It sounds like a simple question: direct mail or digital?
Marketers across Canada have heard it in planning meetings, strategy calls, or budget reviews. It keeps coming up because it feels like a smart, strategic decision to make: Pick the channel that performs best and focus your investment
But what if it’s the wrong question entirely?
The Digital Over-Investment Problem
Canadian marketers initially flocked to digital because it promised something traditional marketing couldn’t: precise targeting with measurable results. The ability to reach specific audiences and track every click, view, and conversion, coupled with its affordability, made digital feel like the obvious choice for budget allocation. The promise of addressable media seemed within reach.
But as more marketers started to invest in digital advertising, something strange happened. Results started to plummet.
Why is that happening?
Well, today’s average programmatic campaign now runs across an average of 44,000 websites, many of which are automated, low-quality sites created solely to generate ad inventory. These sites scrape content and create pages designed to capture ad dollars, not engage real audiences.
The result: Your ads run on sites that lack real human engagement.
This creates intense pressure to either abandon digital marketing entirely or double down with even more budget, hoping to overcome poor results with volume. Meanwhile, this singular focus on digital has caused many marketers to overlook or underinvest in channels that have been quietly delivering results all along.
The Resurgence of Direct Mail
Many marketers completely abandoned direct mail years ago (or never invested in it in the first place). It felt outdated compared to the precision of digital targeting, and the upfront costs seemed harder to justify when digital promised cheaper, more measurable results.
But while marketers struggle with declining digital performance, direct mail quietly continues to deliver results. When executed with proper targeting and data insights, direct mail achieves response rates around 9%.
The evidence for direct mail’s continued effectiveness shows the channel was never outdated; it was just being executed poorly. Modern direct mail campaigns leverage sophisticated audience insights and precise targeting to deliver measurable outcomes.
When you can identify precisely who should receive your message and deliver it without competing against thousands of other ads for attention, the results speak for themselves.
Direct Mail vs Digital Marketing: Do You Have to Choose?
The short answer is no, but most Canadian marketers think they have to. When budget planning comes around, the assumption is that running both direct mail and digital in an omnichannel way requires complex coordination and enterprise-level resources. So they pick digital because it seems more straightforward and more cost-effective.
This perception forces marketers to make an unnecessary either/or decision. They stick with digital-only strategies and accept declining performance rather than exploring how both channels could complement each other.
Even if you only have budget for one channel, whether it’s direct mail or digital, better audience targeting dramatically improves performance. Instead of casting a wide net with broad targeting, you can identify the specific households most likely to convert and focus your spend there.
But the real opportunity isn’t just about improving individual channels. It’s about recognizing that the choice itself is holding back performance.
The Future is Omnichannel
True omnichannel marketing represents the evolution beyond multi-channel tactics. Instead of reaching different audiences across different platforms, omnichannel ensures these channels work together seamlessly to create a unified customer experience for the exact same audience.
The key breakthrough is starting with the audience rather than the channel. Instead of building separate audiences within each platform, you identify your target audience first and then push that exact same audience to all channels.
The future of marketing success lies in this audience-first approach to create seamless experiences from doorstep to digital. When you target the same households across channels with coordinated messaging, every touchpoint reinforces your brand message. The result is higher recall rates, stronger brand connections, and marketing dollars that work significantly harder.
Make Digital and Direct Mail Work Together with intelligentVIEW
intelligentVIEW is the audience prospecting platform that makes the audience-first approach possible for Canadian marketers. Instead of building separate audiences within each channel and hoping for the best, you start with audience identification, and then you can push that same exact audience across direct mail, digital, and other media channels, effectively targeting the same people with postal code-level precision.
With intelligentVIEW, omnichannel marketing can be both simple and affordable, eliminating the complexity that forces marketers to choose between channels.
Stop making an unnecessary choice. Request a demo to see how intelligentVIEW helps you use direct mail and digital marketing (and TV, radio, out-of-home, and other traditional media channels) more strategically by ensuring they work together as a unified omnichannel marketing strategy.
