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E-Mail vs. Print ROI: Moving the Goalposts?
July 21, 2008

Each day this week on “Making Marketing Work” will include individual posts that lack any unifying theme, but essentially comprise the results of my cleaning out my inbox and mining the voluminous e-newsletters and other things I get for topics that may educate, elucidate, or just entertain. Each post will, though, have a lesson appended.

Last week, Brandweek told us:

E-mail is now the most popular form of direct response marketing, per a new survey of large U.S. corporations conducted by Direct Partners, New York.

E-mail is used primarily by 35% of companies compared to 25% which use traditional direct mail and 21% who use package, statement stuffers or free standing inserts

The finding echoes a study from last fall from MarketingSherpa, where participants reported that “house e-mail marketing” delivered the best return-on-investment in terms of direct response.

Since many companies (and people) regard e-mail as “free” (or at the very least “cheap,” especially when compared to print), the ROI issue isn’t all that surprising.

“The dramatic emphasis on e-mail as the primary direct marketing vehicle is significant,” said Harry Haber, vp-Direct Partners, Marina del Ray, Calif. “And why not? It’s fast to deploy, inexpensive to distribute versus other media, and the response is rapid.”

The issue isn’t whether e- vs. p- (as in “print”) is more effective as a medium, it’s a question of comparing costs and speed. Heidi, I’m sure, can readily cite response rate figures for print media, but experience has found that you have to send out a lot of e-mails to get a response rate that approaches that of print. But, given that e-mail is inexpensive (at least if you don’t have to buy lists), it is far more cost-effective to send out tens of thousands of e-mails than to print and mail a direct marketing piece. This is why spam is such a problem; even if just one or two people out of millions fall for the Nigerian banking scam, or a phishing expedition, or replica watches, or phony penis-enhancement pills, it has already just about paid for itself.

What may be the Achilles heel of e-mail marketing is the sheer volume of it. Think about this: back in the 1980s, when television networks started accepting shorter ad spots and shoehorning more of them in a single commercial break, advertisers were unhappy, as any single message got lost in a sea of sponsors.*

Even the things we want to receive (or, I should say, the things we signed up for thinking that it was a good idea at the time) can get on our nerves. In the past six to eight months, I have seen my snail mail volume decline dramatically—but the consequence of that is that now I really pay attention to the one or two catalogs or one or two postcards per week I receive, compared to the past when it was non-stop barrage of stuff and it all just went into the trash. E-mail is now the reverse; I (and I imagine I am not alone) have a tendency to often indiscriminately delete anything not from a friend, relative, or colleague. It’s just overwhelming.

The Lesson: What’s the takeaway? That the idea of “return on investment” is often conflated with “cheap and fast.” To say that e-mail “returns its investment” is really to damn with faint praise. This is not to say that e-mail marketing is of little value—quite the contrary—but rather that e-mail ROI sets the bar a tad low and threatens to be a case of diminished expectations. This isn’t to pick sides in some mythical print vs. e-mail war—although there are many who think of it like that—but rather to stress that the key to successful marketing is sending the right message to the right audience via the right media. As, as this space has mentioned many times, a carefully custom-tailored mix of media is often the best strategy.

* I recently was watching a DVD release of The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show which featured the complete shows, including all the commercial breaks. Normally such a thing would make me scream, but it was an interesting history lesson; each show only had at most three or four different sponsors, and commercial breaks were short and only included two spots. Compare that to today’s TV shows and the barrage of individual ad spots. Speaking for myself, it was far easier to retain the Ed Sullivan sponsors and messages than any spot I have seen in a recent TV show. And now I could really go for some Pillsbury Crescent Rolls and some Lipton Tea. Q.E.D.

Posted by Richard Romano on July 21, 2008 | Comments (0)