Senior marketing executives must evolve their mail systems or miss out on significant cost savings, warns financial and business adviser Grant Thornton.

More than 20 per cent of marketers in charge of distributing printed marketing materials are in danger of making a costly mistake if they continue to ignore the changes to Royal Mail's corporate postage pricing, dubbed Pricing in Proportion, which came into effect last year. 

The results of Grant Thornton's survey found that more than one in five senior marketing executives and print managers had never even heard of the change, which saw a shift from weight to size in the way mail is priced.

Ignoring the shift in strategy could already be having serious implications for B2B marketers, many of whom target senior business figures with bulky, but not necessarily heavy promotional packs. "If you put a single A4 sheet of paper into a C4 envelope, it can now cost 25 per cent to 30 per cent more than if you fold that same sheet into a C5 envelope," points out Alex Walsh, head of postal affairs at the Direct Marketing Association.

"Another problem is that there is still a relatively low awareness of the fact that the postal service is no longer a monopoly, and that there are alternative delivery companies for B2Bs with their own pricing structures that aren't relative to Royal Mail's," says Walsh. Royal Mail has gradually been divested of its monopoly over the past three years, with new players now allowed to compete for selected services.

The survey also suggested that a ‘backlash' of e-marketing may be about to materialise. Nick Martin, managing director of B2B data specialists Mardev, strongly disagrees. "If you don't use direct mail you're ignoring people that can't get email, ignoring the issues of seniority, because many CEOs don't respond well to email and ignoring the fact that direct mail is the most effective way of generating new leads," he says.

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