DUKKY

by Kristen Sullivan | May 4, 2009
The average person receives almost 560 pieces of junk mail each year, according to The Privacy Council. That’s more than $55 billion marketing dollars spent on sending one million trees worth of paper to people who often couldn’t care less about the offers. (The Privacy Council also reports that on average, 246.5 of those pieces of junk mail will be tossed in the trash unread.)

You know what that equals? A whole lot of waste…and some messy mailboxes.

Dukky’s introducing a platform to change the traditional approach to direct mail so that it’s less wasteful. While Dukky isn’t convincing retailers to slash their direct mail campaigns – the team has built technology allowing retailers to connect coupons, gift cards and other incentives meant to acquire or retain customers to the people who actually want them. And learn from their mistakes. Down the line, Dukky will enable marketers to reach consumers in the format of the consumer’s choosing. As more and more consumers move online, marketers will have to follow, and paper waste should ultimately decrease.

A lot of retailers are getting it. Some are taking longer. Unfortunately, the junk mail is still rolling into your mailbox as their marketing groups come up the learning curve.

But there are a few steps you can take to eliminate the amount of junk mail you receive, cut down on environmental waste incurred by direct mail campaigns, and send a message to direct marketing campaigns that they need to smarten up and start filtering their offers so that only tell you about deals that are relevant to your life.  

Here are three ways to start getting rid of the junk mail in your mailbox:

1.) Sign up for Do Not Mail lists. There are thousands of commercial direct mailing lists out there and chances are good that your name is on a bunch of them. Unfortunately, there isn’t one easy way to get your name off all of those lists.  Here are a few of the best places to visit in order to start decreasing the amount of junk mail sent to you.

Free Do Not Mail Lists and Services:

- The Direct Marketing Association’s Do Not Mail service.
- The Direct Mail Association’s Do Not Mail list.
- Catalog Choice’s catalog management service.
- OptOut PreScreen Service. Opt out of credit and insurance offers here.

Do Not Mail Services that Come With a Price:

- Tonic Mail Stopper ($20 a year)
- The Privacy Council ($9 a year)
- ProQou ($17.95 a year)

2.) Petition for a national  “Do Not Mail” registry. A  movement to create one national “Do Not Mail” registry is underway. Help the ForestEthics committee in its quest to send 50,000 names of people who support a national registry to the government and the direct mail industry.

3.) Write “Return to Sender” on your junk mail and pop it back in the mail. Dukky’s position is that this is mutually beneficial.  You get less irrelevant mail and the retailer doesn’t waste their marketing budget on you.

– Kristen

Image Credit: Flickr

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 10:06 pm and is filed under Direct Mail Marketing, Eliminate Junk Mail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.