Gender Differences in Direct Mail

The way in which companies can reach out to audiences reguarding direct mail they have to think about who they are and the differences in gender.
People react to stimuli in different ways depending on whether they are male or female, in most research it is seen to be that females react better to emotional messages with a story whereas males prefer factual styles that are straight to the point.

•A re-written “factual” letter for men generated a response 85 per cent better than the original ‘female/emotional’ pack.
•When the ‘male/factual’ version was sent to women response rate was 15 percent lower

There are also language preferences between gender when looking at direct marketing, women tend to prefer conversational style writing with bold colours whereas men reacted more to factual, straight to the point language with more neutral colours to highlight the writing not the picture behind it. Examples of this can be seen below where the advert for women had lots of text and they had to work out the story whereas the one aimed at males was a bold picture with a few lines for description.

From both of these adverts we can immediately see the difference in the way advertising is used for different audiences and proves most theories correct when relating to different genders. This all links to the way people then buy products where females like to look at a range of products to find the best one possible, and they will shop around however men are more likely to find the product that stands out to them or is the most popular.