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Smith, who was appointed by the DMA board last month after serving two years as deputy chair, said reinforcing the industry's environmental credentials is high up on the DMA's agenda.

"We don't want to be the whipping boy through not having enough ammunition about our environmental impact," said Smith, who is also managing director of RSA Direct and a director of Opt-4. "It's easy to talk about mountains of junk mail. We are only two per cent of household waste, we are only four per cent of paper usage - and 95 per cent of that is recycled paper in the first place. It's those kinds of stats that we need to get out there."

She said the industry body has worked hard with its members to meet recycling targets set under an agreement with the Depart-ment for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to ensure that, by 2013, 70 per cent of direct marketing waste is recycled.

"That might sound like a long way away but it's going to take that amount of time to change both consumers' behaviour and the industry's behaviour to a certain degree," she said. "The fact of the matter is we need to have a better environmental record."

Smith would also like to see the DMA and its members step up their public relations efforts, following a spate of negative press on "junk mail" last year.

"The idea is to make sure every member of the DMA is armed with the right facts about the industry, so that any one of us who is challenged can come back with a positive statement," Smith said. "We need to get the consumer to connect direct marketing with some good things."

Another priority Smith noted was that, with digital becoming a major tool for building one-to-one marketing relationships, it is important for the DMA to represent those channels.

"The challenge for the DMA is to say where our outer perimeter fence is," she said. "It's going to be an interesting two years from that point of view - especially as the growth in digital continues."

Smith, who succeeds Charles Ping, head of customer relationship management at Guardian Newspapers, suspects there will be other big issues to come. "One of the things I've learned is there is usually something waiting in the wings that is in the mind of a regulator or a politician or even a consumer that we haven't yet spotted. We need to be able to react appropriately if that produces a threat for the industry."

Over the two years of her term, Smith will be backed by new vice-chair David Metcalfe, head of wholesale banking development at LloydsTSB Scotland and former chairman of the Scottish DMA.