HOW THE INTERNET CHANGES DIRECT MAIL

HOW THE INTERNET CHANGES DIRECT MAIL

James R. Rosenfield

May 2000

"The Internet changes everything."

That's been the buzz for a few years now, and you know what? I'm starting to believe it.

That doesn't mean that it's changing everything for the better, of course. Powerful new technologies crash through the world like an out-of-control lawn-mower. The grass gets cut, but watch out for the flowers! It's the iron law of unintended consequences. No one knew that television would make us dumb, passive, and asocial, but there you are. Cars give us freedom undreamt of 150 years ago, but at the price of ruined cities and polluted air.

Email is irresistibly seductive. It puts us in touch, but also keeps us apart. Why phone when you can email? But I just had a conversation with a guy I've only dealt with previously via email, and we concluded long-protracted negotiations in minutes. So abstract can email be, in fact, that until we spoke I had no idea that he lives in England.

On the other hand, I discovered while voting in the March California primary that a writer I knew 30 years ago was running for President as a minor party candidate. I found the party's Website, got to his page, clicked on his email, and was instantly in touch with someone who seconds before had been separated by a near infinitude of time and space.

The Internet itself is a wonderland of joy and terror. Everything is there. It can nurture and it can poison. The Web connects, and the Web ensnares. Will it make us more human or less human? Will it redefine what being "human" means? A software tycoon I met recently on a plane said "We began with batch processing because that's what life is like - we batch things. The Internet has no concept of batching. There's a conflict between the organic world of batching and the real time world of the Internet."

Will the conflict be resolved? And if so, how? The resolution (or lack of same) may be the great drama of the 21st Century.

How will the Internet change media? It seems clear that the Internet will be the most significant direct marketing medium ever. As a result, it's not unusual these days to hear people predicting direct mail's imminent demise. These predictions are based on a common fallacy, that new technologies make old technologies obsolete. That's seldom true. What really happens is that new technologies change the role of old technologies.

When television first came about, for example, folks predicted that moves and radio would die off. In reality, television became a prime distribution mode for movies, and there are new theaters springing up everywhere all the time. (The disappearance of drive-ins has more to do with the sexual revolution than with technology.) And when was the last time you saw a newsreel in a movie theater?

Radio is bigger than ever, but it has changed into an interactive call-in medium, facilitated by the ubiquity of cell-phones in cars. Apropos of that, Marshall McLuhan made the observation that when a new technology interpenetrates an old technology, important things will happen. The Internet is already interpenetrating other media. What are the implications for direct mail?

MACRO LEVEL: WILL THE INTERNET SHRINK DIRECT MAIL QUANTITIES?

The great copywriter Chris Stagg used to say that direct mail was a small medium. That changed in the 1990s. Direct mail last decade turned into a mass medium, with the vast, hugely competitive credit card and telecommunications industries leading the way. This, of course, was absolutely contrary to the predictions I made (as well as my fellow prophets) in the 1980s, when we all figured that database marketing would shrink the quantity of the mail channel by giving marketers a laser-like precision. Au contraire! With companies like Citibank, First USA, and AT&T leading the way, it's been a game of enormous numbers for the past few years.

The afore-mentioned Marshall McLuhan makes an interesting point in a posthumous book, The Global Village (Oxford University Press, 1989). He observes that one of the consequences of a new technology is the retrieval of something earlier obsolesced. An example of this is the hackneyed but true observation that direct marketing brings back the old one-to-one relationship people used to have with storekeepers.

It's my feeling that the Internet will bring us back to the direct mail of the 1960s and 1970s, when it was a non-mass medium.

Will this put direct mail companies out of work?

It will, if you define yourself as a "direct mailer." If, on the other hand, you define yourself as a "direct marketer," you should be OK. The Internet, more than anything before, absolutely clarifies the differences between direct mail and direct marketing, between direct marketing and mail order, differences that have been frustratingly confused over the years, not least by the Direct Marketing Association, one of whose leaders a few years back defined direct marketing as shopping in the home. That's mail order, a distribution channel, not direct marketing, a methodology that exists independent of any specific channel or medium.

MICRO-LEVEL: WILL THE INTERNET SHRINK DIRECT MAIL PACKAGES?

When direct mail was a non-mass medium, packages were elaborate: long letters, multi-panel brochures, etc. Production costs on a unit basis were a significant part of the budget.

Proportions changed in the 1990s, as direct mail became a mass medium. Packages became leaner, thinner, cheaper, and production costs declined on a unit basis (aided by greater economies of scale, also). Production elegance was traded off for frequency and reach, qualities a mass medium has to have.
These two approaches have been mutually exclusive in the past, save for the efforts of stubbornly naïve direct mailers such as the automobile industry. It's been either non-mass/expensive packages (most appropriate for customer mailings) or mass/non-expensive packages (most appropriate for acquisition mailings, at least in mass industries).

The Internet, as is frequently its wont, resolves this conflict. And the resolution is firmly in favor of the marketer, rather than the vendor or agency. With the Internet you can chop direct mail down to maximum efficiency because all mailings will be cheap mailings.

Why? Because the purpose of direct mail will be to drive people into Websites. I suspect in a few years, when broad-band and non-computer Internet access become universal, this will be the only purpose of direct mail, with only a few exceptions.

If the information, offer details, and response mechanism are housed on the Website, all direct mail becomes two-step, and follows the basic principles of lead-generating programs: Keep it cheap, and sell the offer. By cheap, I mean a much larger proportion of self-mailers than we have at present, and a greatly increased number of simple cards.

And these mailings, I think, will be acquisition mailings. Customer communications will end up primarily done by email, which of course is much cheaper than direct mail. Customer communications direct mail will be used to deliver physical "love letters," for example the coffee mugs Amazon.com sends its customers. Direct mail also can be used to communicate with customers who haven't given you their email addresses.

This acquisition scenario is completely opposite to the predictions we used to make a few years ago, that direct mail would end up primarily as a customer communications medium. Go figure!

THE INTERNET AND DIRECT MAIL DESIGN

What about the appearance of direct mail? Should letters begin looking like email? Should graphics echo computer graphics?

Right now, I'd proceed cautiously on this, unless you're addressing a quite high-tech marketplace. And even then I'd be careful.

Perhaps at some point a direct mail letter will start "Hi, Mr. Rosenfield," and look like email, but not yet.

Contrary to popular cant (promulgated mostly by ad agencies), it's very difficult to translate the same messages across different media. "The medium is the message," to quote McLuhan again.
Try including stills from your TV commercial in a direct mail package. You'll probably suppress response, and almost certainly won't increase it. Why? TV is a left-hemisphere medium, direct mail is right-hemisphere.

I suspect Internet imagery can be more successfully translated into direct mail than television, since the Internet, like direct mail, is left-hemisphere, tactile, and interactive. But, again proceed cautiously.

And pay attention to the mail that you get. You're likely to start seeing some fundamental changes fairly soon.