Postage is going up again. Keep calm and carry on.

In this post, Rich Boland will be taking a closer look at direct mail ROI and what it means for your marketing efforts

Every year, Australia Post raises the cost of postage and every year, the same question lands on clients desks: is direct mail still worth it? With another Basic Postage Rate increase arriving on 1 September 2026, that is really a question about direct mail ROI. And the honest answer depends entirely on how you make it and measure it.

Yesterday two emails landed in our inbox within a few hours of each other. The first was research from the Visual Media Association confirming that physical mail is still the most trusted, most opened and one of the most action-driving channels Australians have. The second was Australia Post letting us know the Basic Postage Rate is rising from $1.70 to $1.85, with business letter services up by around 9% on the regular timetable. Same day, two very different messages about the same channel.

The price rise is real and cutting mail is the wrong reflex

The price rise is real, it is annual, it is backed by the ACCC and the government, and it is not going anywhere. Australia Post is funding a universal letters service against falling volumes, and the arithmetic is what it is.

Here is the instinct it triggers, though: postage went up, so mail less, and move the budget to “free” digital to protect the return. Understandable. Also, more often than not, wrong. Because the reflex is built on the wrong number.

Direct mail ROI is about cost-per-response, not cost-per-stamp 

The question was never “what does a letter cost to send?” It is “what does a response cost to win?” That distinction is the whole point of direct mail ROI. A stamp that costs 8.8% more but gets read 84% of the time is not competing with an email that costs nothing but gets read around 22% of the time. On a cost-per-action basis, the “expensive” channel is frequently the cheaper one.

And this is not one-off survey. The same verdict has arrived three times in six years: Accenture in 2020, the VMA’s Open Up to Mail study in 2025, and its 2026 research. Nine in ten Australians have discovered new deals or products through the mailbox, and three in four have acted on them. A further 44% trust a local business more when they have seen it in the letterbox as well as online. Mail is a channel that still converts.

The real waste was never the 15 cents

So if you want to protect your direct mail ROI as postage rises, the 15 cents is not where you look. The real waste sits somewhere else entirely. It is mailing those who were never going to respond. It is the wrong message to the wrong segment, off tired data, with no personalisation, printed and posted at full cost to generate nothing. Fix that, and you save a multiple of whatever the rate rise adds.

That is the actual job of a good mailhouse, and it is exactly where an ingenious one earns its keep: cleaner data, sharper segmentation, suppression, personalisation and smarter formats. The rate rise is an annoyance. Waste is the real cost, and it always was.

So the advice we are giving clients this season is cut the waste. Send fewer and better, more targeted and more personal pieces to the people genuinely likely to act. Reserve mail for the work it is demonstrably best at…the important, trusted, consequential communications that need to be seen and believed. Then integrate it with digital, which, incidentally, is what people actually want: 94% of Australians say they want the choice of how they receive important information.

Different and relevant

Here is the part the price-per-piece misses. Mail costs more than digital precisely because it is scarce and that scarcity is the whole reason it still gets noticed. You are not paying for paper and a stamp. You are paying for attention, trust and recall that digital cannot reliably buy at any price. Different, and relevant: those are the two things any channel has to be to earn its place in the mix. Postage will go up again next year, and the year after. The channel that survives that is not the cheapest one it is the one used with intent. That is the conversation we would rather have.

Related reading

• Precision Group mailing house services
• Mail in 2026: what Australians do when mail arrives
• Open Up to Mail initiative (openuptomail.com.au)

Sources

Australia Post, Basic Postage Rate and Business Letter Services pricing update, effective 1 September 2026.

Visual Media Association, Trusted Channels in a Complex World, research by Vypr, 2026.

Visual Media Association, Open Up to Mail, research by The Source on 5,000+ Australians, 2024–2025 — openuptomail.com.au.

Accenture for Australia Post, Mail’s Role in the Digital Age, 2020.

Photo by Myles Bloomfield on Unsplash