JICMAIL. Measuring Success Beyond the Letterbox

We are very excited about one of the biggest developments for direct mail in recent history that will give greater insight into impact and reach than ever before.

JICMAIL is the new Joint Industry Committee for Mail. It has been created to measure the daily readership and usage of direct mail by UK consumers.

Advertising mail is the third largest media channel in the UK, worth an estimated £1.7bn annually. Despite its size, there has never been a recognised audience measurement stem, however, JICMAIL is about to change all that.

For Dragonfly it means that we’ll be able to measure the impact of our campaigns. Right now we can tell clients to which people their message is going, where they live, what age they are and what brands they have an affinity with. JICMAIL means we’ll be able to know so much more about what that audience does with their mail once it’s been posted through their letterbox. We’ll be able to measure the circulation, reach and frequency of exposure of each item we send, whether it’s personalised mail or a door drop.

It also means we’ll have a benchmark against which we can compare other forms of media.  We’ll be able to tell how many people will see a piece of mail versus how often they would see an advert in a newspaper or on the radio. This is powerful data that we can’t wait to use to research and plan the most effective campaigns for our clients.

It’s early days for this milestone development for the industry but some of the key highlights in JICMAIL's first annual report give a snapshot of the kind of insight that we’ll be privy to, and we can’t wait.

• The average household receives 1.3 items of addressed mail each day.
• Households with children and ABC1 households get significantly more mail.
• Each household gets one door drop item for each addressed mail item - younger and C2DE households receive fewer door drops.
• 65% of all addressed mail is opened.
• Each item reaches 1.2 people per household and is read or revisited on average 4.2 times. The more people in a household, the more a piece of mail is shared and passed on.
• ABC1 households share mail more with each other, and C2DE households re-read mail more often.
• For every 100 door drops received ten are passed on and shared, and each piece is revisited three times. Supermarkets, Restaurants and local Tradespeople see the highest frequency of exposure for their door drops.
• Men interact with Utilities, Council and Magazine mail most frequently whereas Medical and Supermarkets are higher for women.