Two datasets, side by side, explain the direct-mail comeback better than any argument. In 2025, Belkins analyzed 7.53 million cold emails and measured an average reply rate of 0.45% — falling to 0.40% by the second half of the year. The same year, JICMAIL's panel measured physical mail at a five-year high: 4.6 interactions per item, 145 seconds of attention, and nearly one in eleven items prompting a website visit. One channel is drowning in its own volume. The other has the recipient's hands, eyes, and kitchen counter.
How much attention does a mail piece actually get?
JICMAIL — the UK's joint industry currency for mail, built on a continuous consumer panel rather than vendor surveys — is the cleanest attention data in the category. Its Q2 2025 numbers:
- 4.6 interactions per mail item — opened, read, discussed, returned to. Business mail runs higher at 4.9.
- 145 seconds of attention per item, up 13 seconds year over year; business mail earns 186 seconds — over three minutes.
- 7.6 days of life in the home, reaching 1.13 people per item — mail hangs around and gets seen by more than its addressee.
- 9.2% of all mail prompts a website visit — a five-year high — and 5.3% prompts a purchase.
Three minutes of attention is not a rounding error in 2026. Most display advertising fails to hold the 2.5 seconds attention researchers consider the minimum for brand memory.
What do response rates look like?
JICMAIL's 2025 response tracker across 3,800 campaigns: cold direct mail responds at about 0.9% with £3.20 returned per pound spent, and warm direct mail — to people who already know you — at 3.5% with £7.20 ROI. Cold-mail response actually rose 24% year over year, which is what happens to a channel when everyone else leaves it.
Executives have noticed: Lob's 2025 State of Direct Mail found 79% of marketing leaders rank direct mail among their top-performing channels, 82% planned to increase investment, and 88% say personalization significantly improves response.
Why is this happening now?
Because the denominator exploded. Radicati counts 376 billion emails a day in 2025, growing every year, while the human capacity to read them stayed fixed. AI made infinite personalized email free to produce, which made all of it easier to ignore. Physical mail scaled down as email scaled up — the average professional's desk sees fewer meaningful physical deliveries in a month than their inbox sees cold pitches in an hour. Scarcity is the whole story.
The catch: most direct mail is still unmeasurable
The honest caveat in all of this: classic direct mail earns its attention blind. A postcard can't tell you it was read; the JICMAIL panel measures the channel, not your campaign. That measurement gap is exactly what we built boxli to close — boxes whose video brochures report watch time, location, and pass-around per send, so the channel with the best attention economics finally comes with receipts. The numbers above say the medium works. The instrumentation is how you prove your program does.
Frequently asked questions
What is the average response rate for direct mail in 2026?
JICMAIL's 2025 response-rate tracker across 3,800 campaigns puts cold direct mail at roughly 0.9% response with positive ROI, and warm (customer-list) direct mail at about 3.5%. For comparison, Belkins' analysis of 7.5 million cold emails found an average reply rate of 0.45% — physical mail to a cold list responds at roughly double the rate of cold email, and warm mail at nearly eight times.
How long do people engage with direct mail?
JICMAIL's Q2 2025 panel data measured 145 seconds of average attention per mail item — and 186 seconds for business mail — with each item interacted with 4.6 times and living in the household for 7.6 days. Digital display ads, by contrast, mostly fail to hold even 2.5 seconds.
Is direct mail growing or dying in B2B?
Growing again. Lob's 2025 State of Direct Mail found 79% of marketing executives rank direct mail among their top-performing channels and 82% planned to increase investment. Mail volumes rose 4% year over year in the first half of 2025 — the channel B2B abandoned for email is being rediscovered precisely because email stopped working.