JICMAIL’s 2025 response rate tracker reveals growing performance of customer acquisition mail campaigns

Print Solutions Direct Mail Solutions

The Joint Industry Currency for Mail (JICMAIL) has released the latest results from its response rate tracker to reveal that cold direct mail response rates and door drop campaign return on investment increased in 2024, signalling the vital role that the mail channel plays in helping businesses prospect for new customers.

The JICMAIL response rate tracker now contains aggregated anonymous campaign level data gathered from 3800 campaigns by 15 different organisations spanning sell side businesses, agencies, data and technology partners. Designed to complement the organisation’s ongoing panel measurement of consumer mail engagement, the response rate tracker provides response, return on investment, cost per acquisition (CPA), and average order value (AOV) benchmarks for use in campaign target setting and measurement.

The response rate tracker provides marketers with a vital tool for contextualising their own campaign performance, with top level benchmarks revealing that:

• Warm direct mail achieves an average response rate of 7.2% and a return on investment of £9.00.

• Cold direct mail generates a 0.9% response rate and return on investment of £3.20.

• Door drops achieve a 0.5% response rate and return on investment of £2.90.

While reaching existing customers through warm direct mail might achieve higher return on investments, few businesses grow without expanding their customer base and both cold direct mail and door drop have been increasingly effective at helping organisations do this in 2024. Cold direct mail response rates grew 24% year on year, while door drop return on investment grew 39%.

While the mail channel offers a range of audience and geo targeted solutions for advertisers looking for more precision with their media spend, the value of scale and frequency of send can now be revealed after three years of building out the response rate tracker data set:

• Cold direct mail campaign return on investment increases with campaign volume. With a send volume of up to 25,000 items, an average return on investment of £2.50 is seen. At 100,000 items or more, return on investment increases to £3.60.

• The power of message reinforcement is evident when noting that repeat cold direct mail sends achieve 37% higher return on investment and 2.5 times higher response rates than new campaigns, along with greater average order values and lower CPAs.

Elsewhere, marketers looking to boost response rates should note the effect of mail campaigns with a dual response and brand objective (ie campaigns which are aiming to not only boost sales, but to also raise brand awareness and reinforce brand values for example). Dual objective brand and response campaign typically achieve three times the response rate of response only campaigns.

Benchmarks are now available across 35 sectors and product categories, including the retail/online retail, mail order, finance, charities, telecoms, travel, property and medical sectors.

In addition to the 13 contributing organisations from 2024 – Ginger Black Analytics, Epsilon, DBS Data, Join The Dots, Sagacity and the Letterbox Consultancy Whistl, PaperPlanes, Conexance Choreograph, PSE, The Specialist Works, Go Inspire and Herdify – JICMAIL is delighted that two new participants have contributed data to the Response Rate Tracker this year: Go Direct Marketing and PDV Agency.

Response rate tracker data is now available to all subscribers through JICMAIL Discovery – the data portal by which its community of nearly 300 accredited organisations access industry leading mail campaign planning and measurement data.

Ian Gibbs, director of data leadership and learning, said: ‘Prospecting for new customers is vital to the future success of businesses, yet performance marketing as a discipline faces challenges in measurement, transparency and creativity. It is heartening therefore to see that the mail channel is bucking this trend with response rates growing at a healthy rate for cold direct mail and door drops alike. With the upcoming DUA (data usage and access) bill bringing greater clarity to businesses looking to employ a data driven approach to customer acquisition, this set of response rate tracker results are very timely for the mail channel.’

Mark Cross, engagement director, commented: ‘Thanks to this industry collaboration we are continuing to grow the evidence base that supports the case for mail as a super touchpoint with some great new insights from this year's tracker. Dual purpose brand and response comms works best, return on investment improves with reach and with the brilliantly simple, but overlooked, insight of just repeat send to drive up response and return on investment.’