A couple of days ago, a member of my team was talking about various fundraising ideas that one of our partners was coming up with, and one of their efforts included sending out letters in the mail.
Honestly, I was a bit surprised because so many nonprofits have stopped sending letters and instead transitioned almost exclusively all of their marketing and fundraising appeals to digital.
It may sound counterintuitive in the age of the $0.49 postage rate for a first-class letter compared to reaching thousands of donors who pay as little as $5 for a post. However, print letters and postcards should still be part of your marketing mix, at least for some of your donors.
- House file: Presumably you have a house file of donors and prospects with whom you have a regular relationship. Today’s world is full of content, especially in the digital world. Our social business regularly sends emails to our internal archive and we have a response rate that can sometimes exceed 10 percent.
- Multichannel: When you create emails, especially for your best followers, you make sure you reach them on multiple platforms and in multiple ways. The approach only reinforces your message and reaches out to them. You don’t know that the moment is inspired to support you in some way. Letters, catalogs, and mailings serve to send them a subliminal message that you are available to them, whenever they are ready.
- Trial Opportunity: Mailing gives you the opportunity to try another method of reaching your followers. If you have a large database, target a random sample of, say, 10 percent of your donors, and then see if your response rate exceeds the cost of sending. If you did, you have another way to reach your donors that will make you money.
- Important messages: When you send a letter or postcard through the mail, especially if it has first class or non-bulk rate postage, the recipient is likely to take a quick look at what you have to say. Mailing is an excellent opportunity to provide donors or major donors, especially, with a critical message that might otherwise get lost in the sea of emails everyone receives daily and ignores.
- Generational Donation: I get that everyone always likes the younger, cooler generations, but the reality is that Gen Xers and Boomers give more to charity than Millennials or Gen Z. These two generations still have a higher propensity to open mail or look at a package, especially if it is a non-standard dimension or size.
- Response rate: The reality is that direct mail still has a higher response rate than email or social media solicitations. For 2017, Compu-mail noted in this article: “The household response rate for direct mail is 5.1% (compared to 6% for email, 0.6% for paid search, 0.2 from online viewing, 0.4% from social media.) This is the highest response rate reported by the DMA since the Response Rate Report was published in 2003.1
- Credibility: In the digital age, everyone is bombarded with ads and messages, and now you can “fake news”. People have learned to quickly dismiss and distrust much of the content they see in the digital world. Direct mail provides an opportunity to build trust because if you’re investing in this form of outreach, you’re setting yourself apart from the digital herd.
- Saturation: On any given day in the digital world, your donors and supporters are overwhelmed with messages and pleas for help. there is only much there is content and a lot of it is low-quality, low-value content, which turns people off. Getting something in the mail is an opportunity to cut through the digital noise, and more brands are starting to go back to the mail so they can build deeper relationships.
- Creativity: Marketers who are stepping back and taking another look at direct mail are doing so in innovative ways, and this should be something your organization should consider. Instead of a standard-sized envelope or postcard, creative marketers are experimenting with different dimensions or tube mailers. For years, for example, City Harvest has been driving its hunger-fighting messages home by sending paper bags to its donors and prospects.
- QR codes and URLs: Marketers have also been testing the use of QR codes or personal URLs (PURLs) in their direct mail so that when someone receives a letter or card in the mail, they can be immediately redirected with their smartphones to a campaign page. organization. Adding these elements to direct mail is a great way to integrate direct mail into the digital age.
According to the Data and Marketing Association (DMA), yes, the amount of direct mail has decreased, but marketers are thinking more carefully and creatively about how to send print material. If you’ve moved all of your marketing into the digital world, you may want to consider treating at least some of your donors by mail.
