The new CMC Print Mailing Study 2023

All insights on more traffic and more for online shops.

CMC Print Mailing Study 2023 - Existing Customer Activation

Print advertising benefits from digitalisation - we show you why print is needed in today's marketing mix and how response enhancers influence the success of print mailing campaigns.

Key results:

  • Print mailings to existing customers of online shops achieve an average conversion rate CVR of 5.4 % in 2023. Advertising letters thus prove to be crisis-resistant: print mailings remain a high-performance advertising channel for activating existing customers.
  • This study confirms once again: print mailings have a particularly longlasting effect. 47% of orders triggered by print mailings are received by online shops only five weeks or more after they have been sent out.
  • Print mailings increase shopping carts: existing customers who receive a print mailing spend an average of 10% more on their order than on their previous order.
  • The return on advertising spend (ROAS) is 901 %. This means that with an average shopping cart of 82 euros (before returns), every euro spent on a print mailing generates 9.01 euros in revenue - even though the costs of paper and energy, among other things, have risen.
  • The use of response amplifiers has a significant influence on the CVR of a print mailing campaign. Depending on the response enhancer, an up to 33 % higher CVR and up to 6 % higher shopping cart can be achieved.
  • Voucher cards are the most successful response amplifiers. You increase the ROAS by up to 33 %.
  • An examination of the QR code scans shows that, extrapolated, almost one in five print mailing recipients from the existing customer base visits the advertised online shop.
  • If it is communicated in the text of the print mailing that the voucher code will be automatically stored in the shopping cart by scanning the QR code, the willingness to scan increases by 52 %.
  • Print mailings are most effective when they are sent to customers not too long after a purchase.
  • The more often a customer buys from an online shop, the more effective activating print mailings are.

The CMC Print Mailing Study 2023 is published by Collaborative Marketing Club - CMC in cooperation with Deutsche Post. For the sixth edition of the study, the 45 participating online retailers sent a total of 1,417,873 print mailings to their existing customers. Only existing customers who had purchased from the respective online store within the last twelve months were contacted. The study ran between October 4, 2022 and February 28, 2023.

Get the results of the CMC Print Mailing Study 2023 in the detailed report.

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