D is for Digital vs. Print

What does it cost to design, print and distribute a Direct Mail piece nationally these days? (The answer: It depends on how big, how far, how much...) So then, what does it cost to design and distribute/deploy an email? (The answer: it's not free, but pretty much.)

The Digital vs. Print argument has been going on for a while, and there are many, many factors involved in assessing a true winner. As a savvy email user, I have filters, and categories, and junk addresses, and marketing addresses, and commenting addresses, and site specific addresses, and I own my own domain and can create and distribute a new address in seconds, so I have so well honed my skills of analysis and detection that I can delete an email based on a Subject line, if it even makes it that far. I'm the ultimate Turing test for email spam. That being said, I also get lots of email every day (that I read, even if it's just a cursory skim) and have perfected my inbox management skills as well.

All of the great skills and tools I describe above don't help me at all in the corporeal world that is Direct Mail. I will never be able to stop the "Unaddressed" or Junk mail as we call it, any better than I can stop the completely legitimate addressed mail (that I also deem junk). (Note: in the digital world, this is called BACN not SPAM, because it is mail that you somehow, somewhere said you wanted, but you really don't read, and can't be bothered or really shouldn't unsubscribe from it)

In your inbox, if your bank sends you something you don't really want, it takes about 1/10th of a second for your brain to figure out what it is and hit the delete button. When your bank sends you something to your mailbox, you really do have to open it to figure out what it is, and by then it's in your house, and you now have to deal with it. The hassles exist in both, but this post is just a comparison.

As a marketer, you know that a DM piece will get a certain response rate, and an email campaign will get a certain response rate. It all comes down to the numbers, so why don't we try to change the numbers? People do the same old things in DM, and expect the same results, knowing that 95% of what they send gets trashed. It's sad. With email, at least less trees get killed.