Delivering on objectives: Insights at Marketreach

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How do you feel when an envelope drops through your letterbox? Joy? Fear? Frustration? Annoyance? Excitement? Is it a case of reaching for the bin or for the letter opener? Now contrast those emotions with an email or a social media notification. Do you feel as strongly?

Far less correspondence has been sent through the mail in recent years.

In the last three months of 2020, which included a national lockdown as well as increased Covid-19 restrictions, post volumes at Royal Mail fell by 14%, with parcel numbers up by 30%. Letters are often viewed as old-fashioned, with many people preferring the cheaper alternatives of email or social media.

Royal Mail’s Marketreach division is setting out to change those perceptions. Marketreach is the marketing authority on commercial mail and attempts to promote postal mail as an effective marketing and communication channel. It seeks to provide evidence of mail’s effectiveness and get brands and businesses excited about its creative and strategic possibilities.

Amanda Griffiths, head of planning and insight at Marketreach, says that she sees her role as akin to promotion for post, and adds that research plays a valuable role in Marketreach’s work. “Mail is the third largest media channel in the UK,” Griffiths says.

“The role of insight and planning at Marketreach is to develop insight largely through research and some secondary sources to show from a variety of angles the value and impact of mail on marketing, both why it is important and how to use it well.”

Griffith’s team focuses on insight and is approximately 25-strong, including a communications planner, media planner and data planning team, all working directly with customers. Within Marketreach there is a specialist sales team and a marketing team. “The bulk of our work is used externally, as our focus is on building the market,” Griffiths says, adding that her team’s insight is frequently used by Marketreach’s sales teams to promote direct mail and door-drops as a means of marketing.

Most of the organisation’s research work is run with outside companies, with Trinity McQueen, Kantar and Accenture among those to have run research projects recently for Marketreach. Griffiths says a mix of external suppliers means “people are coming fresh to it and are bringing new ideas and techniques”.

Griffths says that despite being part of Royal Mail, Marketreach has a degree of independence, with greater focus on the mail industry as a whole, including rivals to sister companies within Royal Mail Group. “At heart, our role is about direct mail and door-drop overall,” she says. “We support the entire mail industry. We are more like a [TV marketing body] Thinkbox than we are Royal Mail.”

This includes work with advertisers, agencies, developers, and anyone in the industry with a connection to mail. “We are in a really interesting position where lots of brands use and access our systems,” Griffiths adds. “Our role is to keep people using mail.”

Any usage of the postal system is deemed important and useful – there is no discussion of how mail should be sent out, just its promotion as a medium or channel. Information is widely shared within Royal Mail too. “We share information across the organisation,” she says. “It ends up in the annual report, and parts of it are taken up to the senior team to understand what we are doing. Because we are a slightly different group to any other in Royal Mail,research tends to have its main life within Marketreach.”

That role in the postal system also feeds into Marketreach’s biggest challenge at the moment, according to Griffiths. “The key challenges are making mail exciting, interesting and relevant,” she says. “As the world has gone more digital, we are spending more time in the industry and the direct marketing industry has moved more and more digital.

“The challenge for us is people tend not to understand mail and how we use it. We need to come up with ways to make people recognise that there is something that works superbly well with digital that isn’t digital – mail. The challenge of that is to prove that mail isn’t old fashioned and has ways to be in an integrated media plan.”

The problem is that mail is not part of integrated media plans in many organisations in the same way that email or online advertising are. In many cases, Griffiths says, mail sits in a different department entirely. Media measurement, therefore, is vital to demonstrating its importance.
Marketreach recently launched a marketing campaign based on the findings of what Griffiths describes as its biggest research programme in five years, to understand how businesses can make the most of customer mail (see boxout overleaf). The campaign is targeted at senior decision-makers in the advertising and marketing industries.

“Most of the work we have done previously has been very focused on marketing,” Griffiths states. “For customer mail, because this type of mail is managed by the finance department, procurement and production, it often comes separate from marketing, and we wanted a wider view of what senior management needs.”

Often Marketreach projects begin with a marketing campaign before research findings are disseminated to the industry at large. As well as being showcased within Royal Mail, information is sent to external trade bodies like the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), large mailing companies and others. Videos, webinars and online presentations are some of the tactics used to get information out publicly. Griffiths says that often the data is the spark for future research projects. “If something is big, you want it to be valuable for a while and you want to keep it fresh and find new angles for it.

“We are always trying to tell a story and build excitement,” Griffiths adds. “Every piece of research we do builds on the last and tries to open something new.”

Telling a story

Much of Marketreach’s work has focused on demonstrating the emotional connection that mail can build among customers.

Seven years ago, in her first Marketreach project after joining the organisation, Griffiths worked on an initiative called ‘The private life of mail’. This project looked at ‘tactility’ – the ‘feel’ of mail, in essence. This culminated in further neuroscience work that examined how people react to mail and what information is absorbed.

“We link the data together to tell a story, as it is multi-layered and each dataset builds on the last,” she adds.

For example, the organisation’s customer mail research project (see boxout) was based on a decision to explore how customer mail affected both businesses and consumers. The project will run for a further six to 12 months, but Griffiths says the material generated will be used in various additional projects in the years to come.

“We went into the research asking a variety of questions about this type of mail,” she adds. “With mail, it is about how people are physically working with it – how they open it, store it, what they do with it, how they feel about it and how they respond to it. What we saw was it was having a really positive impact on all of those outcomes. Our challenge was that while that was interesting as data, it is only interesting to us, and we had to create the messaging and story.”

Mail is often assumed to be something that is old fashioned, or an inconvenience, says Griffiths, arguing that the evidence suggests the opposite is true. “It is important to people – it is about the relationships they have and their money,” she explains. “They were spending a lot of time with it – they had huge amounts of trust in this mail. They felt recognised by brands. What came out of it was the essence of customer experience – mail was creating a great customer experience, but brands weren’t including it in the customer experience thoughts that they had.”

The consequence, she adds, is that businesses need to pay more attention to mail as part of their communications and marketing strategies. “Not only is mail doing something exciting and interesting, but you need to think about it and use it across all of your messaging,” Griffiths says.
“There’s a place for it – it is not for everything, and no one is going to stop doing digital or TV, but you need to think about where it will have the best impact.

“It might just be in files or in a box under the bed, but people keep mail because they think it is important. They think it is information they will need going forward. Everyone has mail they are filing and holding somewhere in their house.”

The pandemic showcased the ability of the mail to reach a wide proportion of the population.

“For some people, the postman might have been the only person to arrive all day,” Griffiths says.

“And so mail became more important and became really trusted. Scams have moved on to digital, and people don’t believe scams come through the mail anymore – people know it is too expensive.”

Even digital-only businesses have embraced mail recently, such as online retailers getting a catalogue into people’s hands to get them online to order, or fast-delivery grocers using door drops to advertise to people in a specific local area. “If there was a gamechanger, it was QR codes,” Griffiths recalls. “They had been around for years, and we had talked about them for years, but we weren’t getting any traction – businesses just weren’t interested in them.

“Post-Covid-19, everyone knows how to use a QR code, and it is on much more mail. It creates a much better connection between mail and online.”

For the future, Griffiths sees research playing a continued valuable role at Marketreach.

“We consider ourselves an insight-driven organisation, and everything we do starts with research.

“The challenge for us is there is not enough money or time to do everything we’d like to do. If I could run 25 studies at the moment, I would.

“My goal is to keep an eye on what is most important and to have a pipeline.”

The meaning of mail