Stat of the Month: Publishing

The publishing industry knows that its bread and butter is direct mail. E-mail direct marketing campaigns have yet to work for the publications that our Who's Mailing What! Archive, the world's greatest library of direct mail, catalogs each month. As a result, while other mailers have reduced their overall volumes because of increased postal costs and a down economy, the publishing sector keeps chugging along in 2008.

Comparing the first seven months of this year (July is the last month that we have official direct mail statistics for at present) to the entire year of 2007 and 2006, some definite trends are visible. First, like stated above, the publishing sector not only showed up strong in the mailstream this year, it actually grew. In 2006, publishing mail -- which includes magazines (from general interest to women's to business), newspapers, newsletters and subscription agencies -- took up 6.7 percent of the mailstream; in 2007, that percentage actually dropped to 5.1 percent. But in the first seven months of this year, that percentage exploded . . . to 8.8 percent. That's nearly a 4 percent increase, which is almost unprecedented from year to year for any sector recorded in our Who's Mailing What! Archive.

For the other trends and tactics that we track, the changes were less dramatic but still apparent. Controls hit an all-time high in 2006, as over 65 percent of all efforts were repeat efforts. In 2007, that percentage precipitously dropped to 40 percent, before a slow uptick to 41.6 percent this year. Premium usage also peaked in 2006 at 51.3 percentage, perhaps because the budgets were bigger back then. That percentage slipped to 44.5 percent in 2006 before recovering to 47.2 percent this year.

The personalization technique took a big hit this year, after rising from 12.7 percent of all publishing efforts in 2006 to 16.2 percent in 2007, and plummeting back to earth at 11.8 percent. Meanwhile, the self-mailer trend grew this year, with 18.4 percent of publishing efforts using self-mailers after only 13.4 percent did so in 2007 (and 17 percent in 2006).