JICMail, the joint industry currency for ad mail, said warm direct mail campaigns achieved an average response rate of 7.2%, cold direct mail 0.9% and door drops 0.5%, while return on investment (ROI) in these categories was £9, £3.20 and £2.90 respectively.
The data showed a sharp rise in response rates in 2024 with a 24% year-on-year increase for cold DM campaigns and 41% for door drops.
The Response Rate Tracker provides response, ROI, Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), and Average Order Value (AOV) benchmarks for use in campaign target-setting and measurement.
Furthermore, the data set is now able to show the value of scale and frequency of send with ROI on cold DM campaigns increasing from £2.50 on average with a send volume of 25,000, to £3.60 when volume increases to £100,000.
Additionally, repeat cold DM mail sends achieve a 37% higher ROI and 2.5 times higher response rate than new campaigns with greater AOV and lower CPA.
JICMail director of data leadership and learning, Ian Gibbs, said: “Prospecting for new customers is vital to the future success of businesses, yet performance marketing as a discipline faces challenges in measurement, transparency and creativity.
“It is heartening therefore to see that the mail channel is bucking this trend with response rates growing at a healthy rate for cold DM and door drops alike. With the upcoming Data Usage and Access Bill bringing greater clarity to businesses looking to employ a data-driven approach to customer acquisition, this set of Response Rate Tracker results are very timely for the mail channel.”
JICMail engagement director, Mark Cross, added: “Thanks to this industry collaboration we are continuing to grow the evidence base that supports the case for mail as a 'super touchpoint' with some great new insights from this year's tracker.
“Dual purpose brand and response comms works best, ROI improves with reach and with the brilliantly simple, but overlooked, insight of just repeat send to drive up response and ROI.”
Response Rate Tracker data is now available to all JICMail subscribers through a new interactive dashboard viewable in the JICMail Discovery data portal.
