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The Direct Mail Company is a leading UK mailing house specialising in direct mail, mailshots, print and post, mail fulfilment, leaflet distribution, door drops, bulk postage and end-to-end campaign management.

Your email got delivered. It still never arrived. Different things.I didn't get this for years.Delivered means it landed...
14/09/2026

Your email got delivered. It still never arrived. Different things.

I didn't get this for years.

Delivered means it landed in an inbox. A server said yes. That's it.

Arrived means someone actually let it into their head. Read it. Felt something. Maybe forwarded it to one person.

A dashboard can't see the second one.

I sent a postcard to a client last spring. Ugly one, from a gas station. She still has it pinned above her desk.

Same week I sent an email campaign with a 42% open rate. Nobody remembers a word of it. I don't either, honestly.

A postcard sits on the kitchen counter. Someone has to pick it up, flip it over, decide what to do with it. It takes up space in the room.

An email takes up nothing. It can be "opened" while the person is thinking about lunch.

So now I ask a different question before I send anything. Not will this get delivered. Will this take up space somewhere.

Most of my sends still fail that test. Working on it.

I kept saying my audience got distracted. They didn't.I checked my own phone last week and lost 40 minutes to a video ab...
13/09/2026

I kept saying my audience got distracted. They didn't.

I checked my own phone last week and lost 40 minutes to a video about a guy restoring an old boat. Full attention. Didn't blink.

So attention exists. Plenty of it.

It just stopped showing up where I was standing.

I was posting in the same place, same format, same time, for two years. And somewhere in there people learned to scroll past that spot. Not past me. Past the spot.

That took me way too long to separate.

Where you show up says something before you say anything. If I'm in a channel someone already tunes out, my message arrives pre-ignored. Doesn't matter how good it is.

Actually it does matter a little. Great stuff leaks through sometimes. But you can't build on leaks.

So now when something flops I ask where it ran before I ask what it said.

Different question. Different fixes.

Our best email of the year opened at 9 percent.Black Friday morning. I checked my phone in the kitchen before coffee.We'...
11/09/2026

Our best email of the year opened at 9 percent.

Black Friday morning. I checked my phone in the kitchen before coffee.

We'd spent three weeks on that campaign. Good creative, clean list, subject line we'd tested twice. Our normal open rate sat around 28.

9.

I refreshed. Thought the dashboard was lagging. It wasn't.

My first instinct was to blame the email. Rewrite the subject line, resend, panic a little. Took me until that afternoon to figure out that was the wrong instinct.

The email was fine. The inbox wasn't.

Everyone with a list sent that same morning. Our subscriber woke up to 40 promo emails stacked on top of each other. Ours was one of them. Quality didn't matter because nobody got far enough to judge quality.

That changed how I plan now. If the channel is at its loudest, I either go earlier, go somewhere else, or accept the send is a lottery ticket.

Well, mostly earlier. The week-before email we sent as a throwaway did better than the main one.

Still a little annoyed about that.

Your dashboard tells you a channel died about six months late.The data is a lagging indicator. By the time open rates cr...
10/09/2026

Your dashboard tells you a channel died about six months late.

The data is a lagging indicator. By the time open rates crater, everyone already knows.

But there are earlier signs. I watched email do this over a Black Friday stretch and the tells were all there before any chart moved.

1. Send volume creeps up. Yours and everyone else's. More sends to hold flat results is the first tremor.

2. Open rates soften. Not crash. Soften. A crash gets a meeting, a soft slide gets ignored.

3. The creative starts looking the same. Same subject line tricks, same countdown timers, same layout. When you can't tell brands apart in your own inbox, the channel is pricing itself out.

4. Brands that were never there before suddenly show up. This one matters most to me. When companies with no history in a channel start piling in, they're chasing yesterday's returns. That's the top of the curve, not the middle.

Actually there's a fifth one, forgot it. Your own team starts saying "we just need better subject lines." When the fix everyone reaches for is smaller and smaller tweaks, the channel is the problem, not the copy.

None of these show up as a red number. They show up as a feeling that things are harder than last quarter.

Trust that feeling before the spreadsheet confirms it.

I'm never sending a Black Friday email again. Decided last year, still holds.Not because email is dead. My regular email...
09/09/2026

I'm never sending a Black Friday email again. Decided last year, still holds.

Not because email is dead. My regular emails do fine. Better than fine some months.

But I opened my own inbox on that Friday morning and counted. 41 promo emails before 9am. Mine was somewhere in there. Number 23 maybe.

I paid a copywriter for that email. Spent two days on the subject line.

Nobody read it. The open rate said some people did, but opening isn't reading, and I know what I do with those emails myself. Select all. Delete.

So the rule now: I don't fight for attention in a place where attention is already gone. Doesn't matter how good the channel is on a normal Tuesday. That week, the inbox is a landfill.

What I did instead last November was one plain text message to my 40 best customers. Personal, no design, no countdown timer. Took an hour. Outsold the previous year's whole email sequence.

Actually that's not the whole truth, it took an hour to write and three days to convince myself it was enough.

The principle underneath, if there is one: every channel has a week where it stops working, and your calendar doesn't care.

Worth checking which of your defaults are just habits wearing a strategy costume.

I still write emails every week. Just not that one.

I think direct mail is about to come back and nobody's ready.Hear me out.Every marketer I talk to is fighting for the sa...
08/09/2026

I think direct mail is about to come back and nobody's ready.

Hear me out.

Every marketer I talk to is fighting for the same feed. Same inboxes, same ad slots, costs climbing every quarter.

Meanwhile the average mailbox gets maybe two or three pieces of actual mail a day. Sometimes zero.

Attention goes where the crowd isn't. That's the whole argument.

I tested it. Sent a plain postcard campaign last year, half expecting nothing. Honestly I mostly did it because a printer gave me a deal.

People called. Actual phone calls. One guy told me he kept the card on his fridge for three weeks before reaching out.

My email list, which is ten times bigger, has never once put anything on a fridge.

The window won't stay open. The moment enough marketers notice, mailboxes fill up again and the math breaks. Well, not breaks, but it gets ordinary.

My prediction: within two years the sharpest teams will quietly have a print budget again, and they won't talk about it much.

I'd rather be early and look old-fashioned.

Every number in your dashboard measures distance to a human. Not contact.Cost per click. Cost per send. Cost per impress...
07/09/2026

Every number in your dashboard measures distance to a human. Not contact.

Cost per click. Cost per send. Cost per impression.

None of them tell you if a person actually paid attention. They tell you how close you got.

I started estimating what I call cost per attention. Rough math, but it changed how I pick channels.

Here's how I do it:

1. Take your send or impression volume for the month.

2. Cut it by how crowded the moment is. An email lands next to 120 others that day. A feed post lands next to friends and family. Be honest about the divisor. I usually assume 2-5% of "delivered" got real attention, and even that feels generous some months.

3. Divide total channel cost by that number. Not by sends. By attention.

Email at $0.002 per send suddenly costs $0.08 per actual moment of attention. Sometimes more. The cheap channel stops being cheap.

I got the divisor wrong for months by the way. I was using open rates. Opens aren't attention either, half of those are a thumb moving past.

The metric won't be exact. That's fine. A rough number pointed at the right thing beats a precise number pointed at nothing.

Run it on your two biggest channels this week. One of them will surprise you.

I had the welcome sequence half written before I caught it.Five emails. Same structure everyone teaches. Story, value, v...
04/09/2026

I had the welcome sequence half written before I caught it.

Five emails. Same structure everyone teaches. Story, value, value, soft pitch, hard pitch.

I'd even copied the subject line style. Lowercase, curiosity bait, the whole thing.

It was a Tuesday and I remember stopping because my coffee had gone cold and I got up to reheat it, and standing at the microwave I read email three on my phone.

I couldn't tell if I wrote it.

That's not a joke. It could have been anyone's. Any list, any niche, any product.

And that's when it clicked. If I can't tell it's mine, my readers definitely can't. And if it reads like the other forty emails in their inbox, it performs like them too. Average, at best.

The playbook isn't wrong exactly. It's just already priced in. Everyone's inbox is full of it, so it lands as noise before anyone reads word one.

I deleted three of the five and rewrote them like I was emailing one specific person I actually know. Slower. Way less clever.

Open rates went up. Not hugely. But replies did, and replies were the thing I actually wanted.

The near miss bothers me more than a failure would have. I almost shipped it. I was maybe an hour away.

Subscribers didn't break email. I did. So did you.For years I blamed low open rates on "inbox fatigue" like it was weath...
03/09/2026

Subscribers didn't break email. I did. So did you.

For years I blamed low open rates on "inbox fatigue" like it was weather. Something that just happened.

Then one morning I counted my own inbox.

47 promotional emails before 9am.

Two I actually wanted to read. Maybe two.

We built that pile. One "quick campaign" at a time, each of us sure ours was the good one.

And the fix I kept reaching for was always more. Better subject line. Send Tuesday at 10. Test an emoji.

That's just talking louder in a room I helped make loud.

So I tried the fix that actually costs something. I send less now. Only when I have something a person would forward to a friend.

My list got smaller. Opens went up. Honestly I can't tell you which change did what, and I've stopped pretending I can.

But I don't blame my readers anymore. They're not tired of email. They're tired of us.

By the time you hear about a channel, it's done.Not dead. Done. There's a difference and it took me too long to see it.A...
01/09/2026

By the time you hear about a channel, it's done.

Not dead. Done. There's a difference and it took me too long to see it.

A channel still works after the crowd shows up. It just stops being cheap.

Early on, attention costs almost nothing. You post something average and it travels because the feed is hungry and nobody else is there yet.

Then the case studies come out. The courses. The agency packages.

Cost of attention goes up. Quality bar goes up. Your average post now competes with a thousand people who read the same case study you did.

I used to think the winners were the ones who got really good at a channel. Mastered it, actually.

Wrong lens. The winners I keep running into were just early. Some of them weren't even good.

So the signal I watch for now is weirdly simple. When a channel starts showing up in everyone's content strategy deck, that's my cue to go poke around somewhere uncomfortable and empty.

Empty feels bad. Empty is the discount.

Address

Ropergate House, Ropergate
Pontefract
WF81JY

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm

Telephone

+441924434394

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