In his blog post, Email: Why It Isn’t Digital Direct Mail, Loren McDonald provides some distinctions between email marketing and traditional direct mail. He correctly points out that:
- Email recipients have more control in terms of granting permission, unsubscribing and having a say in the content and frequency of messages.
- Electronic delivery is much more complicated, especially with new regulations and filtering systems on the ISP and client level.
- Metrics are much more complicated in email marketing. There are many more things to measure, from delivery rates to click-throughs to spam reports. But test results (such as A/B) and metrics are delivered much more quickly and accurately online.
- The format and rendering of your original message shifts from recipient to recipient in email marketing. Image blocking, preview panes and non-standard HTML rendering in email clients make your message appear differently from reader to reader.
One key difference which wasn’t mentioned has to do with the communication channel itself. Email marketing is more effective at building and maintaining relationships because it is much more interactive than traditional direct mail. Recipients can reply immediately with questions regarding your promotion, inquiries about your products or services and important feedback (positive and negative). Email also allows for immediate purchases, subscriptions, registration or membership on your website.
Email is a bridge between you and your customer. It links your products and services in real time with your market and allows immediate access to the value that you are offering.
It certainly is Utah, although the sky’s the limit with regard to how much you can spend on email marketing. If you add in time spent on deliverability issues, ROI measurement and campaign tracking, list acquisition and accreditation/authentication systems, email marketing can get pricey. But for small/medium business communication and product/service promotion, email marketing can certainly help to cut costs traditionally associated with direct mail.
I think email marketing is just a lot cheaper as well.
Thanks Loren. Of course, we could dig a hole as deep as we want to – turn a blog post into a book, etc. I think you covered the topic succinctly and clearly.
Tom – great points. I probably could have gone on for dozens of more differences…things as simple as approaches to copywriting (email needs to be more subtle and more trustworthy, for example). But you nailed it on the engagement and relationship aspect of email. Ultimately direct mail and email work even better when integrated, but even though they may be part of the same family – these siblings are in fact very, very different.