Apply Direct Mail Discipline to Email Marketing

Marketers Need To Apply Direct Mail Discipline to Acquisition Email Marketing.

Marketers love email. It’s easy on your budget, quickly created, and painlessly deployed.

And that’s a huge problem for marketers.

Why? Because emails are so inexpensive and easy to do, marketers rarely give them the due diligence that a best-practice direct mail program receives. As a result, many critical direct response tenets are ignored, forgotten or simply deemed unimportant.

But the truth is, these direct response tenets can make the difference between email success or failure. Take a look at the average response rates for direct mail vs. email. According to Direct Marketing Association studies, direct mail outperforms email by a wide margin (3.54% to 0.12%). The average ROI for direct mail is 12x higher than that of email.

Some of this disparity is due to the nature of the medium. Email is a low-cost tactic that allows marketers to reach a lot of people very quickly. It’s not meant to perform as well as direct mail. However, email performance can be substantially improved by employing the same direct response discipline used in direct mail.

Here are four questions to ask yourself before you deploy your next acquisition email campaign:

1. Are you testing alternative creative executions, offers, target audiences and deployment times?
2. Are you setting clear, measurable goals for email performance?
3. Are you analyzing performance data on a daily basis in order to gather insights that can improve future email performance?
4. Are you utilizing proven techniques and best practice standards to maximize performance?
   

Applying direct mail tenets to email marketing can significantly increase open rates, drive higher CTR, generate more leads and improve your ROI.

All it takes is a little discipline.