We sing the praises of email, and many of our B2B clients use it pretty religiously, too …primarily for nurturing prospects in the pipeline. But what about email for lead generation? On the surface, it sounds great: its cost is so much lower than postal mail, and the results can be known much more quickly.
But hold on a minute, cautions David Ariss in a guest post for B2BMarketingSmarts. David’s firm (Ariss Marketing Group) recently ran a campaign for a large B2B publisher, sending the same survey and choice of offers via both email (n=30,000) and postal mail (n=100,000). Both utilized primarily the client’s in-house list, augmented by highly targeted outside lists. The results may astound you…
- the email got 75 positive responses (0.25%)
- the postal mail pulled 3,100 responses (3.1%)!
So what’s going on here? David discusses three advantages that postal mail may have over email:
- The recipient can open physical mail at his/her convenience and spend some quality time with it (and these days, it may be the only such piece the recipient gets all week!). Email, on the other hand, arrives amidst a horde of other messages that require the reader’s attention during a busy workday.
- A mail piece lets you tell your whole story, with room for all the arguments and helpful graphics. An email of that length is likely to be – if not deleted straightaway – put off until a “whenever” that may never come.
- With email, your recipient is staring at a lifeless monitor; whereas direct mail can be seen, touched and perhaps even smelled. As David says, “There is just plain more emotion and interaction with direct mail.”
No question, email is far cheaper; but a response rate that’s scarcely 8% of the alternative may not be much of a bargain, even if it’s free. Of course, the case cited here may not be representative for your B2B and its market; but at a minimum, it should make you a believer in small-batch testing, before charging off whole-hog in either direction.
