|
Marketing -
Snail Mail vs.
Email |
News:
"Work From Home
-
Wholesale Product
Sourcing"
eBook Available
- click
here |
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.
|