A Channel That Barely Comes Up in This Industry’s Conversation
Ask how MCA brokers source deals and the answer runs almost entirely through phone and data: UCC filings pulled and dialed, aged leads bought by the record, live transfers handed straight to a closer, and high-volume cold-calling underneath all of it. One veteran broker on DailyFunder describes a UCC-dependent shop as pounding the phones 12 hours a day, a description that captures how thoroughly phone-based this entire industry’s lead-generation culture is. Print and direct mail almost never come up in that conversation.
What the General Direct-Mail Case Looks Like, Honestly Caveated
A widely repeated marketing-industry claim attributes direct mail a meaningfully higher response rate than email, citing Association of National Advertisers research. That report is typically membership-gated, and this piece could not independently confirm its exact current figures through a direct fetch, so no specific percentage is presented here as a verified statistic. Treat any exact number you see cited elsewhere for this specific claim with real skepticism unless it names its own primary source. What can be said directionally, without overstating it: general marketing benchmarks broadly and repeatedly report direct mail outperforming email on response rate, a pattern real enough to be worth naming even without a single confirmed figure attached to it here.
Why Main Street Merchants Might Be a Fit for a Channel Digital Struggles to Reach
This is reasoning, not a cited statistic. A restaurant owner working the floor, a trucking company operator on the road, a contractor on a job site, none of them are necessarily glued to an inbox the way an office-based professional might be. A physical piece of mail sent to a business address does not require an app to be open or an email to be checked; it just requires someone at the business to pick up what arrived. For a merchant population that is comparatively hard to reach through digital channels, that difference is not nothing.
Why Most ISOs Still Do Not Bother
The honest counterpoint is cost and speed. A phone call is close to free at the margin once a dialer and a list already exist, and a live transfer connects a broker to a merchant in real time. A mail piece costs real money per touch, printing, postage, list acquisition, and takes days to arrive and register with the recipient, an eternity compared with a same-day phone conversation. For a shop optimized around speed to contact, that tradeoff explains why direct mail stays a minority channel even where it might theoretically work.
The Real Trade-Off: Cost and Speed Against Reach
Neither side of this tradeoff is wrong. Phone-based channels win on cost per touch and speed to a live conversation, the two things that matter most once a broker already has a merchant on the line. Direct mail wins, if it wins at all, on reaching a business owner who is genuinely hard to catch by phone or email in the first place, a smaller but real slice of the total merchant population.
Where Direct Mail Fits in a 2026 Channel Mix
Practitioner guidance: direct mail makes the most sense as a small, deliberately tested supplement, aimed at a specific, hard-to-reach segment, rather than a primary channel competing head-to-head with phone-based prospecting on cost or speed. A shop with an established phone and data operation loses almost nothing by testing a small mail run against a genuinely underreached segment of its target list, and treating the result as a real, measured test rather than a leap of faith based on an unverified industry-wide percentage.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.