Every now and then someone trying to sell me their product or service asks, “So – how’s the junk mail business?” Talk about not knowing your audience. I calmly and quietly say, “We call it direct mail.” I then sit back and enjoy watching as the realization hits that maybe they shouldn’t have called our product junk. It’s funny how some of them trip over their words trying to recover.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article on how direct marketers use data about consumers to target their mailings much more efficiently. Of course, the article called it junk mail. But it’s not junk to us or to the millions of people who respond to offers or advertising received in the mail. Direct mail still has the best return on investment of any type of advertising, so it’s certainly not junk to those companies using it. It’s pretty valuable to the small business that just opened in your neighborhood and wants to let you know what they can do for you.

The article explained that direct marketers can immediately comb through hundreds of sources of public and private data, then target their campaigns more effectively. It gave the example of a company that wants to sell larger, high-end barbecue grills. The company can create a list of people who recently purchased a home, have several children, and live in an upper-income neighborhood. Or it could target a smaller grill to a different set of people.

Direct mail represented 56 percent of all postal deliveries in 2011 versus 45 percent a decade earlier. This is partly due to the drop in first-class mail but also due to direct mail volume not dropping as it becomes even more useful.

It really doesn’t bother me too much when people call it junk mail. On the other hand, try calling it snail mail and wait to see my reaction.