Credit card companies have sent out 3.2 billion pieces of mail this year, and that's not even close to the record

credit card mail offers

(Robin DeGrassi James/Flickr)
Credit card mail offers.

Credit card companies are flooding mailboxes this year, but it's a lot less than it used to be.

According to a note from Moshe Orenbuch at Credit Suisse, the major card companies sent out 372 million mailers during the month of October.

Combined for the first 10 months of 2015, there have been 3.2 billion pieces of credit card related mail go out. At that pace, the total should hit 3.8 billion by the end of the year.

This is an astronomical amount of mail. That's enough to send 28 pieces of mail to every house in the US, per Census Bureau statistics. That's enough to send every American over 18 without a credit card 41 pieces of mail, based on Gallup's 2014 survey of credit card ownership in the US.

But even that's not as bad as years past.

According to a chart in Orenbuch's note, the peak amount of mail sent since 2000 was 8.1 billion in 2006, over twice as much as this year's expected amount.

Between 2000 and 2007, companies sent out an average of 6.7 billion mailers a year. The financial crisis brought those numbers way down, and they have yet to recover.

Screen Shot 2015 11 24 at 2.51.22 PM

(Credit Suisse)

The mailers, while old school, are a good measure of the industry's competitiveness.

"Mail volume remains an important barometer of competitiveness, as well as which brands are the most heavily marketed," wrote Orenbuch on Monday. "We see the card issuers marketing aggressively in these last few months of the year."

The top mailers in October were Citibank (64 million pieces of mail), American Express (63 million), Capital One (56 million), Chase (52 million), and Discover (38 million).

This biggest year-over-year gainer was First National Bank of Omaha with a 50% increase over 2014, leaping up to a total of 10 million pieces of mail.

And who said no one sends letters anymore?

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