When everyone is pushing in the same direction, whoever stops draws attention to themselves.
The marketing communications industry has been writing off paper for a decade. Brands have migrated en masse to digital – social networks, email marketing, automated advertising environments – in a race for visibility that has ended up producing the opposite effect: the absolute saturation of the receiver. What few anticipated is that this massive flight from the physical medium was silently creating one of the most valuable assets of contemporary marketing: the empty space in the mailbox.
The decline of the postal channel
The IPC Global Postal Industry Report 2025, published in December 2025 by the International Post Corporation – a benchmarking reference covering 53 postal operators worldwide -, provides the most up-to-date diagnosis of the sector, reflecting that, since 2019, mail volume has fallen steadily year on year in all markets analyzed. The cumulative decline in Europe now exceeds 30% in six years, and postal operators themselves have had to shift their focus to parcels to compensate for the loss of volume in traditional mail.
In Spain, the CNMC documents the same pattern with precision: traditional mailings accumulated a 64% drop since 2015, and 80% of Spaniards did not send a single letter to a private individual during 2024. From the perspective of advertising investment, the historical series of InfoAdex is equally eloquent, reflecting that investment in personalized mailing has gone from €2,112 million in 2017 to €1,211 million in 2023 after a 16% drop , and to €1,090 million in 2025 after a further drop of 16.6%.
The channel that yields the most is used the least
So far, the story seems linear and the conclusion obvious: paper dies, digital wins. But the second reading of the same data tells a radically different story.
The ANA Response Rate Report 2023 – published in February 2024 by the Association of National Advertisers on data from 250 marketers – states that physical direct mail leads ROI among all channels with a 161% return when targeting owned customer bases. Email marketing follows with 44%, and social media advertising with 21%.
The channel least used by marketers is, paradoxically, the one that generates the best return. This is not a statistical anomaly, it is a market signal that deserves attention.
The explanation has a proven scientific basis. Canada Post commissioned True Impact Marketing to carry out the study Connecting for Action, a pioneer in neuromarketing applied to direct mail, whose results showed that integrated campaigns that combine physical mail with digital channels generate 39% more consumer attention and 23% more brand recall than digital-only campaigns, in addition to requiring 21% less mental effort to process. A decade later, the Journal of Advertising Research – the leading academic journal in advertising research – has confirmed and expanded on those findings. A study published in its December 2024 issue of Taylor & Francis Online, funded by Japan Post and replicated across multiple product categories, demonstrates through field and lab experiments that physical media generates higher cognitive engagement with content and produces higher response rates than the equivalent digital channel. The science, in short, supports what market data already hints at: paper is not a dying channel, but an underutilized one.
And the exhaustion of the digital channel is beginning to be reflected in its own metrics. The GDMA International Email Benchmark 2025 – drawn up on 521 billion emails analyzed in 61 countries – shows that the email click-through rate fell 0.7 percentage points to 2.9% in 2024: recipients open messages, but interact with them less and less. The physical mailbox, on the other hand, retains its attention span intact.
When the physical becomes scarce, it becomes valuable.
The record industry learned this lesson before anyone else. When streaming declared vinyl dead, something unexpected happened, vinyl was resurrected. And not as a relic for nostalgics, but as a growing format for nineteen consecutive years. According to the IFPI Global Music Report 2026, vinyl grew by 13.7% worldwide in 2025 – its nineteenth consecutive year of growth – driving the rebound of the physical format in an industry that surpassed $30 billion in total revenues for the first time. In Spain, according to PROMUSICAE, vinyl sales grew by 44.9% in 2025, generating 28.9 million euros and accounting for 69% of all physical format revenues.
The vinyl buyer in 2025 almost always also has Spotify, Apple Music or other similar platforms. He doesn’t choose between formats, he uses streaming for listening and vinyl for owning and displaying. Sympathy for the Lawyer There is no rivalry between physical and digital. There is complementarity.
The quality press is following the same path. When the physical format reaches the newsstand, it gives the publication a premium character that is a differential for building audience loyalty, generating prestige and attracting quality advertising. According to theobjective, newspapers such as Pronto, which has closed its digital edition to bet exclusively on paper, or the RBA group with its new publication Edit &Live, and global references such as The New York Times, Financial Times or The Economist with their print editions for high-value subscribers, confirm the pattern: when a medium ceases to be massive, it ceases to be banal. And when it stops being banal, it becomes experience. Experience justifies price. Price builds prestige. Prestige builds loyalty.
The mailbox as a competitive advantage
Postal direct marketing is at that same tipping point. After years of decline, the physical mailbox has become so empty that whoever appears in it is guaranteed something no algorithm can buy, unrivaled attention.
At MailComms Group we have been working with this conviction for years. Like record labels that publish in streaming and vinyl, or the media that report in digital and paper, our Phygital proposal also combines both worlds, the capacity for personalization, measurement and reach of the digital environment, with the impact, permanence and proven ROI of the physical medium. Not because paper is nostalgia, but because paper, today, is differentiation.
The question for marketers is not whether paper has a future. The data indicates that it does. The right question is whether your brand will get to the mailbox before the competition.
