Direct Mail Vs. E-mail Campaigns

I recently recommended that a client test a direct mail program to augment their online efforts. Sure it’s expensive, but when I looked at the company’s demographic, which didn’t exactly scream ‘tech-oriented’ or ‘I live online’, I thought it was worth a try. But it did get me thinking about the pro’s and con’s of direct vs. e-mail, so I thought I’d toss down a few thoughts.

With direct mail, you can do something eye-catching that makes you want to take a second look. With e-mail, the eye-catcher won’t be graphic, it’ll have to be the message line. (Which is not to say that you can get away with ignoring the graphic element of an e-mail marketing piece.)

With direct mail, you get to tell more of a story. Sure, this may only appeal to information-junkies like me, but sometimes more is better. With e-mail, you have to get to the point fast. This forces you to go through the process of figuring out what’s most important, a process that you shouldn’t (but might well) neglect with direct mail.

With direct mail, if it doesn’t get tossed immediately, there’s a pretty good chance that, when someone sorts through their pile-o’-mail at a later time, they’ll take a look. Also, now that the balance has shifted and most of us get a lot more e-mail marketing pitches than we do direct mail, direct mail might stand out better. With e-mail, if someone doesn’t open-me-at-the-moment, the probability that they’ll get back to it later is not much above zero.

With direct mail, you need more lead time. Not as much as you used to need to get something designed and printed, but it’s still faster to create an e-mail campaign: just don’t forget that it still needs to look good, and have a landing page that looks good, etc.

With direct mail, a campaign will cost you more - but the question remains: are there some situations where it’s more effective to use direct mail. Sure, it will cost you more, but you may end up getting what you pay for: better results.

What’s the best way to approach things?

Consider your audience: For an older demographic; a business market that’s not especially technical; or just a market that you want to let know that they’re worth the price of a stamp and a postcard (or a more expensive dimensional mailer), direct mail has to be high on the consideration list. For a younger demographic (but not so young that they don’t use e-mail anymore); or for a technical market that embraces the virtual and shuns paper, e-mail marketing is a better approach

Target well: Given the expense, you obviously want to target your direct mail really carefully. The good news: it’s cheaper and easier now to come up with finely targeted messages, even with direct mail, given printing costs and production efficiencies. But it’s not as if e-mail costs zero. You may not have to target as finely as you do with direct mail, but what’s the point of sending out 10,000 e-mail messages if only 100 of the recipients are really likely buyers.

Put some thought into the message: This may seem d’uh obvious, but I’m guessing from the number of marketing e-mails I get that there are plenty of people out there who still don’t think about what they’re saying. You need to make sure that the subject line is going to get someone to read the e-mail. (But you also need to make sure that once they do open the e-mail, there’s some payoff for them. Same goes, of course, for the direct mail piece, but I do think that - given the cost differential - people do tend to put more thought into something that gets printed. They may not always hit the mark, of course, but you can generally catch the drift of what they’re trying to get across.

Test things out: Even if you’re not doing mass direct or e-mails, it still pays to do some testing up front. Test messages, test offers, test subject lines. On the direct mail front, we are blessedly beyond the era when it was supremely costly to do small print jobs. Take advantage of this. And just because e-mail’s cheaper and more immediate, you’ll still get better results if you do some testing in advance of the big “Send”.