NEW YORK, NY – A new marketing report by New York City based Winterberry Group entitled “Outlook 2011 What to Expect in Direct & Digital Marketing” shows a positive outlook for mailing list managers in 2011.
The report, available online as a free download in PDF format at the Winterberry Group website, reveals that although the total spend by businesses for direct mail took a hit in 2009, it recovered in 2010 and is on an increasing trend for 2011.
Direct Mail on The Rise
Overall, there is a better outlook in 2011 for direct and digital channels and mailing list managers will see this as good news because direct mail is definitely on the rise. The report shows that in the digital channels, growth is being driven by search, video and targeted display advertising.
The trends for 2011 are definitely towards increased spending for digital and direct marketing channels (insert media, direct response broadcast, direct response print ads, tele-services and digital) and less for traditional marketing channels (magazines, newspapers, television and radio).
Digital And Direct Advertising
According to the report, there was a 2.7% increase in spending for digital and direct advertising in the U.S. in 2010 for a total of $154.4 billion. Of that amount, Digital advertising accounted for $27.7 billion – up 8.5% from 2009. The two channels with the biggest increases were search marketing ($15.6 billion – up 6.4%) and digital display advertising ($9.3 billion – up 10.7%).
Spending for direct response print advertising was the only direct marketing segment to suffer a decline in 2010 with a decrease of 3.6% in spending.
The growth of digital and direct marketing in 2010 along with the estimated continued growth in 2011 is a reflection of the confidence in the economy, which has shown improvement over the last several months. Direct mail is expected to see an increase of 5.8% ($47.8 billion total spend), direct response broadcast advertising is expected to increase by 7.6% ($25.4 billion) and direct response print advertising is expected to increase by 2.0% ($15.3 billion).
There is also a predicted increase in acquisition mail (mail items sent to all addresses within certain residential postal codes for the purpose of acquiring them as new customers). We believe that this is partly due to the recent postal rules on simplified addressing. Please see our recent article, “USPS Expands Direct Mail Options For Small Businesses“.
Various factors will drive the predicted acquisition mail growth, according to the study. This will include an expected continuation of economic growth; a rebound in the financial services, retail and auto sectors; and no exigent postal mail increase.
Visit the Winterberry Group’s website to download a copy of the report. You will have to sign up and then login to be able to download the PDF.