Is Email The New Direct Mail?
It is unlikely that traditional direct mail will completely disappear anytime soon. But it was clear from the recent 2009 Email Marketing Summit sponsored by MarketingSherpa that in some respects, email has become the new direct mail.
Many of the sessions seemed to confirm that today’s most effective email marketing mirrors the characteristics of direct mail marketing. For example, Siara Nazir, Director of Customer Acquisition and Retention for financial services company E-LOAN, spoke about testing concepts to control groups selected from an email database before committing to emailing the entire list. This is a classic direct mail strategy.
Don McNichol, Director of eCommerce and Direct Marketing for online retailer Intermix, segmented his email list into three types of customers: VIPs (big spenders), sale shoppers (customers who purchase only during sales or at a discount), and brand shoppers (customers loyal to a particular brand). McNichol said targeting messages and offers to each group resulted in a 90 percent increase in open rates and a 28 percent increase in profit from email marketing. Again, segmentation is a classic direct mail strategy.
John Heidrich and Joe Nettum of insurance company Allstate tested a triggered email strategy against emails sent in batches to an entire list. Emails were centered on policy purchases, renewals, or claims filing, instead of more generic messages. The result: The email open rate for the triggered emails increased 84 percent over batch-mailed emails. You guessed it: This is yet another technique adapted from the direct mail world.
Other insights revealed at the summit were similarly aligned with direct mail. Email marketing has matured to the point at which marketers now have the ability to analyze, segment, and target their email lists, tailoring the right offers and the right creative approaches to the right audiences – just like they did before with direct mail. With the increasing acceptance of email as a marketing medium, as long as it’s not spam, and the vast cost difference between email and direct mail, this makes email all the more attractive in tough economic times.
As MarketingSherpa says, “Email is once again favored by executive managers looking for low-cost, high ROI channels. It’s a perfect time to put advanced tactics and data-analysis capabilities in place to make your email campaigns as powerful as they can be.”
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Barry Silverstein is a freelance writer/marketing consultant and co-author of the McGraw-Hill book, The Breakaway Brand.
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