built that will help them decide what they want and don’t want, and we will be able to screen out most of what they don’t want, and, like Amazon.com, prompt them to tell us more of what they do want. I firmly believe that these changes should be and will be led by the private sector, and not legislated by Congress and/or State Legislatures. As technology and consumer preferences are changing constantly, the private sector is best equipped to launch these products and adjust them over time to changing needs.
One thing is clear: consumers want us to help them make choices that make their lives easier, not to saturate them with choices that complicate their lives.
On this last point, I would note that there was a period of time when we gave our employees with 401(k) plans over 50 investment options. They found that confusing and unsatisfactory. Today, we offer a much smaller number of choices, and we provide investment packages suitable for people at particular life stages.
What do I conclude from this? Consumers want choices, but they want a manageable number of them. They want a trusted partner that will help them make those choices.
The mailstream has to evolve to create an environment compatible with consumer choice and help for consumers to find what they want in the mailstream.
July 12th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Mike,
I whole-heartedly support your view on consumers’ freedom to make choices. In that regard, the “Do Not Phone” approach has worked wonderfully for us - much fewer needless interruptions which were numbering 6 per day and now we get a couple a week. My e-mail options also allow me to control, to some degree, minimizing the junk e-mails and again I am the one who makes those decisions.
I hope technology delivers a similar ability for junk mail. I receive on average 6 pieces of junk mail a day. I would like to stop certain pieces that appear month after month with no end in sight. The real bad thing about this junk mail is that you should not just discard it. It needs to be shredded to ensure any of the data does not reach reach the wrong hands if you discard it without shredding. That is an inconvenience greater than hanging up the phone or deleting an e-mail.
July 12th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
Dear Mike:
It’s been a long time since we’ve spoken - back in the old days of Pitney Bowes when you were corporate counsel and used to come up to Albany to help out with my major account, the State of New York. (I had a different last name then.)
In any case, it’s been a joy to follow your successful career all these years - no one deserved it more.
With regard to your blog above, I agree that we all want choices - I enjoy some of the “J” mail I receive. However, for the majority of it, particularly the credit card companies offering their cards/services, they never stop - year after year. The major concern on my part is what all this unwanted mail is doing to our environment and forests. How do we get these companies to stop - week after week, month after month, year after year - from sending this unwanted, wasted material? How many years do they solicit the same people without a response before they get the notion that perhaps those non-responders aren’t interested? Not only do these mail solicitations waste our precious resources, but they must contribute in great part to their their customers’ fees as well. It would be interesting to see what portion of the credit card companies’ budgets go into direct mail solicitations.
Don’t any major shareholders in Citibank, et al, ever speak up about all the waste? They should!!!
Perhaps then this annoying and much-too-frequent mail would finally be reduced, more targeted, or even stopped!
Your old Pal, Louise
July 13th, 2007 at 10:52 am
To Louise Watson:
Louise,
I agree completely with your sentiments about unwanted mail. The Direct Marketing Association is moving toward a set of guidelines for its members, which include virtually all of the major mailers, including credit card mailers, that would require them to give you a contact point to get off a solicitation mailing list. You should go to their web site and get linked to their registry — it’s http://www.dmaconsumers.org/cgi/offmailing
Our industry is trying to create mechanisms for selective use of “Do Not Mail” registries. We believe that you are typical in your views: you want the remote control that shuts off individual channels, not one that has just an “On/Off” switch. People want control and choice. We need to deliver that, or our medium will lose relevance and credibility.
- mike
July 13th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
Well said, Mike!!!
Louise
July 14th, 2007 at 10:52 am
Mike, during your tenure as CEO and Chairman of Pitney Bowes, I spent many years supporting the internal printing division in Stamford as well as the operation in Woburn. The people that I dealt with truly embodied the charaterization that you portrayed in your biography.
I continue to support the printing industry with tools to help manage their operations and I therefore am very sensitive to the direct mail issue and I look forward to your continued support of this topic through your blog. Direct mail continues to be one of the best avenues for companies to reach the buying public. Unfortunately financial services companies dominiate this channel and often overwhelm consumers with their offers and solicitations which in turn makes it increasing difficult for other companies attempts to capture the consumers attention. There are many companies that offer of new and exciting products and services that get lost in the shuffle of the Financial Services offers. I cannot say I have the answer but I remain attentive to the issue.
Many people, consumers, are unaware of the size of the Graphic Arts Industry and the impact that this industry has on the economy. Pitny Bowes is an example of a company that supports this industry and would be impacted by radical changes in the Direct Mail Industry. However, I also recognize that change is necessary and will occur and I hope that the changes will be a compromise that eases the comsumers burdens but continues to make direct mail a viable advertising channel.
I would be very interested in re-connecting with those that are charged with the internal and customer focused printing at Pitney Bowes as my original contacts have either changed positions or retired. I look forward to your future blog updates on this issue.
July 18th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Mr. Critelli, Hello.
I am developing a new email service that will incorporate many of the postal mail characteristics and usage rationale to the email medium – with emphasis on direct marketing and B2C CRM mail - ultimately in order to enable the email to take on many of their respective responsibilities. The trend, I believe, is inexorably to digital communication. In few decades, at least in advanced digital societies – from economic pressures to reserve postal mail for essentials, to increasing consumer preference for digital communication, to being mindful of wastes associated with physical mail - the postal mail could be substantially reserved for specialize situations.
Under current practices, Direct mail’s singular advantage over email is that it is: based on the most accurate psychodemographic profiling available (up to 200 data points are being tracked on average US household) and as you mention, mail is not intrusive – i.e. it does not land in their personal inbox, opened, in vivid graphics and language – and thus, it is need not be permission based, which is costly and inefficient. However, in email, the marketer does not have guaranteed delivery or the targetable email addresses that are comparable to the postal addresses (to which the demographic data are appended).
With B2C mails, including financial notices and statements from my service providers, now due to the ability for latest online account access, I am hardly giving more than cursory glance at them, before discarding them – and even this is becoming a slight nuisance and is wasteful. So then, how to migrate?
The question then being, what changes and improvements does the email need, in order to take on more and more of the responsibilities that the society asks of direct marketing and B2C mail.
A solution could be to create a proprietary and controlled access channel, with various optional special handling and delivery services, for select B2C emails that will be trusted and easy to access by the consumers, and for the unsolicited direct marketing email, giving the consumer the choice and ability to engage with the delivery channel at their choosing while, for the marketer, providing guaranteed access and targeting.