Complete Guide to Direct-Mail Marketing

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While sending snail mail directly to consumers might be an analog marketing method, it’s still popular today. According to the 2026 Direct Mail Marketing Benchmark Report from Franklin Madison Direct, 95% of marketers plan to grow or maintain their investment in direct mail over the next 12 months due to its high engagement rate and return on investment (ROI). 

In this guide, you’ll learn what direct-mail marketing is and how to set up your own campaign. You’ll also get expert direct-mail marketing tips from Tom Aulet, founder of rowing machine company Ergatta.

What is direct-mail marketing?

Direct-mail marketing is the practice of sending physical promotional materials to existing or prospective customers. These materials typically take the form of:

• Postcards
• Brochures
• Letters
• Flyers
• Newsletters
• Catalogs
• Coupon envelopes
• Packages

Is direct mail an effective form of marketing?

• High engagement rate
• Heightened recall
• Strong emotional response

Direct-mail marketing is an effective form of marketing for many businesses. In fact, 79% of executives rank direct-mail marketing as their highest performing marketing channel, according to the 2025 State of Direct Mail report from Lob.

Here are a few reasons why direct mail is effective:

High engagement rate

The Franklin Madison Direct report found that 79% of consumers engage with the mail they receive. For marketing emails, the most common open rate range is only 20% to 30%, according to Litmus’s 2025 State of Email report. 

Heightened recall

When making a purchase, 60% of consumers say direct mail is easy to remember. Only 44% of consumers say the same for digital ads, according to RR Donnelly.

Strong emotional response 

A 2019 study used neuromarketing techniques to measure consumers’ visual attention, emotional response, and brain activity when exposed to advertisements. Print elicited stronger emotions, was more memorable and vivid, and made consumers feel that the products or services were more desirable or valuable than digital advertising. 

Is direct mail expensive?

The cost of direct-mail campaigns varies according to several factors:

• Mailing list. This is the cost of acquiring the physical addresses of your target audience. If you don’t already have a database of mailing addresses, you’ll need to buy one from a direct-mail service. (Pricing starts at $150 for one to 1,000 leads.)
• Physical media. This is the cost of materials like paper, ink, stamps, and envelopes.
• Creative. This is how much you’ll pay designers and copywriters to create your materials
• Postage. This is the cost of getting your mail to your audience. 

The USPS has a direct-mail cost estimator tool for pinpointing the cost of a campaign and figuring out what’s possible within a certain budget. 

For instance, the tool estimates $3,743.25 for working with an affordable designer to send 6,000 full-color postcards to your own customer list using USPS Marketing Mail. In this case, it costs 9¢ to print each card, 43¢ to mail each card, and $605.25 total for design.

You can also work with a direct-mail service to help you compile a mailing list, design creative, and send out your materials. This saves time but makes your campaign more expensive.

Together, these costs make direct mail more expensive than many other types of marketing. On Facebook, for instance, 6,000 impressions on an ad would cost about $96. 

“We only use [direct mail] at really high-spend periods when there’s high buying intent, we have a lot of budget to play with, and there’s a very specific message that’s new and compelling that we want to get out there,” says Tom Aulet, founder of rowing brand Ergatta. 

When to use direct mail 

• Your product is highly visual
• You want to add an offline touchpoint to your marketing mix
• You want to close sales with a discount

Direct mail advertising doesn’t make sense for every marketing application since it’s more expensive than digital. 

Tom outlines three criteria that, in his view, make direct mail a compelling option: 

Your product is highly visual

One of direct mail’s major advantages is that it can make your product pop in a way that’s more memorable than an ad on a screen, mid-scroll. 

“We have a very visual product,” says Tom. “Our product is really pretty, and from a creative standpoint, we thought that it would work well in direct mail.”

Ergatta’s rowing machines are made from cherry and oak wood and handcrafted in the US. Direct mail lets potential customers see the machines’ craftsmanship in ads larger than the size of a phone screen.

You want to add an offline touchpoint to your marketing mix

Direct mail is unique in that it’s an offline channel that still allows for some targeting—unlike a billboard, for example, which is completely untargeted, aside from geographic location. For Ergatta, this quality makes the channel a strong addition to their marketing mix. 

“We have a very high-price-point, highly considered product that needs a bunch of different touch points, so we wanted to fit a different channel into the mix,” says Tom. 

“We also wanted to diversify away from digital-only channels. Direct mail is a more memorable, differentiated, and less saturated medium than digital. Every one of our competitors is bidding on rower keywords on Google and serving Facebook ads to the same audiences.”

From a targeting standpoint, Tom says, “For example, we can send to the 25,000 households that have shown the highest intent and engagement with our brand, specifically online.”

You want to close sales with a discount

For Ergatta, direct mail is best at delivering a compelling offer to high-intent customers who have already engaged with the brand. For that reason, their direct-mail campaigns are seasonal and tied to a specific promotion.

“It's not, ‘Remember that brand? Here’s some more messaging from it.’ It’s, ‘Remember that brand that you liked? It’s 30% off,’” says Tom.

The data supports Ergatta’s approach: 80% of consumers say that offers and discounts are most likely to give them a positive impression of a piece of mail, according to Franklin Madison’s 2026 report.

How to create a direct-mail campaign in 5 steps

1. Create a targeted mailing list
2. Write an offer and CTA
3. Design your mail
4. Streamline your mailing process
5. Track your campaign

Follow these steps for successful direct-mail campaigns: 

1. Create a targeted mailing list

Figure out which types of consumers you want to reach with your campaign. If you’re sending mail to customers who’ve already purchased from you—to re-engage them, for example—you’ll already have mailing addresses. (You’ll need to verify if you have permission to use them for marketing purposes). 

If you’re shipping to potential customers, you’ll need to use a third-party service. Services generally offer two different list-building options:

Interest or activity-based lists

Direct-mail companies create custom lists by grouping consumers by interest or activity, such as people who have just moved in, new parents, or people who are in ZIP codes with a certain median income. 

You might also be able to purchase a list based on shopper characteristics like: 

• Gender
• Age
• Income level
• Interest in related brands

Specific customer list

If you want to reach individuals who have visited your website, you can use data from your store or CRM and have a service find the mailing addresses for you. 

Ergatta, for example, uses a direct-mail service called PebblePost for campaigns designed to reach high-intent prospects at times when they’re offering a seasonal discount. For Ergatta, these leads are people who have shared their email via a lead capture form on their website requesting more information about the product. The service matches the email addresses to mailing addresses in a privacy-compliant way, and Ergatta sends them the campaign mailer. 

2. Write an offer and CTA

Next, determine the offer you want to send the leads or customer segment that will receive your mailer. There are several discount strategies to choose from. If the offer is seasonal, you can create urgency with a time-bound discount. 

Tom says the offer should be new and compelling: “Not just, ‘Our rower is pretty,’ but, ‘We’re running a holiday deal for $500 off.’”

If your goal is to engage a segment of your highest-value customers, you might invite them to join a loyalty program with a limited-time bonus. 

Finally, give customers a way to take action on your offer by writing a clear call to action (CTA). Some brands choose to include a QR code customers can scan to make a purchase or sign up for a program. 

3. Design your mail

Direct mail is a visual medium, which means your creative needs to catch a customer’s eye when they’re sorting through their mail. “The visual creative matters,” says Tom. “It has to be beautiful and has to pop.”

If you have high-quality visual assets, this is the time to use them.

“Direct mail, versus digital channels like Meta and Google, gives you the opportunity to have more of a visual impact,” says Tom. “You could have a good digital ad slot, but digital ads blur together because you’re pummeled with them.”

Take a look at this striking card from Ergatta featuring a high-resolution action photo. Ergatta’s logo is front and center, which helps customers immediately recognize the Ergatta brand.

“The product looks beautiful, you recognize the face, and it cuts through the noise,” Tom says.

4. Streamline your mailing process 

Depending on the size of your campaign, you might want to consider handing over your job to a direct-mail marketing company, which can handle printing and mailing for you.

If you’re going the DIY route, do some organizing upfront to save money. The USPS offers discounted bulk rates for mail that’s presorted by three digits in the ZIP code, and even deeper discounts for presorted mail with the same five digits. Direct-mail marketing companies often offer this presorting service. 

Commercial pricing is available for first-class mail with a 500-piece minimum and for marketing mail with a 200-piece (or 50-pound) minimum. Discounts depend on the weight of each mailer and the amount of ZIP code sorting you’ve done. For example, first-class mail commercial pricing gives you around 20¢ off each one-ounce mailer sorted by all five ZIP code digits.

5. Track your campaign

Measure the effectiveness of your campaign by tracking conversions and cost per acquisition (CPA).

Ergatta tracks conversions at checkout. “When people buy, they need to enter a shipping address. Then we match the shipping address to the mailing address,” says Tom. 

From there, Ergatta can measure CPA. “We know how much money we spent on the channel, so we can create a CPA for people that converted who got direct mail,” says Tom. 

Ergatta then tries to measure incrementality, or the true impact of the direct mail on that conversion.

“Incrementality’s hard to measure, and we don’t have a perfect system,” says Tom. “Would these direct-mail people have converted anyway if we didn’t send them a pamphlet? That’s the hardest thing to tease out.”

Tom says that one way to measure it is with a holdout group—a group of customers who are intentionally excluded from receiving the campaign. Some direct-mail vendors, like Pebble Post, measure incremental lift from the targeted group relative to this holdout group.

You might also include QR codes, custom shortened links, or a unique email address for customers to reach out to with questions about your product. These let you directly track the engagement of your marketing campaign.

3 tips for a successful direct-mail campaign

1. Test with digital
2. Focus on the lower funnel
3. Keep it simple

Here are three expert tips for running a successful direct-mail campaign:

1. Test with digital

Direct mail is expensive to produce, so you want to have confidence that you’re using the most high-performing messaging and creative on your mailers. Ergatta tests creative using digital marketing channels to find winning combinations. 

“Start with your digital,” Tom says. “Figure out what creative, what message, what audience combinations work. Then you can extend those into a new medium with direct mail.” 

Consider creating a marketing plan to map out what you’ll test and when. Shopify’s free marketing plan template can get you started.

2. Focus on the lower funnel

Instead of using direct mail to generate brand awareness, use it to push consumers at the bottom of the marketing funnel toward making a purchase.

“Don’t use it as a broad educational channel. Fold it in later for a highly targeted, lower-funnel, high-intent, vetted audience, and then expand from there,” says Tom. “It’s just too expensive of a channel to do prospecting or broad targeting and upper-funnel stuff.” 

3. Keep it simple

You don’t need to create an intricate pamphlet to run a successful direct-mail marketing campaign.

“It’s a really expensive channel on a CPM [cost per thousand impressions] basis” says Tom. “The pamphlets and bigger formats are even more expensive and not worth it.”

You can keep your visuals and messaging simple, too. 

“Don’t be like, ‘Let me introduce you to our brand and our product, and here’s our 17 messaging points,’” says Tom. “Focus on a pretty product to make you pick the card up, then a punchy, short message, like a holiday promo.”