A "paper and pencil" questionnaire sent through the mail can be used to good effect when the respondent must see printed text or images to respond intelligently. In this way, complex concepts or descriptions can be considered and reviewed at the respondent's own pace. Graphics, as opposed to text, can be incorporated as well.

Some drawbacks to mail surveys are a low response rate and lack of control over the "interview." The response rate (and non-sampling error) can be improved by sending pre-notification and follow-up mailings to a subset of the population, rather than sending a single mass mailing to the entire population of interest. The use of stamped envelopes instead of bulk rate outgoing mail and the use of business reply return envelopes can also increase the response rate.

Historically, mail surveys have been one of the cheapest methods for collecting survey data. New technologies such as e-mail, web-based surveys and interactive voice response can compete on price since the cost of postage and the labor to transfer data from paper to disk are eliminated. Scanning returned mail surveys can increase efficiency over manual entry but typically is economical only for ongoing, repeated, or very large surveys.

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