Advertising mail on the up in 2014

Mail is back! What a relief after the last five years of wondering what was happening and worrying about how fragile the market for the physical mail product was at last there is light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe you hadn’t noticed how the number of letters you received seemed to disappear from the door mat. Or the constant encouragement to go online with your bills and statements. And to add insult to injury we were asked to pay for a paper bill. It all started looking better at the end of 2012 and the demand has continued to increase through 2013.

The trends I have seen this year are:

• The term ‘integration’ being used regularly in terms of all media channels, crucially including social media. Mail has the great advantage of working with online channels through QR Codes, augmented reality and Purls. This brings personalisation and movement to the printed page, creating an extension of the customer journey and adding more content to the original communication
• Investment in technology platforms and fully variable content delivery. Over the past years a lot of investment has been made by mailing houses in digital print technology and the platforms to deliver this content through multiple channels. The last 12 months has seen more and more collaborative programmes being developed to solve genuine business issues rather than using the technology to produce gimmicks

So based on this, what can we look forward to in 2014?

• Mailing houses will continue to invest in service provision and offer more data and creative services to move more towards service providers than product providers
• More white paper solutions allowing mailers to be more personal and targeted with messages based on transactions and previous purchase behaviour in both transactional and the direct mail arena
• More visibility in the postal supply chain with Royal Mail launching Mail Mark and TNT offering an end-to-end full tracking service. The more visibility and traceability that mail has the better for both cash collection as well as monitoring call centre volumes. The race is on to give the market the best product

I am looking forward to next year with a great deal of optimism with increased sales target, new investments to leverage our traditional sales and I am confident for the first time in many years the light I can see isn’t the 7.30 express from Milton Keynes.

By DMA guest blogger Alistair Ezzy, Sales Director, GI Solutions Group and Vice-Chair, DMA Mailing Houses Council