Direct Email Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

by Brynne Pearson

Let's face it. Email marketing is here to stay. Many people use email in their daily communications, many use it even more than a phone. Many companies use email to build and strengthen connection between them and their customers, to have good customer relationship. While traditional marketing has its place in every business, it is important to also consider how effective email marketing is compared to traditional marketing.

Advertising and marketing online and offline have at least one thing in common - you have to know your target audience. Market segmentation is very important because you don't want to lose your money sending your ads to someone who has no interest in it.

Cost/Benefit

With direct email marketing, you can have 1-1 communication with your customers and prospects. Email marketing campaigns are very inexpensive compared to other media outlets. You also have more versatility and room for creative in email, because you have ability to send HTML emails. HTML emails allow for the creation of custom templates that include the look, feel and graphics of your brand.

Just as in a direct mail campaign, email marketing allows you to create unlimited lists with unlimited recipients in each and to make list segmentation. You can send different emails to your prospects, clients, business partners, press or any other group about your company. The major difference between direct mail and email comes down to cost. With email marketing you can segment and send your different messages at a fraction of what one direct mail campaign would cost.

While traditional marketing is important and has its place in every business, it is much more expensive than email marketing. If you want to start a direct mail campaign you will have costs for creating and printing along with delivery expenses. Not to mention TV or print advertising. Beside that it is much more expensive, it takes much more time to create and implement any of the traditional marketing campaigns or offline advertising and response ratio is usually much lower than with using email marketing.

Imagine that you want to announce your new software product, update, conference or webinar. You want to inform your business partners and clients of you company's news and updates. You have two choices: to use email to notify them or to use traditional techniques like sending letters or using a phone? Not only is the latter more expensive, it also takes more time and manpower.

Tracking

The second advantage using direct email marketing compared to traditional marketing is tracking. Practically, you can find anything about your email marketing campaign with analytics. You will get detailed statistics about how many people have opened your emails, what is your click-thru rate, which articles or ads were the most popular in your email newsletter.

There are no such precise techniques for tracking in traditional marketing. Can you know precisely how many people have seen your last TV commercial? No! Can you know precisely how many people have seen your last radio commercial? No! It is the same like with advertising in print magazines. There are some techniques like using equipment like "people meters" or some surveys regarding popularity of certain programs in which your ad was broadcasted but it is not so accurate, at least not that accurate like email marketing tracking. In this case you will usually have to pay to some marketing agency that will make that research. Another option is to include a special phone number or web site in your offline campaigns but even then you won't know exactly how many people have seen your ad.

If you find that Direct Email Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing is something that your company would like to know more about, feel free to contact Central States Media at info@centralstatesmedia.com or on the phone at (309) 693-2345.