Email vs. Direct Mail… 5 Old Lessons for New Media

We often help people overcome their anxiety that e-marketing is this great big mystery in the internet cloud. E-marketing is still marketing. And to that end, we can apply some old marketing lessons learned in the direct mail world to email marketing.

1. It’s all about the list.
Having a list of people who are interested in your product or service is the first key to success. In the direct mail world, you can purchase lists with certain demographics that fit your target audience. While this is possible in the email world, it is not recommended.

Purchased email lists tend to violate the CAN-SPAM laws while not having a direct relationship with you the emailer. The best list for email marketing is one that you build in-house. You can do this by collecting email addresses at the point of purchase, by calling existing and old customers and asking for it or by offering interesting content on your website which requires email for registration.
 

2. Timing is everything.
Direct mail has always been a combination of repetition with timing. You want to send your marketing piece to the right person at exactly the time the person is thinking about your product. This is why companies such as Target send out a holiday toy catalog in November. They hope that parents will use their catalog to build their holiday shopping list and thus drive sales.

The same thing applies to email marketing. For example, you can communicate with someone five times via email and it is viewed as junk because they don't need your product or service. But the sixth time, your message comes with just the right educational piece and the person is thrilled to have found the solution and vendor for their problem.

3. Make the message meaningful.

Direct mail often uses database driven information to modify the look of the direct mail piece to fit the specific recipient. For example, a car advertisement in the winter shows a driver smoothly navigating a snowy road for people that live in the north. However, the same car advertisement in the winter shows rainy road conditions for people living in the south.

Email marketing is most effective when the message matches the person's interests. This is called segmentation. Review your customer and prospect lists and identify how to group your contacts into similar categories. Consider writing content that is unique for each of these audiences. By making the content meaningful to them, you will increase the effectiveness of your email campaign.

4. Creative is king.

The creative design of the print piece pulls the reader into the message and has a huge impact on its success.

In email marketing the creative spans several elements. It includes the sender display name, the subject line and then the creative of the email itself. These three elements of the email message work together to pull the reader into the message and to drive the action. A powerful visual or a deliberate use of font size and color can have a big impact on the person clicking a link in your message. It is important to plan for all of these elements when designing an email marketing message.
 

5. Measurement matters.

Direct mail has frequently used tracking codes and bar codes to track redemption at the retail level. However, if you don't have a product that someone immediately purchases, it is difficult to measure how direct mail contributes to the influence of the person's buying decision.

This is where email marketing shines! Email marketing has the ability to provide instant feedback on the effectiveness of an email campaign. By looking at measures such as open rates and click-throughs of the links in an email message, you can measure and compare how one email campaign compares to another. You can measure the interest level of individual people as it relates to the topic. You can pull reports on the activities of individual people and then use this information to make phone follow up calls at just the right moment. Using the measurement tools in email marketing is the true benefit of this marketing tactic. If you're not using the reports, you are truly missing out!

Email marketing as a marketing tactic has both technical and marketing elements. By applying the lessons from direct mail, we hope that you see that it truly is a new marketing tactic which follows old marketing lessons.