Direct Mail vs Email Marketing: What’s Best for your Business?

Every business ultimately wants more customers or they wouldn’t be in business for very long. So in the case of direct mail vs email marketing, which one is best for capturing your customers attention and driving them to you.
Although both methods have merit it is important for you to decide which is most likely to target your perfect customer. To do this you will need to consider their age bracket, geographic location, income level and their needs. Determining the type of customer you want to reach will help you decide which method may be the best.
Regardless of whether you use direct mail vs email marketing, when formulating a strategy there are four thing to consider:

1. What is your offer
2. How relevent is that offer to the audience you want to target
3.  Timing
4.  What action are you asking your audience to perform

Addressing these key points will be fundamental in helping you decide if email marketing or direct mail marketing is the right approach for your campaign.Now lets look at what else you should consider.
Direct Mail Marketing
Direct mail marketing tends to be a costly and time consuming campaign to implement, with current estimates ranging from $1 to $6 per person depending on the size of the item being sent. Designing, printing and mailing the campaign can take a number of weeks and the response rate is low at around 2%. A print campign like this may be considered environmentally unfriendly in this day and age, with consumers regarding it as junk mail. However direct mail is great for sending promotional items and delivering them right into the hands of your customer. Unlike email marketing which is constrained by available space and layout, direct mail marketing can be colourful, attention grabbing and use as much space as you need to get your message across.
Email Marketing
An Email marketing campaign costs substaincly less than a direct mail one, typically around $20-$50 per month to send to 1,000 customers.It is a strategy that is not only fast to execute but it is deliver instantly to a large group of targeted customers. Response rates from email range around 40-60% and it is easy to track the open and response rates giving you the ability to analyse how successful or unsuccessful your campaign has been.Lets say you are sending out emails 1,000 at a time, then analysing the response rates of the first 1,000 sent will give you time to make improvements before sending the subsquent campaigns, testing this way can lead to even better response rates.
Email marketing can be fast to generate leads and sales as your customer is already using their computer or smartphone when they recieve your email. They are able to take imediate action clicking on the links to your website or product and producing instant results. However emails are also one of the chosen forms of communication by spammers which has led to an increase in the efficieny of spam filters. It is often hard to guarantee that your campign will make it through the filter and into your customers Inbox. The most effective and ethical way to combat this is to ensure that your customers have opted in to recieve your emails which hopefully prevents the message from ending up in the junk file. Ensuring the campaign is attention grabbing will minimize the chance of the message being deleted by the recipient.
Which method wins in the direct mail vs email marketing battle? Whilst there isn’t any doubt that email marketing is by far cheaper and faster, many businesses would benefit from a blended marketing approach, combining both strategies.Direct mail marketing isn’t as popular as it once was, however customers are getting more and more frustrated with the rising levels of spam email, so it may yet see a reprive. Finding a balance and utilizing a mix between the two methods is a solid strategy that many successful businesses implement.