Media and Marketing for Consumer Brands

Why Amazon Still Mails a Toy Catalog: A Masterclass in Reconnecting With Digitally-Weary Customers

by Editorial Team

One number for the next board meeting: According to Lob's 2025 State of Direct Mail Consumer Insights Report, a nationally representative survey of 2,000 U.S. adults conducted with Kelsey White Research Consulting, 58% of consumers say they feel overwhelmed by digital brand messages, while 84% report reading a piece of direct mail the same day it arrives, up from 70% the year before. For a retail or consumer brand chief executive, the implication is direct: the mailbox has become the quieter, higher-attention channel, and the brands using it well are capturing attention that grows more expensive to buy online every year. Amazon, one of the most digitally sophisticated retailers on earth, has spent eight consecutive holiday seasons proving the point by mailing a printed toy catalog to millions of households, a playbook now being studied across travel, hospitality, and financial services brands looking to reconnect with the same digitally-weary customers.

Amazon began mailing "A Holiday of Play" in November 2018, sending millions of copies to customers nationwide at the moment Toys "R" Us liquidated its stores, leaving a gap in how families discovered toys each holiday season. The company has mailed the catalog every year since, including in 2025, when customers were again invited to request free copies online. For a business built on recommendation algorithms and one-click checkout, the choice to keep investing in a piece of paper is worth studying: it shows how reach and emotional connection can travel through a channel a screen rarely replicates on its own.

Personalization Turns a Commodity Catalog Into a Data Product

Amazon rebuilt the printed catalog with an advantage built into its business model: first-party data. By the second annual edition in 2019, retail analysts covering the mailing noted that copies sent to households with toddlers carried a different product order than copies sent to families with older children, drawn from purchase history, Prime Video viewing habits, and even past Halloween costume sizes. The catalog also swapped printed prices for scan-to-shop QR codes, tying a physical object directly back to a personalized digital cart. Personalization is the detail that separates a mass mailing from a performance channel, and it is why Amazon's paper catalog behaves more like a targeted media buy than a throwback.

The marketing lesson: A data-personalized mailer earns sustained physical attention and turns a commodity retail moment into something a family looks forward to and remembers, a form of customer experience an app notification rarely produces on its own.

The Economics Behind the Swing Back to Paper

Amazon sits at the front of a broad industry shift. Lob's 2025 State of Direct Mail report, surveying 405 marketing and operations executives at North American companies with 500 or more employees, found that 82% of marketing executives plan to increase direct mail investment in 2025, with total volume projected to nearly double from 34.9 million pieces in 2024 to 67.3 million pieces in 2025. Seventy-nine percent of executives ranked direct mail as their best-performing marketing channel, a figure independently confirmed by Media Logic's analysis of the same research, and 90% said direct mail measurably improves engagement and conversion when planned alongside digital channels. Eighty-eight percent of executives said personalized direct mail meaningfully improves response rates, reinforcing that the format performs best as an integrated media play rather than a standalone tactic.

The marketing lesson: Direct mail earns its keep as part of an integrated media plan built on first-party data, delivering its strongest results when it runs alongside digital measurement rather than as a channel evaluated on its own.

Trust Travels Through Paper Faster Than Through a Feed

Consumer research explains why the channel converts. In Lob's consumer survey, 49% of respondents said they view brands that send mail as more credible, 44% said mail feels more authentic than digital advertising, and 56% said they remember a brand better after receiving something physical from it. Gen Z and Millennial respondents, the cohorts brands work hardest to reach, engaged with direct mail at a rate of 85%, and 67% of that group said they had made a purchase directly from a mail piece.

Other digital-first brands share the instinct. Airbnb, a company built entirely on an app and a marketplace, invested real budget for two years in Airbnbmag, a print magazine published with Hearst beginning in 2016, giving hosts and guests something tangible to hold onto between bookings. Even a fully digital brand found value in paper, further evidence that a physical object builds a form of trust and recall that keeps compounding long after a single push notification fades from a lock screen.

The marketing lesson: A physical touchpoint, whether a catalog or a magazine, builds brand memory and credibility that compound well past the moment it is opened, because holding something is one of the strongest cues a brand can give a customer's memory.

The Broader Takeaway

For a CMO evaluating agency partners, the direct mail rebound is a proxy for a larger discipline: recognizing when a channel's cost of earning attention has dropped below the ones everyone else is bidding up. As customer acquisition costs climb across paid social and search, a channel with 79% executive-reported top performance and a measurable lift to digital conversion earns a real line in next year's channel budget. Brands that track customer lifetime value and customer retention alongside acquisition cost are the ones best positioned to spot this shift early. Amazon's catalog remains the clearest example of the discipline at scale, but the same logic applies wherever a brand's customers show signs of digital fatigue, from financial services to CPG to travel, and it builds brand awareness along the way.

RSL News Inc. builds brand strategy, customer experience programs, and measurement frameworks that show a brand exactly which channels, paper included, deserve the next marketing dollar. If your team is weighing where to invest next, talk to us about building a plan that puts data behind every channel decision.

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References

  1. Lob, "2025 State of Direct Mail Consumer Insights Report," https://www.lob.com/state-of-direct-mail/consumer-insights/2025-report
  2. PR Newswire, "Lob Report Shows Direct Mail Breaks Through Digital Noise," https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lob-report-shows-direct-mail-breaks-through-digital-noise-302489944.html
  3. Yahoo Finance, "Lob Report Shows Direct Mail Breaks Through Digital Noise," https://finance.yahoo.com/news/lob-report-shows-direct-mail-123200855.html
  4. Lob, "State of Direct Mail 2025," https://www.lob.com/state-of-direct-mail/2025-report
  5. Media Logic, "Direct Mail Still Delivers for Financial Services: Key Takeaways from the Lob 2025 State of Direct Mail Report," https://www.medialogic.com/blog/financial-services-marketing/direct-mail-financial-services-2025/
  6. CNBC, "Amazon Is Mailing a Printed Holiday Toy Catalog to Millions of Customers," https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/06/amazon-begins-mailing-printed-holiday-toy-catalog.html
  7. Ad Age, "Amazon Takes a Page From Toys 'R' Us With Holiday Catalog," https://adage.com/article/media/amazon-takes-a-page-toys-r-holiday-catalog/314109
  8. Retail Dive, "Amazon Mails Out 1st Toy Catalog," https://www.retaildive.com/news/amazon-mails-out-1st-toy-catalog/541743
  9. Forbes, "Amazon's Toy Catalog Just Dropped, And It Shows Just How Much The Company Knows About Us," https://www.forbes.com/sites/kirimasters/2019/11/05/amazons-toy-catalog-just-dropped-and-shows-just-how-much-they-know-about-us/
  10. The Krazy Coupon Lady, "Amazon Toy Catalog 2025: You Can Order Up to 3 Free Copies Online," https://thekrazycouponlady.com/tips/money/amazon-holiday-wish-book
  11. Marketing Dive, "Airbnb Launches a Print Magazine," https://www.marketingdive.com/news/airbnb-launches-a-print-magazine/430834/
  12. Chief Marketer, "Airbnb, the Digital Disruptor, Launches a Print Magazine," https://www.chiefmarketer.com/airbnb-the-digital-disruptor-launches-a-print-magazine/
  13. Axios, "Airbnb's Magazine Promotes Home-Sharing Lifestyle," https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/airbnbs-magazine-promotes-home-sharing-lifestyle-1513304568

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