There was a postcard in my mailbox on Thursday. Heavy stock, letterpress, from a ceramics studio on Alberta where I bought two mugs in 2018. It said the kiln was running again, the firing schedule was on the back, and pickup was Saturdays between noon and four. I read it twice and put it on the fridge.
I have four thousand unread emails. I have never once put an email on my fridge.
Direct mail is having a moment, and most of the trade coverage is filing it under nostalgia, which is both wrong and lazy. Nobody misses catalogs. I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, where mail was the first line item cut to fund something that came with a dashboard.
Physical mail works in 2020 for the least romantic reason available: it is the only channel where a brand is not competing with eleven other brands inside the same three inches of screen.
The economics are the whole argument. Email costs effectively nothing to send, so brands send infinitely, so the inbox became a landfill and open rates went exactly where you would expect. A postcard costs real money per household. That cost is not a bug. It forces the discipline email lost: a smaller list, a clearer reason, one idea per piece. Constraint has always been the thing that makes marketing good, and postage is a constraint you cannot argue your way around in a meeting.
The timing helps. People have been home since March. The mail is one of the few things still arriving from outside, and it gets opened standing at the kitchen counter rather than scrolled past at a stoplight. Attention is not distributed evenly across a day, and right now some of the best attention in America is sitting between the front door and the recycling bin.
The irony is thick. The direct-to-consumer brands built entirely on cheap social inventory are buying postage now, because the auction got expensive and the inbox got full. The channel their whole model was supposed to make obsolete is the one they are renting to get through.
Constraint has always been the thing that makes marketing good, and postage is a constraint you cannot argue your way around in a meeting.
Three rules if you try it. Send to people who have actually bought something from you. Make an object worth keeping, which the ceramics studio understood and most national retailers do not. Give the piece a reason to be physical: a date, a map, a thing to hold. Salt & Straw figured this out years ago and Powell's has known it since before I moved here. The postcard is still on my fridge. Barnaby has knocked it down twice, which in this house counts as engagement.