When it comes to the harsh realities of direct mail, it doesn’t get harsher than this: Not every mailing is going to succeed. Some are going to be meh. And some are going to fall flat on their faces.
When that happens, we blame the mailing because it’s easy and obvious. The mailing wasn’t good enough. So eventually we try again, either with another mailing or some other marketing tactic. And maybe that works or maybe that fails.
Whatever it does, it doesn’t answer the fundamental question: Why did the mailing fail?
As much as we want to answer to be simple and superficial, sometimes it’s not.
A Refresher On Attribution Research
There’s actually a branch of marketing research devoted to analyzing why your mailing was a dud.
Well, maybe not your mailing specifically. And maybe not why it failed. But certainly why and when people act or don’t act on marketing messages.
This field of marketing study is attribution research, and like a lot of marketing research it starts off neat and clear-cut and devolves into a chaotic mess.
Attribution research tries to determine what marketing message actually caused someone to take action. It starts by assuming the last message someone saw caused them to buy or click, then looks at the first message someone saw, and finally settles on a weighted-average approach that looks for changes – a spike in web traffic or social-media engagement, for instance – as a pretext for impact on a purchasing decision.
It becomes gobbledygook passed off as science, which brings us back to our mailing.
Attribution theory might say your mailing didn’t fail but it wasn’t the trigger that caused people to buy, though it might contribute to a purchase or donation down the road.
This is unhelpful because it assumes everything works and everything contributes. And as marketers we know that just isn’t so.
Instead of giving this mailing a participation medal, why not look on it as a canary in a coal mine alerting you to more fundamental problems with your marketing?
If you look at the failed mailing as a symptom and not another brick in the wall, you might be surprised at what you find. For instance:
Your website is flawed.
A mailing might point up lots of website issues. It could show navigation errors – a landing page that doesn’t easily take you back to the main site, a home page with too many calls to action or too many nav bars, or the dreaded 404 error.
These are obvious issues. Less obvious issues include:
- Form-fills that don’t go anywhere.
- QR codes that go to the wrong page.
- Website copy that doesn’t parallel the mailing, either in tone or content.
- Outdated information on the website, whether it’s showcasing old events or delivering past brand messages.
People don’t do well with dissonance. If what the website says doesn’t align with what the mailing says or the process doesn’t work the way they think it should, people are going to be turned off. And they’ll likely place blame on the mailing, even though the mailing talks about the brand or organization as it is while the website talks about the organization as it was.
But it’s the website, the repository of your brand. And the mailing is just a mailing. Who are you going to believe?
Your social media is going in the wrong direction.
This is a related problem.
Marketing is an integrative function. That’s not a math term; it means that marketing integrates various marketing tactics to execute strategies and eventually achieve goals.
For marketing to work, the website has to line up with what sales is saying, which is amplified and enhanced through social media, which is expounded upon through print materials and echoed through statements from executives and other influential people.
Again, people don’t like dissonance. When your social media is going in a different direction from your website and/or mailing, when it’s talking about National Toast ‘n’ Jelly Day when it should be talking about messages in your mailing, you’re going to lose people. And you can’t afford to lose people.
If your marketing team consists of you, yourself and your shadow this is less of a possibility – but not impossible. An actual team of discrete people can get scattered unless someone is watching over everything.
It sounds incredibly obvious, but what makes integrated marketing integrated is integration – everything working together. Organizations that don’t work together need to focus on alignment before blaming the mailing.
Your mission-vision-values isn’t resonating (or isn’t being communicated).
Ah, the MVV. It should be the touchstone for purpose-driven organizations. But too often folks lose track of the why and just do things to get them done.
It’s easy to do. So much happens in a day, it’s easy to forget about what’s really important.
Before you do your next mailing, look at your organization’s mission, vision and values. Ask whether they’re still relevant. Ask whether your organizations still lives them out. Ask if they’re implicit in all your external communication.
Be honest with yourself, and if the truth is you’ve gotten away from your MVV or your MVV has gotten away from you, examine it in the context of your organization. Shift away from your MVV only as a last resort, but if it’s not what you’re about now and in the future, plan to move on.
Your brand needs refreshing.
On the other hand, it might not be your mission, vision and values. It might be your brand.
Brand and MVV are two different things. They can be closely related – they might even share some of the same words – but they’re not the same thing.
Your MVV is codified. Your brand is how your organization lives in people’s minds.
Scouting is a great example of how this can operate – and things can separate.
Scouting America changed its name from the Boy Scouts of America in 2024-25 as part of an effort to be more inclusive. The brand changed but core elements of the organization’s mission, vision and values remained, and people’s image of scouts didn’t change much.
In other words, Scouting found itself with:
- A new brand
- Organizational mission, vision and values in transition
- Long-held brand impressions still being held by key audiences
Has the rebrand gone smoothly? Not particularly. And with that particular set of circumstances, it’s no wonder.
Any mailing an organization does when these three key elements are in three different places is probably going to fail. Is it the mailing’s fault? Hardly.
Your target market is going away.
Time passes. The Beatles are in their 80s now. The people who supported your organization even five years ago may not be your current supporters.
Your target market is evolving. It’s getting married, having kids, seeing kids leave home, saving for weddings, taking care of grandkids, transitioning to assisted living, transitioning out of assisted living. At some point, saying the same thing the same way to these same people is not going to work.
You need to look at your mailing list before you mail, keeping your eyes open for demographic shifts. Sometimes the shifts will be in your favor, as they often are with new empty-nesters. Sometimes they won’t be, as in the case of Baby Boomers shuffling off this mortal coil.
A mailing that’s meant to appeal to a well-defined group may fail with other groups, so making sure your target group still exists should be step one.
You know what can help with this process? Direct-mail experts who can examine your lists and tell you what they show.
JHL has experts like that who can help you understand who you’re mailing to before you mail.
Contact us and let’s talk about your next mailing, and how we can optimize it for success.
It’s what we do.
Jim Felhofer 3/10/26