Direct mail boosts its appeal among younger audiences

The direct mail channel has delivered fresh evidence of its effectiveness – especially in reaching younger audiences – with the latest figures revealing that the proportion of mail driving website visits has reached its highest level in five years.

With fears that direct mail could suffer from the current Royal Mail delivery crisis, Jicmail’s Q4 report will no doubt be seen a welcome verification of the channel’s potential.

It reveals that mail engagement and effectiveness grew in what is traditionally a busy time for many sectors in the run-up to the end-of-year trading season, with 9.7% of mail prompting website visits, surpassing the record set during the previous quarter.

Meanwhile, open and read rates both grew year on year, while the mail channel’s impact on sales (online and offline) grew to 6% of direct mail, door drops, business mail and partially addressed mail combined.

Notably, the frequency with which 25- to 34-year-olds interact with mail has grown 8% between the start and end of 2025.

To help marketers plan across the increasingly effective mail channel, Jicmail has entered a new data partnership with consumer insight and planning tool TGI’s Connected Audiences, bringing over 300 new audience definitions to its planning data tools.

TGI’s in-depth survey of 24,000 British adults enables planners to gain an in-depth understanding of how consumers think and feel, as well as their product and brand use: what they consume, from who, how they do so and what motivates them. TGI’s demographic and psychographic data runs across multiple sectors from travel to finance, and from FMCG to consumer electronics.

So, alongside Jicmail’s demographic, geo-demographic and household information, mail exposure and interaction can be interrogated across a broad range of new audience variables.

Life-stage, financial comfort, FMCG buying habits, holiday preferences, credit card ownership, consumer technology ownership, environmental engagement, automotive preferences and pet ownership are just a handful of the rich profile data points now available to Jicmail users.

Across these new audience variables, Jicmail users can assess mail exposure, interaction and commercial actions taken with mail across direct mail, door drops and business mail and across all Jicmail-measured industry sectors and mail content types tracked.

Jicmail director of data leadership and learning Ian Gibbs said: “We’re delighted to announce a new partnership between Jicmail and TGI. Not only have we massively expanded the breadth of audiences against which mail engagement and effectiveness can now be assessed, but for the first time we can open up this data to our thousands of registered Jicmail Discovery users. This integration really brings the worlds of gold-standard audience measurement and market-leading media planning data together.”

Fifty5Blue managing director of TGI Rachel Macey added: “This partnership represents the latest step in our mission to facilitate ever smoother, more connected campaign journeys from insight to activation with TGI data. Partnering with Jicmail means we can bring the unique clarity into the who, why and how of consumer audiences that TGI provides to the heart of advertising mail.”

Picture credit: Royal Mail Marketreach

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