UK direct mail benchmarks, dated and sourced

Search for direct mail statistics and you will find American consumer figures presented as universal truth, usually undated, usually on a vendor's blog. This page is the UK version, business mail first, with the source and the period beside every number so you can decide for yourself whether it applies to you.

How business mail behaves, Q1 2026

JICMAIL measures UK mail on a household panel with quarterly reporting. Business mail, meaning addressed mail sent to people at work, behaves measurably better than consumer direct mail on every dimension they track.

Source: JICMAIL Q1 2026, reported by the DMA. Checked 9 August 2026.

What that means in practice

Three minutes of attention is the number worth sitting with. Not three minutes of exposure, three minutes of a person actually engaging with a piece of paper, across nine days, with slightly more than one person seeing it. There is no digital channel where a cold approach buys that. An email is read or deleted in seconds and never resurfaces.

It also explains why the letter matters more than the envelope contents. You are buying three minutes of somebody's attention. Spending it on a discount code is a waste of the most expensive thing on the page.

Response and return

• 76 per cent of mail was read, looked at or glanced at in Q1 2026, unchanged year on year.
• 9.4 per cent of mail items prompted a website visit, up from 8.7 per cent a year earlier, a record in JICMAIL's series.
• 56 per cent of mail driven purchases were transacted online, up from 53 per cent, which is the reason a QR code and a page you control matter more than a phone number.
• Warm direct mail returned 11.50 pounds for every pound spent in JICMAIL's Response Rate Tracker, across nearly five thousand campaigns in 2025. Partially addressed mail returned 2.00 pounds.
• Warm retail response rates rose 26 per cent year on year, cold rose 21 per cent.

Source: JICMAIL, via the DMA, Q1 2026 and 2025 full year. Checked 9 August 2026.

What we can tell you, and what we cannot, yet

We are not going to invent benchmarks. Rockkt is young enough that our own aggregate figures, scan rate by envelope treatment, days from posting to scan, and letter to meeting rate, are not yet a sample worth publishing. When they are, they will appear on this page, dated, with the sample size stated, and they will be the only numbers here that exist nowhere else.

Meanwhile, the honest way to build a business case is not a benchmark at all. It is your own cost per meeting from your current channels, compared against what a letter costs you all in. That arithmetic is on the pricing page, and there is no benchmark in the world that beats your own numbers for persuading a finance director.

Update policy

JICMAIL reports quarterly. This page is refreshed within a fortnight of each release, and the date at the top changes only when the figures do. If you find a number here without a source and a period beside it, that is a mistake and we would like to know.