Other than transaction printing, direct mail is the area where inkjet printing has had the greatest impact to date. Most designers have not had a great interest in designing for transaction print, they should if they like making money, but more on that later. Direct mail, on the other hand, has been driving profits for the design community from the largest agencies to stay-at-home parents with a desktop publishing app. Digital printing, and inkjet in particular, provides opportunities for designers to do more for their clients and generate better, more effective direct mail.

Making direct mail better should also be a priority for every print organization that even remotely touches the direct marketing segment. Direct marketing underwrites the postal costs of many other segments in the US, with 77.3 mail pieces delivered in 2018. While direct mail volumes have grown, direct mail producers and their designers must compete with many other channels for a piece of the marketing pie. Designers are also competing with the perception of direct mail as “junk mail.”

Let’s face it, everyone loses when poorly designed pieces make it into the mail. Consumers are annoyed and more likely to toss everything in the bin. If response rates are low, especially on mass mailings, it drags down overall industry performance, making marketers less likely to put their budget into mail versus non-print channels. Everyone in the supply chain has a vested interest in creating truly effective direct mail. That means everyone in the supply chain needs to work together, and the opportunities to create great work have never been better.

What Can Mailers Do?

While some print and mail organizations offer services like design and marketing strategy, most of what they print is designed by someone else. In order to have an impact on mail design, they need to work with designers before the piece becomes a job. The idea is to get designers excited about the latest digital production technology and help them raise the bar on what is possible. We call this creating “design optimists.”

This requires an investment in customer education and outbound marketing to designers, as well as the technical ability to deliver high-quality production. Getting to designers before they are customers may actually help bring in more business, particularly if a printer can enable them to deliver differentiated designs that their last print partner could not.

What Do Designers Need to Learn About?

Designers who specialize in non-print channels need to learn about the great, and improving, response rates that direct mail can deliver. Direct mail is the most effective channel in driving response from consumers as well as business prospects. In fact, in 2018 direct mail response rates were 5 times higher than either email or social campaigns and 9 times higher when using a house mailing list versus a prospect list. Those trends continued through 2025 with direct mail response rates remaining robust and relatively stable — holding a significant edge over email and social channels. House lists consistently deliver roughly double the response of cold prospect lists, and both continue to outperform digital channels by large margins.

Source: ANA; DMA Response Rate Report, 2018, 2023, 2025

Of course, those numbers are averages. Some response rates are lower and some are significantly higher. Getting those higher results is what everyone should be striving for. Even designers who have been working in print may not be aware of all of the new possibilities for driving top results with direct mail. Let’s consider a few in the next post.

In Part 2, we move from why it matters to how to make it work, exploring personalization, haptics, finishing, and how to turn possibility into production.

About Elizabeth Gooding

Elizabeth Gooding is an expert in customer communications and production inkjet, working across the full design-to-production workflow to solve complex communication challenges and unlock new opportunities with print.

She has led transformation efforts for major financial and healthcare organizations, managed complex design initiatives, and advised print service providers on operations, positioning, and growth. She is the co-author of The Designer’s Guide to Inkjet and a founding member of the Inkjet Summit advisory board.

Known for her ability to see print challenges from multiple perspectives, Elizabeth translates real-world experience into practical insights that help organizations optimize workflows, improve results, and grow profitably.

In Part 1, we established why the design supply chain matters and the opportunity it creates, now let’s focus on how to execute it through personalization, haptics, finishing, and production alignment.

Data-Driven Personalization or Relevant Personalization

There have been huge leaps in data management to drive personalization and in what can be personalized in a digital printing environment. Advances in data management, filtering, appending, and even Artificial Intelligence (AI) means that lists can be more targeted, even micro-targeted, and more robust with multiple data points used to personalize a campaign. (download free white paper)

Once triggers are identified to drive variations, designs can be tailored with variations in color, imagery, offer, response methods. In fact, the entire campaign flow might be changed based on the demographics of the list with some receiving print as a follow up to online activity and others getting direct mail first with an enticement to go online. With digital print, sophisticated marketing software and the right data, pretty much anything in a campaign can be personalized – including the envelope. Personalization means more than adding a name, when used effectively, designers can use data to make direct mail more relevant for the receiver and more cost-effective for the sender.

Haptics

The literal feel of the piece can have a direct impact on whether mail gets opened, how the message is interpreted and how memorable it is. “A Communicator’s Guide to the Neuroscience of Touch” by Lana Rigsby and Dr. David Eagleman cites research from Eagleman Labs connecting haptics with memory. Specifically, research participants were more likely to recall content printed on high-quality, heavy weight paper than on low-quality paper. No doubt, the feel of a piece can be a major differentiator when sorting through a pile of mail. Is there a soft-touch, a grainy feel, a raised surface? The feel of the selected media is only one step in the process since that media can be enhanced with coatings, varnishes, embossing and foils to drive interest. In many cases, the application of textures and embellishment is also one more characteristic that can be personalized for each mail piece. (See also Soft-Touch Effects post)

Finishing

Some of the haptic opportunities described above are part of post-print finishing lines, including clear and textured coatings and foils, but there are many other finishing opportunities to for designers to consider and understand. Sometimes even understanding all of the folding options that are compatible with a particular print technology can be confusing – but a unique “reveal” through an unexpected fold can be a differentiator. Designers need to understand how available finishing options work together from haptic enhancements through folding, binding, cutting and inserting – or building the envelope around the piece in lieu of a typical inserting process.

Creating Design Optimists

Personalization, haptic enhancement and finishing are just a few of the areas that can take direct mail to the next level and they each are complex topics to master. The selected paper (or other media) must be compatible with each step in the process. A particular print provider may have different combinations of print and finishing solutions including toner or inkjet, sheet-fed or roll-fed and different levels of sophistication with their software processes. Without guidance, designers can become frustrated with trying to figure out what is possible. Print organizations can help them by providing guidelines on:

• The production capabilities of the organization. Not feeds and speeds, but rather combinations of technology that work together. What paper and print options are available for high, medium and low coverage designs? What finishing capabilities can be used with each of those options. What are the base sheet sizes or roll widths that can be produced. How can you get each piece in the mail at the lowest cost?

• File preparation guidelines for submitting data, design and graphic files for production. Start with color space and preferred image file formats for each print process used.

• Inspiration through sample designs. Print firms can create them in-house or hire a designer, but sample jobs that push the limits of your production capabilities should be available to drive designers to think big.  

Thinking big may include designs that include more than one type of print, more than one type of media, variations in finishes and campaign components that go beyond the page such as augmented reality or other connections to web, social or mobile experiences. Design optimists assume that what they want to do is possible and go out and work with production partners to try to make it happen. Printing and mailing organizations need to be ready to collaborate on that vision and find ways to say yes, even if that involves some fine tuning on the design.

Print providers need to work to gain the attention of designers, but designers also need to engage with print providers and push them to collaborate. Talking with different providers can open up design possibilities that may otherwise have been missed. When designers and their print partners are working together early in the process, the chances of a clean, successful and innovative campaign are greatly increased. When innovative campaigns drive even higher response rates, we all win.

About Elizabeth Gooding

Elizabeth Gooding is an expert in customer communications and production inkjet, working across the full design-to-production workflow to solve complex communication challenges and unlock new opportunities with print.

She has led transformation efforts for major financial and healthcare organizations, managed complex design initiatives, and advised print service providers on operations, positioning, and growth. She is the co-author of The Designer’s Guide to Inkjet and a founding member of the Inkjet Summit advisory board.

Known for her ability to see print challenges from multiple perspectives, Elizabeth translates real-world experience into practical insights that help organizations optimize workflows, improve results, and grow profitably.