REAL WORLD - How Royal Mail postal strikes affect our busine

[Geezer]

http://www.marketingdirectmag.co.uk/new ... usinesses/

By Noelle McElhatton, marketingdirectmag.co.uk,
22 September 2009, 2:27pm

REAL WORLD - How Royal Mail postal strikes affect our businesses


Clients are getting increasingly vocal about how the postal strikes are affecting their business. If you have a story too, please contribute in the comment box below.
Direct mail: not the only direct response channel
Direct mail: not the only direct response channel


Q: How exactly does a delay in postal delivery affect direct marketing?
A: For an insurance company, direct mail functions as a trigger to contact a call centre or go online. The issue with call centres is that they have to be manned at the right time, ie the time that the prompt communication is expected to drop. "The worry I've got is we have a regular programme of direct marketing to drive response to our call centres," said Pete Markey, marketing director at More Than. "A postal strike disrupts our call pattern. It hits your call centres with higher calls at the wrong time. Insurance in particular is date-driven using renewal data [and a postal strike means] the window of opportunity starts to drop."

Q: As Royal Mail controls 'the final mile', ie the actual delivery of a letter to a consumer's letter box, then clients are just going to have to put up with postal strikes.
A: Not necessarily. British Telecom, the UK's second biggest spender on direct mail, had been "heavily focused on direct mail but now we realise there are many more ways to do direct response," says BT's retail marketing director Matthew Dearden.

"We use a lot of channels for direct response - the traditional channels of direct mail, door drops and inserts - and we also use TV for direct response and quite a lot of online - pay per click," Dearden says. "We're testing some other channels - we're testing some ads for our BT Vision TV service on music service Spotify. It's a mix of channels but all direct response."