I tweeted in January that snail mail had become a competitive marketing advantage. Three months of testing later I think I underestimated it.
Conservatively, B2B cold email response rates run 0.1 to 1 percent. Direct mail response rates run 5 to 8 percent on a cold list, and 15 to 30 percent on a hyper-targeted list of fifty to a hundred. That's not a marginal lift, it's an order of magnitude or more for the kind of buyer worth chasing as a solo founder. Lawyers, doctors, owners of small firms, anyone whose inbox is a war zone.
It works because a real envelope, a real stamp and a handwritten address survive a filter an email subject line doesn't. The recipient touches it, reads it, decides. It sits on a desk for a day, which is most of the point. There's no spam button on a physical letter. The cost per reach is high enough that nobody wastes one, which is exactly why the recipient reads it. The signal is that you spent two euros and ten minutes on them specifically. Everything else in their inbox spent nothing.
Nobody else does this. It doesn't scale to a thousand sends, there's no dashboard, it's manual labour and marketing teams have been told manual labour is beneath them. The feedback loop is slow. A CMO can't sell "we wrote forty letters this week" to a board. So they don't, which is why it still works.
If I were starting from zero today I'd pick fifty people I actually want as customers, by name. Not "fifty CFOs in pharma." Fifty specific humans. Find them on their company sites. Write each one a letter with one specific reason you're writing to them, not to their company. Sign in blue ink. Add a P.S. with the one thing they should look at if they only read one line. You won't get fifty replies. You'll get five to ten conversations. Of those, two or three will turn into something real.
Compare that to the email-blast funnel needed to produce two real conversations and you don't go back.
A lot of modern marketing tactics work because they were rare. Email worked when nobody had marketing automation. SEO worked when nobody knew about it. As soon as it scales the signal degrades. Snail mail is rare again, so it works again. Until enough people read this, anyway.
— Simon