The Marketing Times They Are a Changin’
I’m still a believer that direct mail - if done carefully - is still an element in the B2B tech marketing mix, but there’s no denying that the times they are a changin’.
Since the article is brief, I’ve included the entire piece from BtoB Online reporting a pretty dramatic decrease in direct mail spending last year. And a real slow-down forecast for the coming year.
New York—The recession, rising postage rates and marketing trends have combined to severely affect direct mail spending in the U.S. Last year, total direct mail spending declined 3%, according to a new white paper by marketing consultancy Winterberry Group.
The report, “A Channel in Transformation: Vertical Market Trends in Direct Mail 2009,” said direct mail spending last year totaled $56.7 billion, down from $58.4 billion in 2007, representing the first drop in total direct mail expenditures in 60 years, according to Winterberry.
The company projects that direct mail expenditures this year will decline 8.6% to $51.8 billion.
The industry that saw the largest decline in direct mail expenditures last year was financial services (mortgages and loans specifically), with spending off 38.8%. Technology (down 16.6%) and travel and leisure (off 4.7%) also declined. Showing increases were telecommunications (up 9.6%) and insurance (up 4.6%).
—Christopher Hosford
The article cites the recession, but that really only started to factor in big-time later in the year. And I’m not buying “rising postage rates” as that big a factor, either.
I think that the decrease in the tech sector is really interesting, especially given that tech wasn’t impacted very severely by the economy in 2008 - fingers crossed for 2009. What this tells me is that tech companies are replacing much of their direct mail programs with online efforts, which is not surprising. If tech buyers aren’t looking online for their product information, I don’t know who would be. I’d be interesting to see a breakdown on what the online efforts are. I’m guessing that it’s not a one to one switch from direct mail to online outbound, but that there’s a heftier amount devoted to search, social media, and other inbound categories.
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Yani