Email Marketing or Snail Mail Marketing?

Email marketing has gained in popularity over snail mail these days. It was not too long ago that most people had no internet leave alone email address. But internet brought in a new era that is full of unlimited information. Internet gave birth to electronic mail popularly known as email. Email opened new avenues to the world of communication. In the beginning email was only used as another means of communicating with other people for personal or business related matters. Now people of every age group have an email address. But, since past few years its potential for marketing has been exploited to its maximum both in good and as well as bad manner. At the same time who can disregard the services of direct mail which has been operating since nearly two centuries? It is still the preferred method of communication for many people.

Email is the cheapest method of communicating available as of this date. The advantage with email is that you can send email to many people at the same time just with the click of a mouse whereas in the case of direct mails one has to go through putting letters in envelopes for each and every person, make different address labels, mail it and also have to bear the cost of mailing. Time is money and email marketing saves a lot of time.

While email marketing might look easy but if you compare the net result the story is totally different. When you are marketing through email you go to make sure that you are emailing the right person otherwise the email would end up going to junk folder. Also you got to be careful that you don’t miss the subject or the body of the email otherwise the net result would be same. In this age of spamming, spammers use variety of subjects, so you have to put the subject keeping in mind that it wouldn’t send your email to the spam folder again. In contrast the direct mail gets a better treatment.

Studies show that direct mail is more efficient and has better success than email. First, it is not as easy to block direct mail as junk email and secondly the process of blocking mails itself is not automated like email. The other reason why people hate email marketing is due to constant bombarding of emails from spammers and illegal marketers from Nigerian money scams to porn to online prescription drugs to stock quotes to what not. In addition to that, you also get promotional offers from big companies and who can ignore phishing these days. Due to all these people have developed a negative perception about email marketing and they simply delete or spam the email if they do not identify it as their regular email. In contrast direct mail is seen with respect and people pick their mail as a daily routine and open them with a priority.

Direct mail has a personal feel attached to it, one of the reasons why people prefer mail greetings over an electronic greeting. It takes time to personalize a direct mail whereas an email is instant and the fate of email is also instant i.e. immediate deletion. Researchers are constantly puzzled by the mystery surrounding why people are so enthusiastic about direct mail. But no worries this only good news for the marketers that they have something in their tool kit that works. So marketers have the mailing list of potential customers handy and send some nicely composed letters to them about your company and its products.

Snail mail has a potential of going through the hands of gatekeepers and administrative assistants before actually going to their boss which can end up being thrown in trash. The survival chances are rare unless its subject is business oriented and has some important information. But email wins in this regard, as it reaches directly the person to which it is intended to go, after that its fate is left to the person whether to read or send it to spam folder.

A more scientific explanation of why direct mail is dearer to people than email is the sensory perception of people. A direct mail uses three of the four senses of a person i.e. visual, verbal, listening and touching whereas email does not use sense of listening and touching. But this can be achieved by adding appealing graphics, text reading ability and streaming audio to the email.

Statistics shows that direct mail has not died and in fact the volume seems to have grown. For example, we receive more magazines, journals, mails from universities, DVDs etc. than we used to receive few years ago. So which method should we go with? One possible answer is to use email marketing to contact only those people who you know and use direct mail for the people who don’t know you.