Direct Mail VS E-mail Marketing

You have probably heard in recent conferences or business gathering that you should abandon old marketing methods in favor to online marketing. In today’s article, I will go over the pros and cons of using direct mail or e-mail marketing and try to show why e-mail marketing provides such a high ROI and positive response from subscribers.

First, let’s look at a few interesting figures:

• Junk Mail Kills 2.6 Million Trees Every Year
• E-mail marketing returned $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009 (Direct Marketing Association)
• 75% of daily social media users said e-mail is the best way for companies to communicate with them (MarketingSherpa – 2010)

Direct Mail & Newsletters

• Flexibility of target
• Can be tailored to each client
• Higher chance to be read (the average person receives 150 time less mails than e-mails)
• A numbers game
• Lengthy to deploy (6 to 8 weeks)
• Can be expensive based on amount sent
• Hard to measure ROI

E-mail Marketing

Pros

• Inexpensive
• Easy to deploy (1 to 3 weeks)
• Can be tested, measured and improved
• Over half of Internet users check or send e-mail on a typical day
• Can be linked to your website (landing pages that will convert into sales)

Cons

• A numbers game
• Must comply with CAN-SPAM
• Most likely to be ignored (the average person receives 7-10 spam emails per day)

Conclusion

As you might have guessed, E-mail marketing is a clear winner. Why not suspending sending direct mail ads that cannot be measure and sometime don not work and jump on board with its online counterparts?

Here is a list of free (or inexpensive) e-mail marketing solutions to get you started. These software offer features that assist the user in the process of organizing contacts, creating campaigns, and scheduling communication.

• Constant Contact
• Mail Chimp
• iContact