Marketing – Snail Mail Vs E-mail
Marketing – Snail Mail Vs
E-mail
It was not too long ago that most people had no
internet leave alone e-mail address. But internet brought in a new era that is
full of unlimited information. Internet gave birth to electronic mail popularly
known as e-mail. E-mail opened new avenues to the world of communication. In
the beginning e-mail 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 e-mail 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.
E-mail 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 where as 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 e-mail marketing saves a lot of
time.
While e-mail marketing might look easy but if you
compare the net result the story is totally different. When you are marketing
through e-mail you go to make sure that you are e-mailing the right person
otherwise the e-mail 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 e-mail 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 e-mail to the spam folder again. In contract the direct mail gets a better
treatment. Studies show that direct mail is more efficient and has better
success than e-mail. First, it is not as easy to block direct mail as junk
e-mail and secondly the process of blocking mails itself is not automated like
e-mail. The other reason why people hate e-mail marketing is due to constant
bombarding of e-mails 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 e-mail marketing and they simply delete or spam the
e-mail if they do not identify it as their regular e-mail. 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 where as an e-mail is instant and the
fate of e-mail 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 e-mail 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 e-mail 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 where as e-mail 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 e-mail.
The statistics show that direct mail has not died
and in fact the volume has grown by leaps and bounds in past few decades. A
typical example is the fact that we receive more magazines, journals, mails
from universities, DVDs etc. than we used to receive few years ago. This leaves
the marketers with a dilemma about which method to use. The answer is simple,
use email to contact only those people who you know and use direct mail for the
people who don’t know you.
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