The UK just measured what postcards really do
UK mail tracking shows printed mail driving website visits at a five-year high. A local business can put that to work with one route and one QR code.
Ask most owners about postcards and you get a shrug. Old school. Goes in the trash. Everybody is online now.
The UK decided to stop guessing and measure it. What they found should change how you spend your next marketing dollar.
What the numbers say
JICMAIL is the UK industry body that tracks what happens to mail once it lands. A panel of households logs every piece they receive and what they do with it. Its Q2 2025 results:
- 9.2% of business mail, direct mail and door drops led someone to visit the advertiser’s website. That is a five-year high.
- The share of mail that prompted a purchase rose 15% year over year, and half of those purchases happened online.
- A piece of direct mail held attention for 145 seconds, up 13 seconds on the year before.
- Direct mail gets picked up 4.6 times over 28 days and stays in the home for 7.6 days on average.
Read that last one again. A social post lives for seconds. A postcard sits on the counter for a week and gets picked up four or five times.
Mail is not competing with your website. It is the most reliable way to send people to it.
What it means here
Every new rooftop going up between Austin and Temple is a household that does not know who to call yet. They do not follow you. They are not searching for you. But they do check the mailbox.
The UK data says the winning play is not mail instead of digital. It is mail that hands people straight to digital: a postcard with one clear thing to do online.
Your first move this month
- Pick one route. Every Door Direct Mail lets you target a single mail carrier route near your shop or your best customers, with no mailing list needed.
- Design one postcard with one offer and one action. A QR code that goes to a dedicated landing page or booking link, never your homepage.
- Make the offer mail-only so you can tell exactly where the visit came from.
- Track scans and visits for 30 days. Then decide on the next route with real numbers, not a hunch.
Want it done for you?
Fingerprint Ideas designs and prints EDDM postcards in Hutto and builds the landing page the QR code points to, so the print and the web side are made to work together. Start a project with them here.