Is Snail-Mail Making a Comeback?

About 2 months ago I met with our internal marketing team and the ad agency we hired to help us with a new client acquisition campaign. They recommended something that I never expected to hear - a snail mail campaign. They were talking paper, envelopes and stamps sent through the US Postal Service. I couldn't believe that this would be effective, and certainly didnt think it could be more effective than digitally - doesn't everyone throw their mail away like I do? And doesn't everyone expect digital native?

Then our marketing team showed the research, which I'll summarize here - essentially these days consumer email boxes are so flooded with "noise" from spam, ads, and numerous targeted email campaigns that there is a better chance of a person in our target market opening a physical letter from us rather than opening an email.  Furthermore, direct mail with a personal touch has a high hit-rate.

The recommendation was that we differentiate the mail - make it nice quality paper with an elevated design, potentially handwritten, and offer the consumer something meaningful through it (i.e. free services, a discount, a tree planted in their name, $ donated to charity...you get the picture). It would also have to follow a precise campaign strategy, for example we mail on X date, and that week they receive a phone-call check-in from the person who sent the letter, followed by an email for any non-responders, and followed by an invite to a selective event in their city. Since physical mail is more expensive than digital, to make the campaign effective, we'd have to be extremely targeted in our outreach and work with data-scientists to identify exactly which potential consumers to reach out to in this way. I am still skeptical about how effective this will be, but we are in pilot and have already seen evidence that this could work on a larger scale.

To me, this trend may not be widely applicable to all consumers, because we are focused on a very selective target market. But what I've seen thus far is that there is some opportunity for a personalized touch with consumers when they are digitally oversaturated.