How many commercials and advertisements have you seen for the Post Office’s package services? Thousands.

How many commercials and advertisements have you seen from the USPS promoting direct mail marketing?

I haven’t seen any. None, nada, zilch.

What if the Post Office — or even local Postal Customer Councils — actively promoted the use of direct mail marketing to grow a business?

I am thinking that if the Post Office started promoting direct mail marketing, they could make a serious dent in their $8.5 BILLION deficit.

How many businesses use direct mail?

According to my list source, which comes from Dun & Bradstreet, there are 27,969,953 businesses in the United States.

I wish I had statistics for how many businesses use direct mail marketing. Is it 1%, 10%. My hunch is that it’s a microscopic percentage.

But what if the number of businesses using direct mail marketing increased by 10%?

And that each business sent out 10,000 postcards over the course of a year. Would that increase mail volume significantly?

In 2010, in statistics provided by the Post Office, standard mail volume was 82.5 billion pieces. In 2007, that was 103.5 billion. A sharp decrease.

Probably a lot of that decline was the reduction in credit card offers and other “junk” mail from huge mailing houses. Those inflated numbers are gone forever.

Even with that decline, the Post Office — according to their own numbers — generated $17.3 BILLION in revenues in 2010.

On the other hand, package services brought in $1.5 billion and shipping services brought in $8.7 billion.

But that is where the advertising dollars are going even though the Post Office has competition in these fields.

First class mail, which is the bills and checks everyone hates to receive, have declined every year from 103.7 billion pieces in 2001 to 78.2 billion pieces in 2010. That business is never coming back with online bill payment becoming increasing popular.

Growing direct mail marketing

But what about the possibility of growing direct mail? Only the post office offers the ability to reach every household in America with a tangible marketing piece for only a few cents apiece.

There is no doubt that direct mail marketing — especially direct mail postcards — is severely under utilized. Despite the overall decline in volume, my business mailed out 25% more postcards in 2010 than 2009.

Every business, no matter how small, needs a business card and now a web site. But how effective are websites for most local businesses?

A few years ago, the local business person only had to contact the Yellow Pages and buy the biggest ad he could afford. Just like first class mail volumes, those days are long gone.

Although some Yellow Pages business like Dex1 here in Raleigh are in and out of bankruptcy, the Yellow Pages are trying to promote websites. From what I have seen of the value of those websites, the companies selling those web services should be arrested for fraud.

The websites are almost totally and completely useless for gaining new business — but they do produce revenue for the companies selling them.

As someone who has learned the intricacies of search engine optimized websites, they require a lot of work and understanding of how the search engines work.

Although there are countless “web designers,” there are very, very few who understand how to market effectively on the web. And don’t get me started on how Google Adwords is a waste of resources for most business. Even Google uses direct mail marketing!

Getting the word out

So what is the local business going to do? Direct mail marketing.

But many of them haven’t even thought of it. Direct mail marketing, just like websites, is very complicated. You can’t be effective at it if you do it once a year. That’s my niche.

It’s all about knowing how to integrate list, offer, timing & creative execution

Plus knowing postal regulations. There is a reason there is an expression “Going Postal” and that is my job security.

If you are a direct mail marketing professional — or anyone else who has a vested interest in growing direct mail marketing — let’s try to figure out how to get the Post Office grow by helping us bring results to all those businesses out there who to reach their best prospects.

Contact me at steven@marketplace-solutions.com and let’s make it happen.