Direct Mail

Dennis L. Wilcox reported that Benjamin Franklin used direct mail in 1744 to inform potential buyers of books he had for sale. Today, direct mail is the most prevalent form of direct marketing, but public relations practitioners use it not only to reach existing and potential customers, but also to communicate with donors, volunteers, voters, investors, and myriad other audiences. For example, public relations practitioners may want to distribute newsletters to consumers of specific products; solicit donations for civic, health, and humanitarian causes; send financial reports to potential investors; enlist support for a political issue, cause, or candidate; or distribute correspondence about a product recall.

Direct mail allows communicators to cost effectively tailor and personalize their messages directly to the audiences they choose, using the appeals deemed most appropriate for them. Databases and marketing research allow public relations practitioners to target their direct mailings with precision. Recipients may be profiled by specific demographics, psychographics, income levels, street addresses, hobbies, past purchase histories, professional associations, health problems, reading preferences, household type, voter registration, credit history, charitable contributions, pet ownership, and nearly any other documented variable or combination thereof. This specificity, computerized personalization, and the reduced costs of bulk mailings make direct mail an attractive communication tool.

Direct mail packages typically include such elements as a personalized mail envelope; a personalized letter, appeal, and call to action with various response and contact options (e.g., return mail, toll-free number, and Web site); an informational brochure, fact sheet, or pamphlet; some type of response card or form; and a postage-paid response envelope.

There are basically three types of mailing lists used by public relations practitioners: (1) those derived from in-house databases, (2) “response lists” of people who have responded to other organizations, and (3) “cold call” lists of people identified according to specific characteristics or variables. Examples of common types of marketing data collection include catalog purchases, grocery store discount cards, online inquiries, and Web searches. Companies that offer tailored mailing lists or list contact information include Standard Rate and Data Service's (SRDS) Direct Marketing List Source and Metromail, among others. List delivery options often include mailing labels, directly printed envelopes, zip disks, or CDs. Although rented lists vary in price, one might expect to pay between $50 and $300 for the one-time use of a 1,000-name list (Stone & Jacobs, 2001, p. 81; Wilcox, 2001, p. 401). List owners have the option of declining to sell lists to those they deem are competitors or otherwise not appropriate organizations for their customers, patrons, donors, or subscribers.

Wilcox (2001) estimated that American households receive more than 550 pieces of direct mail each year. With the October 2003 enforcement of the national marketing “do-not-call” registry, one might expect that even more direct mail will be sent to American households, creating even greater challenges for communicators trying to get audiences' attention and to avoid having their messages be seen as irrelevant junk mail. As a result, even more people might use the Direct Marketing Association's Mail Preference Service to have their names removed from national mailing lists. Such constraints make research techniques such as pretesting materials with a sample of the target audience and split message research even more critical to obtaining public relations objectives.

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