PRINTNEWSPAPER
News room
The conclusion is clear: with email open rates stuck around 20% and digital acquisition costs (ads) soaring, brands are looking for a way out. What if the solution was hiding where we no longer look? In the mailbox. Forget the old school flyer: direct mail is being reinvented in a premium editorial form, the addressed newspaper.
We are saturated with screens, but our physical mailboxes are empty. That statistical anomaly is now being leveraged by savvy marketers. Addressed mail comes with a hard to beat metric: a handling rate above 90%. Unlike an email deleted unopened, physical mail is touched, looked at, and assessed. If it is beautiful, high quality, and genuinely interesting (like a newspaper), it gets past the front door and lands on the living room table. This is the coffee table factor: a lifespan of days, versus seconds for a digital ad.
To be clear, this is not about sending a glossy A5 flyer screaming ‘PROMO -50%’ in red.
That era is over. The trend is paper nurturing. Brands send high value content, and the newspaper format (tabloid or broadsheet) is the perfect tool to do it:
The main barrier to direct mail has always been logistics: printing, inserting, stamping, dropping at the post office… a time consuming nightmare. Today, solutions like Paypernews have digitized the process. It is web to print applied to direct marketing. The principle is as simple as a Mailchimp campaign:
1. Upload your PDF (your newspaper).
2. Import your customer file (XLS with postal addresses).
3. That is it. Printing, mailing preparation, and shipping are handled automatically. This agility lets businesses of any size, from local shops to large SMBs, run highly targeted campaigns without touching a single stamp.
1. Real Estate Agencies: Send a quarterly neighborhood gazette to residents with market prices, new local businesses, and home styling tips. You become the local reference.
2. Ecommerce Brands: Mail a lookbook newspaper to your best customers for a new collection launch, with QR codes linking to product pages.
3. B2B: Send an industry analysis newspaper to decision makers. It is far more powerful than a PDF white paper nobody reads.
In conclusion, paper is not marketing past, it is its premium future. In a virtual world, sending a physical object to customers is the ultimate sign of consideration.
Campaign Monitor. (2024). Ultimate Email Marketing Benchmarks for 2024: By Industry and Day. https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/email-marketing-benchmarks/ (Source for the average email open rate of around 20%)
Royal Mail MarketReach. (2015). The Private Life of Mail. https://www.marketreach.co.uk/resource/private-life-of-mail (Source for the 17 day mail lifespan and handling rate)