Does direct mail still work for builders?
The honest answer has three parts: what the industry measures, why almost none of it covers a builder posting thirty letters a month, and what we cannot tell you because we have not done it yet.
What our own data says CANNOT TELL
We have not posted a single live letter for a customer, and we do not have customers yet. Every letter in our system is a test submission against our print supplier's sandbox. So we have no response rate of our own, no return figure of our own, and nothing to show you about how our letters perform. No source — not a zero, an absence
We could have written a number here. Almost every page on this subject does. When we have posted enough real letters to have an answer, it will appear here with the count it came from, and it will be whatever it turns out to be.
What the industry actually measures
The best UK source is JICMAIL, the joint industry body for mail measurement. Their Response Rate Tracker is not a survey: it is campaign data submitted by fifteen organisations and measured by matchback, tracking codes and test-and-control, covering 4,939 mail campaigns. The headline benchmarks are a 2023–2025 average. Declared — JICMAIL, read 22 August 2026
| Type of mail | Benchmark | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Cold direct mail | 1% response · £2.10 back per £1 | Mail to people who are not already your customers. This is the row a builder writing to planning applicants is in. |
| Warm direct mail | 6.3% response · £8.80 back per £1 | Mail to existing customers. Six times the response of cold mail, and not available to you on a first approach. |
| Door drops | 0.3% response · £4.00 back per £1 | Unaddressed mail through every door in an area. |
| Partially addressed mail | 0.7% response · £2.30 back per £1 | Addressed to a household rather than a person. |
Writing to a planning applicant you have never met is cold direct mail. So the number that applies to you, before any of the caveats below, is a 1% response rate and £2.10 back for every £1 spent.
Three reasons that number may not be yours
This is the part most articles on this subject leave out, and it is the reason we bothered to read the source rather than quote the press release.
1. There is no construction sector in the data
JICMAIL publish sector benchmarks for charity, financial services, retail, telecoms, mail order, medical and travel. There is no builder, no trade, no home improvement and no construction row — not because the response is bad but because too few such campaigns are submitted to publish one. Declared
The nearest published sector to the property trade is Letting or estate agent, and it does not flatter the average: 0.3% response to cold mail, roughly a third of the cross-sector figure. Its return figure is not published — fewer than ten campaigns in the sample.
2. Every campaign in the return figure is enormous
JICMAIL break the cold-mail return down by campaign size, over 1,637 campaigns:
- Up to 25,000 items — £1.60 back per £1
- 25,000 to 100,000 — £2.20 back per £1
- 100,000 and over — £2.70 back per £1
Read the first row again. The smallest bucket they publish is up to twenty-five thousand items. A builder posting 30 letters a month sends 360 in a year — roughly one seventieth of the bottom of the smallest bracket. Nothing in this dataset describes a campaign the size of yours, and the trend within it runs the wrong way for you: return goes up with volume, so if the pattern continues below 25,000 it continues downwards.
3. The figure everyone quotes is out of date, including ours
The number circulating on most pages about direct mail — and in our own internal business case until the day this page was written — is 0.9% response and £3.20 back per £1. That was JICMAIL's May 2025 release, covering 2024 campaigns. Declared — 9 May 2025, superseded
JICMAIL's current publication, the Response Rate Tracker — Full Year 2025 Update of June 2026, puts cold direct mail at £2.10. The return figure everybody is quoting is about a third higher than the one its own publisher now prints. We were quoting it too; we are not any more.
What the data does say in your favour
Two findings are worth having, and both come with their own qualifier because the headline versions are broader than the evidence.
Format matters, and a letter beats a postcard. Across 634 campaigns:
- A4 letter — 9.6% response
- A5 — 6.6% response
- Postcard — 3.5% response
An A4 letter pulls about 2.7 times a postcard. JICMAIL's own summary slide states that without a qualifier; the chart underneath it is warm retail mail only, so it is a finding about mail to existing customers and we cannot honestly tell you it holds for a cold letter to a planning applicant. We sell both formats and the letter is the dearer one, which is exactly why we are not going to quote this without the qualifier. Declared — with the caveat the source's summary omits
Mail that is written to be read, not just to be answered, does better. Campaigns with both a brand and a response objective averaged 9.3% response against 1.9% for response-only campaigns, and £8.20 back per £1 against £5.80, over 625 and 2,778 campaigns respectively. That is a five-fold difference and it is the one lever on this page that costs nothing — it is about what the letter says. Declared
The sum you can actually do
At these volumes direct mail is not a percentage game. 30 letters a month at a 1% response is not "a third of a reply a month"; it is a lottery ticket with a known price. So the useful question is not the response rate — it is what does a year of it cost, and is one job worth more than that?
- 360 letters posted over a year, at 30 a month Measured — our own price card
- £468 total cost on the £39 plan, including every letter Measured
- £1.30 all-in per letter, subscription included Measured
- 3.6 replies a year at JICMAIL's 1% cold benchmark Declared — and see the three caveats above
So the whole year costs £468 and the honest expectation is a handful of enquiries, of which some fraction become work. So the real question is not the response rate. It is whether one job in a year is worth more than £468. If it is, the arithmetic works well below the published benchmark; if it is not, no response rate will rescue it. That is the calculation to do, and you can do it better than we can because you know what a job is worth to you.
Sources
- JICMAIL, Response Rate Tracker — Full Year 2025 Update (June 2026). Read 22 August 2026. Advertiser-reported campaign data, not a consumer panel: 4,939 mail campaigns submitted by fifteen organisations, measured by matchback, tracking code and test-and-control. Headline benchmarks are a 2023 to 2025 average.
- JICMAIL, Response Rate Tracker 2025 update (9 May 2025). Read 22 August 2026. The previous release, covering 2024 campaigns: cold direct mail 0.9% response and £3.20 ROI over 3,800 campaigns. Cited here only to show what the figure used to be — it is superseded and is not the number on this page.
We have no commercial relationship with JICMAIL and they have not seen this page. If we have read their figures wrongly, tell us and we will correct it here rather than quietly.
Also worth reading
Who publishes this
Just Granted reads the planning register of every council we cover, every week, and posts letters to the applicants for you. A free account searches all of it and posts a letter for £1.45 with no subscription. £39 a month adds the applicants' names and addresses, with 30 letters included and £1.20 each after that.