Revisiting Direct Mail Effectiveness: Balancing Organizational Goals with Consumer Sustainability Concerns

In this episode, we speak with Jennifer Seokhwa Hong (Seattle University) to discuss her article, "Revisiting Direct Mail Effectiveness: Balancing Organizational Goals with Consumer Sustainability Concerns," coauthored with Chance Michael Ringor (Nordstrom, Inc.), published in the March 2026 issue of JAR. Jennifer explains the puzzle that motivated the research: despite years of predictions that print is dying, direct mail still accounts for more than a third of direct marketing spending worldwide, with $6 billion spent annually in the US alone, even as it carries a real environmental cost, with over 65 billion pieces mailed in 2022 requiring roughly 100 million trees and generating 3.5 million tons of waste, less than 40% of which gets recycled. Across four studies, the team finds that as consumers grow more environmentally conscious, their response to direct mail depends on who's sending it. For nonprofits, direct mail still outperforms email at eliciting donations, but for for-profit companies that advantage disappears entirely. The mechanism is perceived resource inefficiency: when a for-profit sends a glossy brochure, consumers read it as burning money and trees to sell something, but when a charity sends the same thing, they give it a pass as a justified way to raise money for a cause. In a telling boundary condition, nonprofits focused on sustainability lose the advantage too, since resource-intensive mail contradicts their own mission.

The practical takeaway for for-profit marketers is that the familiar cost argument against direct mail now comes with a reputational twist, as consumers read channel choice as a signal of what a company values, though Jennifer is careful to note the studies hold open rates constant and measure response conditional on opening. Nonprofits, meanwhile, can keep leveraging direct mail's trust and emotional appeal, unless their cause is environmental. Our conversation also digs into the challenge of making physical mail feel real in an online experiment and future directions extending the core insight: that consumers judge the same resource use differently depending on who's using it, to organizations' adoption of AI.

Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1080/00218499.2025.2492430

To keep up to date on the latest JAR news sign up for our newsletter: 
https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/su/mtD04QN

And follow us on LinkedIn: 
https://www.linkedin.com/company/82528291/admin/