The internet has given birth to electronic mail, more popularly known as e-mail. E-mail opened new avenues to the world of communication. In the beginning, e-mail was only used as another means of communicating with other people for personal or business related matters. Now people of every age group have an e-mail address. Over the past few years, its potential for marketing has been exploited to its maximum both in good and as well as bad. At the same time, who can disregard the services of direct mail which has been operating for nearly two centuries? It is still the preferred method of communication for many people.

E-mail is the cheapest method of communicating available as of now. The advantage with email is that you can send email to many people at the same time with the click of a mouse. Where as in the case of direct mails, one has to go through putting letters in envelopes for each and every person, make different address labels, mail it and also has to bear the cost of mailing. Time is money and e-mail marketing saves a lot of time.

While e-mail marketing might look easy, comparing the net results of the story is totally different. When you are marketing through e-mail, you need to make sure that you are e-mailing the right person otherwise the e-mail is going to end up in the junk folder. Also you need to be careful that you don’t miss the subject or the body of the e-mail otherwise the result is going to be the same. In this age of spamming, spammers use a variety of subjects, so you have to title the subject keeping in mind that it wouldn’t send your e-mail to the spam folder again. In contrast, the direct mail method gets better treatment. Studies show that direct mail is more efficient and has better success than e-mail.

First, it is not as easy to block direct mail as junk e-mail and secondly the process of blocking mail itself is not automated like e-mail. The other reason why people hate e-mail marketing is due to the constant bombarding of e-mails from spammers and illegal marketers from Nigerian money scams to porn to online prescription drugs to stock quotes to what not. In addition to that, you also get promotional offers from big companies. People have developed a negative perception about e-mail marketing and they simply delete or spam the e-mail if they do not identify it as their regular e-mail. In contrast direct mail is seen with respect and people pick through their mail as a daily routine and open them with a priority.

Direct mail has a personal feel attached to it, one of the reasons why people prefer mail greetings over an electronic greeting. It takes time to personalize a direct mail where as an e-mail is instant and the fate of e-mail is also instant i.e. immediate deletion. Researchers are constantly puzzled by the mystery surrounding why people are so enthusiastic about direct mail. But no worries this only good news for the marketers that they have something in their tool kit that works. So marketers have the mailing list of potential customers handy and send some nicely composed letters to them about your company and its products.

Snail mail has the potential of going through the hands of gatekeepers and administrative assistants before actually going to their boss which can end up being thrown in the trash. The survival chances are rare unless the subject is business oriented and has some sort of important information. But e-mail wins in this regard, as it directly reaches the person to which it is intended to go, after that its fate is left to the person whether to read or send it to spam folder.

A more scientific explanation of why direct mail is more effective than e-mail is the sensory perception of people. Direct mail uses three of the four senses of a person i.e. visual, verbal, listening and touching where as e-mail does not use the senses of listening or touching. But this can be achieved by adding appealing graphics, text reading ability and streaming audio to the e-mail.

Statistics show that direct mail has not died and in fact the volume has grown by leaps and bounds in the past few decades. A typical example is the fact that we receive more magazines, journals, mails from universities, DVDs etc. than we used to receive few years ago. This leaves the marketers with a dilemma about which method to use. The answer is simple, use email to contact only those people who you know and use direct mail for the people who don’t know you.