Direct Mail

Direct mail is a marketing channel which avoids intermediaries such as wholesalers and retailers by directly coming in contact with the customer by mailing them catalogs or special offers.

The effectiveness of this type of marketing is debatable because most consumers consider these mails as junk and throw them away. However certain consumers do tend to respond to these offers and hence discredit the myth that everyone hates these junk mails.

There are a lot of ethical concerns regarding direct mailing. Firstly environmentalists are against it because it leads to a waste of paper as most of these mails are trashed and hence wasted. Secondly these companies tend to have a lot of sensitive information about the households like their income, mortgage details etc. which makes many of these potential customers uncomfortable. Despite all this direct mails have endured largely because they are cheap and their effectiveness can be measured easily.

For more in-depth details of direct mailing, click the link below:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,971769-7,00.html

The reason I found this article relevant because it shows both sides of the picture with regards to direct mailing.