Regular mail or email?

I'm interested in knowing if anyone has invested in both email marketing and regular direct mail - which one delivers a better cost/benefit? For email there's no print or postage costs yet the response rate could be lower, which works against the lower costs. Any ideas?

I would have to say that for business-to-business marketing in particular, an email campaign (or "blast") is certainly more effective, both in terms of cost and response rate. While email marketing does have some unique costs involved, it is relatively less expensive than regular mail, with campaigns usually costing only pennies per email sent. And the more you send, normally the cheaper it gets. Compare that to the cost of materials and postage and you'll see quite a difference. Depending n how much you have to invest in email marketing, there are a lot of options out there for managing email campaigns, ranging from out-of-the-box e-marketing software packages to a plethora of companies that specialize in developing and delivering email marketing campaigns for any size business.

In terms of response rate, in the increasingly digital world, a growing percentage of your target market is actively tied into the medium (email) throughout the business day, offering you as an e-marketer direct access to the decision maker during a time-frame in which they are more inclined to make a response decision. With regular mail, the active tie-in isn't there and there is often the potential for your marketing effort to get screened out by a so called "gate-keeper" (eg: an administrative assistant) as junk mail and not even make it to your intended target. When that happens, your marketing effort could potentially be a waste of your valuable time and money.

Another great advantage of an email campaign is the wealth of feedback you can get that can help you improve your program going forward. In addition to your response rate, a good e-marketing service provider should be able to deliver a complete post-blast analysis of your campaign, with feedback including the percentage of emails successfully delivered and click-thru rates... the percentage of recipients who actually opened your email. You can even get a report on failed deliveries, that is the email addresses that bounced back to the server. With that, you'll immediately have a list of addresses to weed out of your future email blasts.

There are of course lots of caveats to email marketing. You have to be cautious not to cross the line from e-marketing to being considered a spammer, but with a well planned campaign that usually isn't a large issue, especially if you're targeting recipients who have actively opted in to receiving your email. A great example of this is the e-newsletter which is often times subscriber based. There are even schools of thought on the best timing for sending an email blast. Believe it or not, some experts contend not only that Tuesday is the most effective day for your e-marketing effort but that 10 am to Noon on Tuesday is best. That might be a bit extreme, but probably isn't too far off the mark. I get for example a weekly "Websaver" email from Air Canada on Wednesday mornings like clockwork. Either way, compare the feedback from your Tuesday or Wednesday campaign with that of say a blast on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend and you'll probably see a very different set of results.