Is print dead? No — but the argument isn’t nostalgia

The case for print has nothing to do with nostalgia

People who defend print usually do it emotionally — the feel of paper, the craft, the way things used to be. That argument convinces nobody who wasn’t already convinced, and it deserves not to.

The real argument is duller and better. A physical object occupies space, and things that occupy space keep getting seen. An email occupies a row in a list that is competing with a hundred other rows and will be scrolled past in under a second.

What happens to a printed piece

A four-page newsletter arrives at a house or an office. Somebody picks it up because they had to pick up the whole stack of mail. It gets sorted into keep or bin — and if the front page has anything worth keeping, it goes into keep.

Then it sits. On a counter, on a desk, on the pile by the door. Over the next two weeks the same person walks past it repeatedly and sees the masthead each time, whether or not they ever read page three. Somebody else in the household or the office sees it too, which is a reader you never paid for.

None of that is available to an email. An unopened email is gone the moment it moves down the screen, and nobody else in the building will ever see it.

What happens to an email

To be fair to email, it does things print can’t. It arrives instantly, costs almost nothing per copy, links directly to whatever you want somebody to do, and tells you what got clicked. For anything time-sensitive it is plainly the better tool.

But it lives in the most contested space in a person’s day. Your newsletter is in the same list as their boss, their bank, and every retailer they have ever bought from. You are not competing with other newsletters. You are competing with everything.

This is why we send both. They fail in different ways, and the failures don’t overlap.

Print works well for some businesses

Print earns its cost most clearly when the following are true. The more of them apply, the stronger the case.

• Your list is small and valuable. A few hundred to a few thousand past clients and referral sources, where one recovered client pays for a year of printing.
• Your work is high-value and infrequent. Legal matters, major purchases, specialist services. The gap between engagements is long, so staying remembered is the whole game.
• Your referral sources are other professionals. A printed piece in an office gets seen by the people around the desk it sits on.
• Your clients skew older, or simply aren’t heavy email users. Plenty of excellent customers do not read marketing email at all.
• Your competitors have all gone digital. The mailbox is emptier than it was, which cuts the other way from how it sounds.

Print is the wrong call for other businesses

We would rather say this plainly than sell print to somebody it won’t suit.

• You have a very large list. Print and postage scale linearly. At tens of thousands of addresses the bill becomes the strategy, and it shouldn’t be.
• You don’t have physical addresses. If you collected emails and nothing else, building a mailing list is a project in itself and may not be worth it.
• Your customers are online-native and transact online. If the desired action is a click, put the message where clicking is free.
• You need speed. Print has a lead time. Anything tied to a date less than a few weeks out belongs in email.
• Your margins are thin and your ticket is small. The maths has to work. Sometimes it doesn’t, and that’s a real answer.

Digital-only is a real product, not a consolation prize

We sell a digital-only newsletter and we sell it without apology. Same interview, same ghostwriting, same design, same monthly date. What you skip is the press and the postage.

It goes out as a digital flipbook — a page-turning version of the same four pages that you can email, text and link to — plus an email edition the same week. For a lot of businesses that is the correct answer, and it’s the cheapest way to find out whether the habit sticks before committing to a print run.

It also has one genuine advantage over paper: you can see how far people read and what they clicked. Print gives you no such feedback and never will.

The version we recommend most often

Both, staggered. The printed piece goes in the mail, the flipbook link and the email go out the same week, and the same content reaches the same person through two different doors.

The people who never open marketing email still see the paper. The people who never read their mail still get the email. And the flipbook link is the one you can actually use elsewhere — in a follow-up, on a website, in a text to somebody who just asked what you do.

The list is the harder half of the print question

People debate paper versus pixels and skip the part that actually determines whether print works, which is the quality of the addresses you are mailing to.

A mailing list decays. People move, firms merge, offices close. Mail sent to a stale address costs exactly as much as mail that arrives and does nothing at all. If you have not touched your address data in three years, cleaning it is the highest-return work available before you print anything.

It is also worth being deliberate about who is on it. Print rewards a small, well-chosen list: past clients, current clients, referral sources, and people who asked to be on it. It punishes a large, vague one. Email is forgiving of a padded list because the extra copies are free. Paper is not.

What has changed about the mailbox

The reason print still functions for a small list is that the competition left. Two decades ago a printed newsletter arrived alongside a great deal of other printed marketing and had to fight for the same attention. Much of that budget has since moved online, and the mail that remains is largely bills, official letters, and the occasional catalog.

Meanwhile the inbox went the other way. Every business a person has ever transacted with now emails them, and the mail apps themselves have started sorting promotional mail into separate tabs and folders where it is seen less.

That is the shift, plainly: the cheap channel got crowded and the expensive channel got empty. It does not mean print wins. It means the two have swapped which problem they have.

How to decide without guessing

Two numbers settle it, and they’re both yours.

1. Work out what one recovered client is worth to you over the life of the relationship.
2. Work out what a year of printing and mailing your list would cost.
3. If the first number covers the second more than a couple of times over, print is a straightforward bet. If it doesn’t, run digital-only and put the difference somewhere with better maths.

So, is print dead

Print as a mass advertising channel is a much harder sell than it was, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling printing. Print as a way to stay in front of a few hundred people who already know you is in decent health, largely because so many businesses abandoned it.

The mailbox got quieter while the inbox got louder. That’s the entire trade, and it points different directions for different businesses. Ours is to tell you which one you are.