Potential Effects
How many home improvement or remodeling companies use direct mail? No poll exists, but Rich Harshaw, a REPLACEMENT CONTRACTOR contributor and the president of Monopolize Your Marketplace, a Dallas-based marketing company with many home improvement clients, suggests that 10% to 20% of home improvement companies use direct mail to “specific targeted houses.”
Many more also use marriage mail, a service that bundles the promotions of many advertisers into packets. For instance, in 2007 marriage mail marketer Valpak’s 60,000 mostly small-business advertisers included 842 in the “Roofing and Siding” category, according to company spokesperson Marsha Strickhouser. “Window, door, and glass” companies were number seven on Valpak’s list of 20 top advertisers by industry. “Home remodeling” was number 19.
“For those who do use it,” Harshaw says, “this law would be devastating … similar to the DNC restrictions of a decade ago.”
Cooper, of Mail Moves America, argues that passage of Do Not Mail laws at the state or federal level would create an unfair advantage by denying to small businesses “their right to advertise and compete in the marketplace.” Strickhouser says that “direct mail works for small businesses, and they can afford it.”
Postal Service Opposition
Of course, while the situations of telemarketing and direct mail may seem similar, the differences are important. For one thing, at the beginning of the decade, there was little that organizations such as the Direction Marketing Association could do to halt the momentum of the Do Not Call list legislation at either state or federal levels. Every unwanted phone call fed the frenzy to regulate telemarketing. Once established, the Do Not Call registry quickly grew to include a majority of American households.
Do Not Mail legislation, on the other hand, comes with no kind of similar groundswell of passionate public opinion. That may be simply because people are not inconvenienced by mail advertising in the way that they are, or were, by a ringing phone.
Major opposition to the Do Not Mail laws has surfaced from the U.S. Postal System and from postal worker unions. The effects of eliminating even a portion of that would hobble the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) at a time when that agency ? self-funded through its own revenue streams ? is already losing money and raising rates on dwindling first-class mail.
In addition, direct mail organizations such as the Direct Mail Association and DirectMail.com have created their own voluntary do-not-mail registries. But Craven, of ForestEthics, says that the problem with such industry self-regulation is that, since it doesn’t have the weight of legislation, it’s unenforceable. “The first thing they want to do when someone opts out is mail them something else to see if they really meant it,” he says.
?Jim Cory, editor, REPLACEMENT CONTRACTOR.
