Has Snail Mail Regained its Impact?

It doesn’t seem like too long ago when the common wisdom was to send a hand written note to thank someone whom you had just interviewed with or visited in a sales call. When I say send, I mean via the United States Postal Service, in an envelope with a postage stamp stuck in its corner.
Likewise it seems like only yesterday that our mailbox (the one attached to the exterior of our home) was crammed full of offers of every kind and description. Now, it’s our email mailbox that is crammed full of pitches, promos and pleas at a seemingly faster rate and quantity than ever achieved by regular mail.
The daily routine of tearing envelopes in half and recycling their contents without even considering opening them is still very fresh in my mind but it has almost entirely been replaced by ridding myself of unwanted email promotions. Fortunately I don’t have to expend the energy of tearing anything in half before clicking the trash icon.
Email marketing is clearly the rule not the exception in today’s business climate but two factors in its implementation are rendering it less and less effective. First, the sheer numbers of vendors and would be vendors who are emailing is growing exponentially. Second, the frequency of each sender is also growing at an alarming rate. A complaint I hear time and again is that even when someone has signed up for a “vendors email alerts” the alerts come so frequently as to render them more nuisance than news. More intrusive than interesting.
We would never have dreamed of sending written notes to our customers every single week, week in and week out, but many businesses do not hesitate to send one or even two emails to customer each and every week. Unfortunately they are just as easy to trash without reading as they are to send without thinking.
Enter U.S. Mail. Handwritten on paper… Placed in an envelope with a stamp on it… The last time I got one of those was five months ago, and I remember what it was about, who sent it and particularly the positive impression that it made. The only thing I remember about the hundreds of emails I trashed in the last week is that I wish I hadn’t gotten them.
The next time you want to make both an old fashioned and a solid impression with a customer, try making it on paper and delivering it with a stamp.