Response Rate Tracker 2025

The latest results from the JICMAIL Response Rate Tracker reveal that Cold Direct Mail response rates and Door Drop campaign ROI increased in 2024, signalling the vital role that the mail channel plays in helping businesses prospect for new customers. 

The JICMAIL Response Rate Tracker now contains aggregated anonymous campaign level data gathered from 3,800 campaigns by fifteen different organisations spanning sell-side businesses, agencies, data and technology partners. Designed to complement JICMAIL’s ongoing panel measurement of consumer mail engagement, the Response Rate Tracker provides response, Return on Investment (ROI), Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), and Average Order Value (AOV) benchmarks for use in campaign target-setting and measurement.

The Response Rate Tracker provides marketers with a vital tool for contextualising their own campaign performance, with top level benchmarks revealing that:

• Warm Direct Mail achieves an average response rate of 7.2% and an ROI of £9.00
• Cold Direct Mail generates a 0.9% response rate and ROI of £3.20
• Door Drops achieve a 0.5% response rate and ROI of £2.90

While reaching existing customers through warm DM might achieve higher ROIs, few businesses grow without expanding their customer base and both Cold DM and Door Drop have been increasingly effective at helping organisations do this in 2024. Cold DM response rates grew 24% year on year, while Door Drop ROI grew 39%.

While the mail channel offers a range of audience and geo-targeted solutions for advertisers looking for more precision with their media spend, the value of scale and frequency-of-send can now be revealed after three years of building out the Response Rate Tracker data set:

• Cold DM campaign ROI increases with campaign volume. With a send volume of up to 25,000 items, an average ROI of £2.50 is seen. At 100,000 items or more, ROI increases to £3.60.
• The power of message reinforcement is evident when noting that repeat Cold DM mail sends achieve 37% higher ROI and 2.5 times higher response rates than new campaigns, along with greater Average Order Values and lower CPAs.

Elsewhere, marketers looking to boost response rates should note the effect of mail campaigns with a dual response and brand objective (i.e. campaigns which are aiming to not only boost sales, but to also raise brand awareness and reinforce brand values for example). Dual objective brand and response campaign typically achieve three times the response rate of response-only campaigns.

Benchmarks are now available across thirty-five sectors and product categories, including the retail / online retail, mail order, finance, charities, telecoms, travel, property and medical sectors.

In addition to the thirteen contributing organisations from 2024 – Ginger Black Analytics, Epsilon, DBS Data, Join The Dots, Sagacity and the Letterbox Consultancy Whistl, PaperPlanes, Conexance Choreograph, PSE, The Specialist Works, Go Inspire and Herdify - JICMAIL are delighted that two new participants have contributed data to the Response Rate Tracker this year: Go Direct Marketing and PDV Agency.

Response Rate Tracker data is now available to all JICMAIL subscribers through JICMAIL Discovery – the data portal by which JICMAIL’s community of nearly 300 accredited organisations access industry-leading mail campaign planning and measurement data.

Key Performance Benchmarks from the Response Rate Tracker 2025:

	Response Rate (%)	ROI (£)	No. of Campaigns
Warm Direct Mail	7.2%	£9.0	1,735
Cold Direct Mail	0.9%	£3.2	1,659
Door Drops	0.5%	£2.9	324

Ian Gibbs, JICMAIL’s Director of Data Leadership and Learning says “Prospecting for new customers is vital to the future success of businesses, yet performance marketing as a discipline faces challenges in measurement, transparency and creativity. It is heartening therefore to see that the mail channel is bucking this trend with response rates growing at a healthy rate for Cold DM and Door Drops alike. With the upcoming DUA (Data Usage and Access) Bill bringing greater clarity to businesses looking to emply a data-driven approach to customer acquisition, this set of Response Rate Tracker results are very timely for the mail channel.” 

Mark Cross, JICMAIL’s Engagement Director commented “Thanks to this industry collaboration we are continuing to grow the evidence base that supports the case for mail as a Super Touchpoint with some great new insights from this year's tracker. Dual purpose brand and response comms works best, ROI improves with reach and with the brilliantly simple, but overlooked, insight of just repeat send to drive up response and ROI.”

The contributing organisations are:

Join The Dots

Epsilon Abacus

Letterbox Consultancy

Sagacity

Ginger Black Analytics

DBS Data

Whistl

PaperPlanes

Conexance Choreograph

PSE

The Specialist Works

Go Inspire

Herdify

Go Direct Marketing

PDV Agency

JICMAIL would like to hear from any organisation wishing to contribute data for the next phase of release. If you would like to submit your organisation’s response data to this powerful new dataset from JICMAIL, get in touch today.