It is no secret in my home and office that I hate mail. When you are the owner of a business you go on the publicly available Companies Office register you end up in numerous databases and become a target for an untoward amount of "personalised" direct mail. I also hate the other mail as well as this is mainly bills and stuff from the tax man. Let me count the ways:

Personalisation

This is a joke. Most marketing departments have terrible data which is invariably out of date because they or their agencies insist on creating copies of their customer database. Examples I can personally attest to include:

• Being asked to join a Kiwi Saver superannuation scheme….one month after I had already done so. What, you want me to join it twice??
• My three year old daughter receiving a special offer to join a rental car company’s priority membership scheme!!
• Various letters from web design companies offering me a special deal - Why would I want to pay you for something that has been one of the main ways I make a living for over 10 years now?

Carbon Credits

Forget about air travel, think about how much natural resources are consumed and carbon is generated with the creation and delivery of direct mail. What makes it even worse is that they usually use those window envelopes with a bit of clear plastic to show the address at the top of the letter so you can’t even recycle them. Send email or better yet, set up a blog with an RSS feed, and save some trees people.

It Costs Me Money

We have to pay for a post box redirect, plus a courier to clear the post box and deliver it to our office. Some days all we get is direct mail.

How to deal with it

Okay, rant over, you get my point.

So imagine my delight to see this link on Katie’s blog to a letter carefully written by someone just like me in Australia which he posted back to the marketing department of some unfortunate company as well as obviously sharing it with the world via the power of the blogosphere. As Katie points out, how many recipients of their DM campaign did not bother to respond with a witty complaint letter.

I know people go on about spam, but this is far less intrusive and easy to deal with. Marketers also talk about permission marketing and the recent flurry of activity around getting permission for email marketing databases in September 2006 with the new legislation in New Zealand. When has a company ever given you a clear opt out option in a direct mail piece. A simple website you can go to where you can tell the company that you no longer wish to receive direct mail please. You can go to this website and have your name removed from all databases in theory, however, it is up to the individual marketers to keep their database up to date with those that have asked to be removed. I’ll let you know if I notice any difference in a few months.

Am I just being overly cynical? Does anyone out there like getting direct mail?