28 September 2006 - For few people will it come as a surprise, but it's now official. Banks and credit card firms are Britain's worst junk mail offenders. Together they are responsible for more than a third of the 3.4 billion mail shots that are sent out each year. Of these mail shots 97 to 99 percent, or between 3,298,000,000 and 3,366,000,000 are not responded to.
According to a survey by Neilsen Market Research, the worst offender is MBNA, the finance company behind credit cards for more than 5,000 organisations including Manchester United, WWF and AOL. MBNA sends out 99 million mail shots a year at a cost of £44.5 million. Second on the list is Lloyds TSB with almost 1.8 million pieces of direct mail per week (or 92 million pieces of junk in a year). Third came Capital One, which dreams up 20 new pieces of junk mail each month.
But despite public antipathy to junk mail, which costs £1.87 billion a year, the survey suggests that four in every five mail shots are opened and that people are more likely to read junk mail from a bank than any other type.
Marketing magazine, which commissioned the research, gave the research a positive spin by focusing on the fact that 'only' 750 million items are thrown away without being opened or read. The magazine said: "The financial services industry has long been accused of carpet bombing households with hundreds of millions of unwanted credit card and loan offers. Yet the study found consumers are more likely to open those mailings than letters sent by mail order companies and charities."
The study asked 10,000 households to record the junk mail they received and what they did with it. They said that they immediately threw away mail if it was addressed to the wrong person or contained spelling mistakes, binning about 22 per cent of all junk mail unopened.
This suggests that junk mail that is addressed correctly is nearly always opened. This figure seems to be rather high, especially given the fact that junk mail elicits responses from only one to three per cent of recipients. If the research is correct it seems to reveal something else; namely that the direct marketing industry has become better in disguising junk mail. One has to open a letter to find that it is junk mail. But when someone can see that something is junk mail, for instance because the name is misspelled, than nearly a hundred per cent of junk mail goes into the bin unread.
Even though junk mail elicits responses from 1 per cent to 3 per cent of recipients, companies believe the cost of a mail shot is well spent as mail itself raises brand awareness. Even bad publicity is publicity.
However, Marketing said that the study suggests that mail order companies and charities may need to review their marketing strategies. It believes the success of finance companies is linked to the use of more sophisticated data to identify potential customers.