My Top Three Direct Mail Reports of 2025

For years I’ve been collecting mail, because yes, it’s been part of my career. But that only gives me a partial picture of what’s going on at any one time in the universe of direct mail and marketing. So I’m always on the lookout for surveys, reports, and studies about mail, as well as print, marketing, retail, and whatever else that seems like it may offer some new way to understand the environment(s) that we and our customers all operate in.

As a quick aside, I have to tip my hat to Denise Gustavson and her team here at PI for their outstanding work producing The 2025 Printing Industry Census. It’s a fun and interesting read that’s about us, very visual and engaging. And hopefully, it will help guide how companies in the industry hire and grow their workforces.

To help remember what stood out to me this year, I went through my desktop folder of PDFs. Here’s a quick look at 3 of the top direct mail studies that I read this year, and why they were relevant to me.

1. In a time of digital ad clutter and fatigue, mail can be a profitable alternative. Let’s start with an article by Colorado State University business and marketing professor Jonathan Zhang, published in the Fall issue of MIT Sloan Management Review. In “How Direct Mail Delivers in the Age of Digital Marketing,” he relates how he conducted a range of studies, tests, and surveys involving brands, marketing executives, and consumers. In one experiment, he paired with an e-commerce beauty/personal care company to test and measure Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) for mailed catalogs vs. the digital ad platforms of Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

Direct mail catalogs yielded an average order value of $75, well above the 3 retailers, the highest ROAS by far (55%), and the lowest per customer acquisition cost of $37.50.

I love the empirical research that went into his work here, so if that’s your thing, I recommend checking all of it out.

2. Direct mail’s performance has improved over the last year compared to other channels. Marketers and consumers were surveyed for Franklin Madison Direct about their use of and preferences for direct mail in the “2025 Direct Mail Marketing Benchmark Report.”

67% of marketers said that their direct mail performance had improved in the previous 12 months, a higher figure than for any other channel or strategy.

Also, at least half consider mail to be more effective than digital for winback efforts, acquisition, and upselling or cross-selling. The study authors cite increased investments and testing as factors driving this improvement. Consumer attitudes about their enjoyment of mail and print are also worth considering.

3. Mail sent to lapsed donors performed better than acquisition mail. That comes from the folks at Moore, who looked at results from hundreds of nonprofits totaling $1.5 billion in donations. This report, “2024 in Review Charitable Giving by the Numbers”, includes quite a few sections dealing with direct mail either alone or as part of omnichannel campaigns.

Renewals had a better response rate, average gift, and revenue per name than acquisition efforts.

I’ve seen a lot of data and campaigns over the years, so this finding certainly helps to bolster the case for investing more in renewal mail. There’s also an interesting point made later on about how some donors have a “preferred channel of giving” (offline or online), but that preference was influenced by mail. The study notes that mail has been under-attributed and “smart marketers” should incorporate it into omnichannel campaigns. I couldn’t agree more.

There really is a lot of value in these studies. As dry as the writing can sometimes be, the findings provide important insights about trends, competitive intelligence, audience needs and pain points, and strategy. And with all of that, you can uncover and create opportunities to improve your mail and raise your ROI.

The preceding content was provided by a contributor unaffiliated with Printing Impressions. The views expressed within may not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of the staff of Printing Impressions. Artificial Intelligence may have been used in part to create or edit this content.