Direct mail: unfashionable, expensive, and still working

Direct mail is the channel every digital marketer dismisses and every high-volume pizza operator still runs. The reasons are structural: it reaches households you have no digital relationship with, it requires no consent, it sits on a refrigerator for weeks, and its trade area targeting maps exactly onto a delivery zone. It is also the most expensive channel per contact, which means the targeting has to be right.

Saturation versus addressed

Two fundamentally different tools that operators routinely confuse.

Choose routes by penetration, not by proximity

The default mistake is mailing every route within three miles. The better approach uses your penetration map: mail heavily into routes where you sit between roughly 5% and 12% penetration, because those households know the category, are reachable, and are not yet yours.

Skip your strongest routes (you are paying to reach people who already order) and be sceptical of routes under 1% inside your delivery zone, because that usually signals a delivery-time or competitor problem that a mailer will not fix.

Formats and what gets kept

The piece has one job: survive the walk from the letterbox to the bin. Two formats do that reliably for pizza.

• The full menu. Expensive per piece, but it becomes a reference object and stays in a drawer for months. Best where you have distinctive menu breadth.
• The magnet or fridge card. Highest cost per piece and by far the longest life. Justified for acquisition into strong routes and for new stores.
• The oversized postcard with a single fenced offer. Cheapest workable format. One offer, one deadline, one code. Do not put six offers on it.
• The door hanger. Technically not mail, but the same job at lower cost and with different regulatory rules. Covered separately.

Measuring it honestly

Mail is where attribution goes to die, because there is no click. Three techniques recover most of the truth.

First, unique codes or offer-specific landing pages per route batch. Second, and better, a matched-market holdout: withhold mail from a set of comparable routes and read the sales difference. Third, address matching: for addressed mail, match responders back to the mailed file directly.

A well-run mail programme knows its cost per incremental order. A poorly run one knows its response rate, which is a different and much friendlier number.

Response rate flatters. Cost per incremental order tells you whether to do it again.

Timing

Aim for in-home delivery Wednesday through Friday for weekend occasions, which typically means dropping earlier than the printer suggests. Build in a week of slack: a mailer that lands the Tuesday after the game is a complete write-off, and mail timing is the least controllable part of the process.

Questions