This was the message from Mike Colling, managing director of direct response media agency Mike Colling & Company, at a roundtable on the future of direct marketing, hosted by Xerox late last month.
Colling said that in the future, costs would render the medium unviable and that consumer concerns over the impact of direct mail on the environment would also have a big impact on the future of cold direct mail.
Colling cited the example of consumer organisation Which? to demonstrate his point. Over the past two years, the business has switched from spending 95 per cent of its acquisition budget on cold direct mail to now spending less than two per cent of the same budget on the channel.
Colling was chairing the event alongside speakers including Anthony Hyde, marketing communications manager at Xerox Europe and Alex Walsh, head of postal affairs at the DMA.
Walsh said he agreed with Colling's view to some extent, but added that cold direct mail still has a place in customer acquisition.
"(Cold direct mail) is not dead, although there will be no more mass mailing as we saw in the past," he said. "There's still a role for it, but not as the prime acquisition channel. It will survive, just in a different form."
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