Why Snail Mail is Cool (and Effective) Again

Your business needs to reach people in the real world

The robots are drowning us all in a tsunami of digital marketing and advertising. It feels like capitalism run amok. Not only is the firehose of sleazy sales pitches exhausting for consumers, but it’s also making it harder and harder for ethical businesses to get their messages out.

I’ve been a freelance copywriter for more than fourteen years. I mostly work with B2B companies and law firms. None of my clients are trying to sell you crypto, get-rich-quick schemes, or questionable pharmaceutical solutions to your weight or sexual performance problems.

You might say that my clients run boring businesses. But they are increasingly having a hard time cutting through all the spam and noise online.

For most of my career, my bread and butter has been writing blog posts and other online content for clients. My most profitable services used to be writing and designing email marketing campaigns and video scripts.

But as AI becomes more common, things have changed not only for my clients but for my copywriting business as well. When AI can send out millions of emails, many poorly written, the human targets of all those emails often have no choice but to use AI to sort and summarize all the messages piling up in their inboxes. This means that lots of email marketing is much less effective. There’s a great chance that a human will never even read your headline. A bot will sort it, and likely delete it, before a customer ever sees it.

I recently relaunched my freelancing business after taking eighteen months off to work on the book publishing side of my business, which was totally unrelated to copywriting.

When I looked out at the landscape of online marketing, heard from former clients what they were interested in, and noticed what was working in my own business, I realized that snail mail marketing was making a comeback.

The future of digital marketing for the next few years is going to be learning how to combine online automations with physical, real-world marketing campaigns.

Snail mail is back, and your business needs to be leveraging it!

I admit to having a bias for physical media. I’m a Gen-Xer. I love vinyl, CDs, newspapers, and even junk mail. My first training in copywriting was in physical direct mail marketing. I learned to write long, persuasive sales letters.

My direct mail skills translated well to all kinds of digital marketing efforts, and now I’m seeing that all of my digital marketing skills are translating back to physical marketing campaigns.

It’s important to point out that part of the reason snail mail is about to be huge for marketing again is because of the massive backlash to AI that is underway. Tech journalist and author Brian Merchant has written extensively about this backlash in his newsletter, Blood in the Machine.

My Case Study

When circumstances in my personal life required me to jump back into copywriting, I started emailing old clients and cold emailing prospects. The results were bleak. I was getting a response rate of less than 1%.

Never one to quit easily, I pivoted to snail mail. I sent out 100 letters of introduction to potential clients in my metro area, and 25 letters of re-introduction to former clients.

These were simple one-page letters with a QR code to either a landing page or to the contact page of my website. I heard back from 20% of the cold prospects and booked in-person or Zoom meetings with 5% them.

I heard back from 80% of my former clients and booked work with two of them.

Overwhelmingly, I was told how refreshing it was to get a real letter. I also learned that most of the people I was meeting with wanted to do more with physical mail.

I’m currently redesigning my copywriting offers to focus on different physical products and snail mail strategies for my clients. I’m also preparing a multi-step direct mail campaign to grow my copywriting business using letters, postcards, and a booklet.

People may not read their emails anymore, but if done right, they are more likely to at least glance at their physical mail, something of a switch from how things used to work. The reality is, people see the value in physical things, are tired of email, and subconsciously see snail mail as having taken more effort and being more sincere.

There are an infinite number of ways for a creative business to use snail mail as part of their marketing.

Direct Mail Marketing

The easiest way to get a return on your investment with snail mail is to run a direct mail campaign. This is where you send out physical mail with the express purpose of getting the reader to take an action.

My letters of introduction were a direct mail campaign with the goal of getting prospects to send me a direct message so we could continue the conversation.

The letter was the first step to getting a prospect into my sales funnel.

With QR codes, any business can use direct mail to reach customers through snail mail. However, snail mail, like anything else, isn’t foolproof. There is an art and science to designing a direct mail campaign.

Physical Newsletters

My favorite growth industry is physical newsletters. People love getting cool stuff in the mail. Some marketing experts are now sending out quarterly physical newsletters, and their audience loves it.

My personal favorite example of a physical newsletter also underscores how powerful this tool can be for any business. In 2024, Brittany Wilder started Poetry Club, a monthly physical newsletter where she sends readers a poem and a letter describing the context of the poem. After a year, the Poetry Club had become her full-time job.

I loved this idea so much, I started my own Weirdo Poetry Snail Mail Club, where I send out letters with a poetry comic printed on cardstock. I only mentioned the club once in a single issue of my digital newsletter, and I collected enough paid subscribers to make it immediately profitable. It’s nowhere near as big or ambitious as Wilder’s Poetry Club, but it shows that people will pay for physical newsletters.

If people will pay for physical poetry newsletters, imagine what a business could do with financial advice or business coaching. I’m working with professional service business clients to develop both paid and free newsletters that go out not to clients, but to potential referral partners. Imagine a CPA who sends out a quarterly newsletter with advice aimed at divorce attorneys for tax issues that often come up in divorce cases. Who do you think those divorce lawyers will think to refer their clients to when a tax issue comes up?

Getting Creative with Snail Mail

Direct mail and newsletters are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ways businesses can effectively use snail mail. Ecommerce companies could send out catalogs focused on different holiday offerings. Again, a simple QR code per product, or even service, will take someone directly to a product page to make a purchase.

Even Amazon has been sending out physical catalogs for the past several holiday seasons using this exact strategy.

Businesses could copy old content marketing models from companies like John Deere and Betty Crocker and make physical magazines and cookbooks that are sold either for profit or at cost to customers, to further strengthen trust and to sell more products down the line.

With Print on Demand (POD), it’s possible to make print books or booklets cheaply and send them as lead magnets or bonuses for existing customers.

When I started working with law firms that were reluctant to launch a blog, I would tell them that marketing is dynamic. What worked yesterday may not work today.

Now all my law firm clients have blogs, and I’m advising them to reimagine ways they can use that content to produce physical books and other real-world marketing collateral they can mail to clients, referral partners, and prospective clients (under ethical and limited circumstances).

While many copywriters and content writers I came up with have quit marketing because of AI, I’m using my skills to make physical, human-made marketing materials for myself and clients that work with digital marketing efforts to increase revenues and make real people’s lives better.

How could your business use snail mail to grow this month?

Jason McBride is a freelance copywriter, poet-cartoonist, and best-selling author. His most recent book is “How to Create a Life You Love.” If you enjoyed this post, you’ll love his newsletter, which features both email and physical mail, where he uses poetry, comics, and illustrated essays to explore the people, places, things, and ideas that make life weirdly poetic.

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This post was originally written for Smarter Marketing on Medium.