BLOG: Time to acknowledge the true reach of your door drop campaign – it’s bigger than you think!

The concept of audience-based planning and measurement is a fairly novel concept for the mail industry. Facebook and Google can tell you how many people saw your ad. So can TV channels, print publications, radio stations, outdoor and cinema media owners – so why have we never done it before for mail?

The answer is pretty simple – the mail industry has simply never had a comprehensive and robust industry-wide measurement system to convert numbers of mail items or door drops delivered to the numbers of eyeballs on your ads. This changed as of last year with the advent of JICMAIL (The Joint Industry Currency for Mail) and over sixty organisations are now able to enhance their mail campaign planning and reporting for either themselves or their clients.

Take the example below. This is a screen grab from JICMAIL’s Mail Campaign Calculator - a tool to which all subscribers get access and a tool which enables us to see that retail door drops aimed at younger audiences are probably 2.5 times more efficient investment than you thought they were:

We know that door drops for retailers aimed at 25 to 34 year olds aren’t just seen by one person in each household they are delivered to. Because they are shared in the home, each door drop is seen by 1.09 people on average: that’s an additional reach of nearly 10%. If you multiply this figure by a campaign volume of 1,000,000 door drops, you’ll discover that your door drop mail out is probably going to reach nearly 1.1 million people (see the dark blue box centre bottom).

We can also predict that those 1.1 million people will each on average look at a retail door drop 2.31 times over the course of a month. If you multiply these two figures together the resulting figure of 2.5 million campaign impacts (green box bottom right), is essentially an equivalent to a digital ad impression count. That’s over 2.5 million opportunities to get your brand in front of consumers, generated from just 1 million door drops. If you consider pricing up your campaign on a cost per impression basis (or cost per 1000 impressions as other media channels do), then you’re looking at spend that is 2.5 times more efficient than before reach and frequency were factored in.

Of course hardened marketers will at this point claim that none of this matter when door drops and DM are response channels… but why not give the channel the credit it deserves and acknowledge that it can have effects higher up the purchase funnel? 6% of door drops drive brand conversations for example, while we also see effects on website visits and store footfall, irrespective of whether an immediate purchase is made.

Gathered from a panel of 1000 households a month using an MRS award winning methodology that asks consumer to record every interaction they have with mail and door drops over a 28 day period, JICMAIL is currently offering potential subscribers a free six months trial of its data.

If you want to explore a more effective way to plan mail campaigns, then get in touch with ian@jicmail.org.uk.

Ian Gibbs, Director of Leadership & Learning, JICMAIL