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clutter. More and more he’s doing work for new companies. A notable feature is the number of acquisition campaigns where businesses
are actively seeking to gain new customers. He tracks the dynamics ten years back to when the market went to digital in a big way. Now there is a recognition that emails and social media just don’t work when it comes to acquiring new customers.
As an example he talks of the success a major international client has enjoyed since entering the local market with massive and sustained direct mail campaigns. “It’s a simple single page in an envelope. They started off doing one campaign. Now it’s up to four to five campaigns hitting one to one and a half million customers every time. That’s twenty per cent of Australia.”
Another booming sector is charities. “It’s very strong. They also tried to do digital but it didn’t work. Now they’re coming back in droves. We’re sometimes doing two to three
Above
Value: Luke Pearsall
(left) places great value
on longterm employees such as Najid Elham (right), who he credits with keeping the machines running so well
acquisition campaigns a month.” Second-tier finance businesses are also big direct marketing users. “Not
the big four banks but the others are, those who are trying to grow.”
He points out the majority
of companies now have digital marketing capability in-house.
At the beginning, some mailing houses jumped on the email and
SMS bandwagon but it was a short- lived romance. “I remember when it started they were charging one dollar a message or fifty cents an email. Now companies can put out twenty thousand through Survey Monkey for practically nothing.
“In the USA, direct mail is going gangbusters. Other print may be falling but print to the letterbox is booming. I was at a trade show in Chicago where there was a whole section devoted to mailing.”
The elephant
in the room
Australia Post is the single largest factor in the success or failure of direct mail. Its monopoly power over letter delivery, along with the discovery of
a profitable parcels service, create a situation fraught with difficulties for mail houses. Pearsall has definite views on the organisation’s impact. He looks back to the time of former CEO, Ahmed Fahour, as a watershed when the relationship with the industry changed.
“As far as I’m concerned he just wanted to kill letters. He set out to gouge the price with a thirty eight per cent increase across the board in one hit. I was part of a focus group with Lindsay May that went into Strawberry Hills. Fahour would never attend the meetings. The attitude was, we don’t care what you have to say; this is the way it’s going to be. So I bowed out of it. The only breathing space they gave us was they introduced promo post with only a smaller increase. If you sent a bill pre-sort it’s about a dollar; promo post was for anything [to do with] marketing at around 70 cents.”
He takes a dim view of some in the industry who through cupidity or ignorance don’t pass on the promo discount to their customers. But
it does mean that when customers learn of it they become loyal to their new provider.
“Promo mail opened up a can of worms. People were not passing on the discounts to their customers. I thought it was like suicide; why they would do that? We still pick up a new
client every now and then and when
I look at their work, I tell them, ‘this could go promo.’ Actually, we picked up a massive one last year, a huge client we took off one the big guys. They were sending it regular pre-sort, not promo. We’re talking a couple of hundred grand in postage every job. The guy couldn’t believe it when I told him.”
A lot of it has to do with the lack of skill, knowledge and experience in the mailing industry now. Pearsall lives and breathes mailing with all its technicalities and recognises that many people in the trade are selling it short.
“A lot of printers I know are
trying to do it, but they just don’t know how. You can’t do it like a scheduled print run. This ties back to the skill set and understanding mail and the amount of variability and intricacies in the process. It’s not just about putting a letter in an envelope. There’s so much that can go wrong, so quickly, if you don’t know what you’re doing: incorrect data formatting, mismatches, wrong envelope, so many.
“When you’re doing document composition and manipulation,
we’ll sometimes do letters that are six pages long for charities with a hundred variables. If you pull in that one wrong variable, it can send the whole letter into a spin. You could end up with someone else’s info.”
A long way to the top
Pearsall maintains that part of the reason why mid-size companies, such as Active Mail, are doing so well, is the shrinking number of businesses in the sector as many of the older generation are getting out. There’s also a lack of skill in the industry. “There are not that many people
who understand mailing. People think they can do it but they can’t. Certainly most printers don’t.”
Running his own business is
the culmination of a long career in direct mail for Pearsall, who could
be termed a direct mail native. He entered the industry in 1998 out of school in a junior capacity, working with one of the leading providers at the time, Security Mail, where he stayed for seven years. He quickly found that his métier was in account management and customer service. He gained experience with such large customers as Optus, running all of their marketing campaigns, which would exceed 70 million direct mail packs during the year.
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