USPS Must Find New Ways to Fulfill Dmers’ Needs
DIRECT MARKETING in America is undergoing some fundamental changes, particularly regarding the media DMers use to reach customers and prospects.
Once upon a time, mail was king of direct marketing. If you wanted to reach a diverse audience, mail was practically the only game in town. Kiss those days goodbye.
Marketing by e-mail and the Web promises to transform the way America transacts a significant part of its business.
But as veteran DMers are fond of saying, “You can buy it over the Net, but you’ve got to ship it by mail.”
Quite frankly, though, when it comes to DM fulfillment the U.S. Postal Service is sorely lacking. In fact, it has more than a few holes in its service offerings that create a whale of an opportunity for a more adventuresome enterprise. But does the USPS need to languish in some parcel delivery limbo? Not at all. What it has to do is recognize where the holes are and then go about filling them.
If the postal service truly wants to recast its image, it can start by targeting core business areas with services designed to win the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of DM customers. For instance, it could develop a new service for books and recordings that better matches the market’s needs-say more reasonably priced priority shipping for bulk, bound printed matter.
Fortunately, we now have a postmaster general who knows that when marketers ask the USPS to focus on a back-end strategy, they’re asking for something more than a swift postal kick in the butt.
But time’s a-wastin’. If the postal service doesn’t want to be orphaned in a potentially lucrative Internet-based economy, it has to wake up to the reality that its services fall lamely into an Internet fulfillment no man’s land that won’t remain unclaimed for long.
As my physics teacher once told me, nature abhors a vacuum. For that matter, so do direct marketers.
