Laptop screens and PC monitors used to be passive objects, gently filling our eyeballs with Word docs, Hotmail junk and the wonders of Solitaire.

However, these days it feels more and more that they are vicious magnets, generating their own gravity and sucking more and more of our lives into their world.

As much as I wish this meant Tron-like light-cycle races and glowing frisbees that always come back, it’s really more of a comment on just how reliant we’ve become upon the digital world, almost entirely forgetting that there was a time when we did most things quite successfully in the physical world.

I even seem to remember once playing just one Scrabble game at a time while actually sitting in the same room as my opponents… Crazy times. 

It’s the same in the world of business; if we’re not trying to get something to ‘trend’ we’re trying to go viral, improve our click-through or just do whatever it takes to beat back the thousands of other companies all trying to target ‘our’ customers.

Relatively young companies probably don’t even realise that you can run a direct mailing campaign any way other than online bombardment, but it worked for hundreds of years before Twitter Twet out its first Twang (or whatever the kids say) and is still doing very well today thank you.

As the world changed, so too did institutions such as the Post Office, but when it comes to DM the Isle of Man Post Office is the specialist. Verification, mail merging, printing, fulfillment and placing into the postal stream, all done under secure CCTV using staff that has been police and credit checked, with NO third parties ever involved. As a postal administration, IOMPO can also target direct mail campaigns to hit countries on specific dates from dispatch, due to the first class international mail streams.

Operators already have the data to carry out reactivation/retention campaigns so why aren’t more using postal DM as part of their marketing mix? Just to rub it in, 90 per cent of mail is read the same day it arrives and 68 per cent is read straight away.

Can you imagine ANY form of online marketing that enjoys that kind of response from recipients? I’ve had my fair share of dancing reindeer and singing mushrooms on my screen but mail uniquely affects all five senses and is the only medium to provide endless possibilities to engage customers on all levels

IOMPO clients have reported a 1-1.5 per cent response rate through email marketing increase by 10 per cent just from a basic letter campaign. They believe that the response rate would grow again if the recipient was to receive something that they could interact with, for example scratch cards or a scratch panel on the letter itself.

Mail is personal; we’re biologically designed to get excited when something drops through the letterbox (I may have just made up that last bit – it could just be me!), but 65 per cent of mail respondents considered direct mail more personal than email.

Mail is also one of the easiest media to measure as responses can be attributed directly to a specific activity. With 80 per cent of successful businesses agreeing that regular mailings help build customer relationships, isn’t it time you thought beyond online and joined the successful percentage?