A study released this month by the marketing services firm Epsilon indicates that a full 50 percent of consumers prefer receiving offers via direct mail rather than email, according to Direct Marketing News.
"It's just 'surprising' because everything you hear in the media is basically counter to what the consumers are actually telling us, which is that direct mail is still the preferred channel," Warren Storey, VP of product marketing and insight at ICOM (a division of Epsilon), told the news source.
Upon further inspection, however, the results might not be all that surprising. The survey questioned 2,226 U.S. consumers. Of those involved, 60 percent reported that they felt a certain sense of enjoyment upon checking their physical mailboxes and finding letters inside. This lead to what marketers refer to as an "emotional connection" with the mail. Twenty-five percent of respondents said that they actually trusted direct mail more than email.
Smart businesses are rethinking email-only campaigns. While email is still a valid way to reach out to many people, relying on this medium alone could exclude a large percentage of American consumers who either don’t have email or who are well conditioned by the 75 emails they get a day to ignore promotional materials that arrive in the inbox. Instead, marketers should mix their email campaigns with direct mail in order to achieve higher campaign results.
On-Demand Targeting by Semcasting is one of the most effective ways to implement a highly-qualified direct mail or email campaign. Using their patented offline database, Semcasting is able to sort through millions of individuals and households and target them based on over 750 demographic and psychographic variables. Using these data points, Semcasting's On-Demand Targeting can create predictive models and help pinpoint the most qualified audience to receive a given offer, and determine which channel - direct mail or email will be most effective.
Semcasting : Oct 8, 2015 2:23:51 PM