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Direct Mail’s First Known Appearance In History
The earliest known direct marketing comes from the year 1000 B.C., where an Egyptian landowner wrote an advertisement on a piece of papyrus offering gold for the return of a runaway slave.
That papyrus was recovered in Thebes and now stands on display in the British Museum. Other ancient cultures experimented with direct marketing – Babylonian merchants used stone tablets to advertise the products available when they visited towns.
How Direct Mail Progressed
Direct marketing took a huge step up with the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440. The technology quickly spread across Europe, with William Caxton creating printed pamphlets to order from his printing press set up in Westminster Abbey from 1480.
Technology for printing presses continued to improve over the coming centuries, allowing for faster and faster output, and direct marketing on a bigger scale. In the 18th century, garden and seed catalogues were distributed in the nascent American colonies before the Revolutionary War – so catalogue mailings predate even the United States as a country!
Direct Mail’s Involvement In Advertising
It was in the century that followed that direct mail really developed, though. Aaron Montgomery Ward is considered the inventor of mail order processes and direct marketing; he created his mail-order business in 1872, launching with a one-page catalogue.
Richard Warren Sears followed soon after in the 1880s, mailing flyers to rural and small-town customers to sell watches. The actions of both men served to revolutionise the purchase of goods – having previously been at the mercy of price mark-ups by their local stores, customers were now being reached directly. The advent of mail-order meant that consumers could receive attractive items whether they lived in developed cities like Manhattan or out in rural regions – and all at far cheaper prices.
The Tests Of Time
These new technologies also helped shape the use of direct mail due to the change in lifestyles that they brought about. Statistics show that the number of women working outside of the home went up from 42% to 58% between 1980 and 1990, which was simply the continuation of a trend that had started decades earlier.
With fewer and fewer women able to go shopping during daytime hours, it made perfect sense to mail to them so that they could peruse and mail order the latest items in their own time.
The technology available now can give us targeted campaigns that in the ‘70s and ‘80s wouldn’t have been thought possible. Direct mail innovation and design have taken a huge leap forward, with marketers given greater creative tools to design their direct mail pieces. Direct mail now is all about creativity, targeting and understanding your target market.
However, when looked at in simple terms, it is just like it has always been – offering a product or service directly to others. And we still do catalogue mailings, just like it’s the 1800s – though we haven’t done any mailings from Egypt yet!