The U.S.
Postal Service loses billions of dollars every 12 weeks. A mantra at the U.S.
government meetings I have attended since 2000 is, “We have to run our agency
like a business.” After tallying a third quarter loss of $3.5 billion, the
business leaders at the dinosaur-like USPS predicts a “cash shortfall” in
fiscal 2011 which begins on Oct. 1, 2010. No kidding?
Does
your business still rely on traditional mail or “snail mail?” The “snail” is
not the French delicacy escargot aux grenouilles. The snail is the metaphor for
moving slowly. In the age of e-mail, sending a hard copy of a document is less
convenient than firing up my free Gmail account, banging in the message and clicking
the Send button. Snail mail is inherently expensive: humans get involved, trees
die and petroleum products are needed for inks, delivery and envelope glue.
But
snail mail lives and it has its uses. One can send a hard copy of a document,
get a bit of colored cardboard that “proves” the envelope arrived where it was
sent and that a person (usually with an illegible hand) signed for the envelope
or carton. Lawyers love snail mail. My cable company sends me a fat invoice
each month stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey with discounts, deals and
“important reminders.”
The
USPS has tried to get into the electronic mail business, but like many
government initiatives run by appointees and crafted by committees, the postal
service failed. FedEx and UPS owe their success to the decades of floundering
at the USPS.
Savvy
marketers have figured out that spending $2 per piece in a traditional direct
mail “blast” is expensive, time-consuming and inefficient. A return of 1
percent is a home run with many response rates from traditional direct mail
failing to cover their costs.
What
can a business do to reach customers and not fall into the snail mail direct
mail rut? The answer, based on our research funded by a large educational
publisher, is don’t mail. That’s right. No traditional direct mail campaigns
like the now infamous America Online carpet bombing of signup discs. And no
e-mail spam campaigns. Aside from being annoying and possibly catnip to law
enforcement agencies, unwanted e-mail is often filtered out by Internet Service
Providers. Even e-mail from known colleagues can go unread. Time is short, and
only a few Type-A personalities are sufficiently obsessive to deal with the
flood of digital messages.
