Email Great Medium For Reaching Old, Stupid People

Posted: May 29th, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Media And Advertising | Tags: , , | No Comments »

The latest asshattery in the world of media planning news comes in the form of a study from Datran Media suggesting that email ads perform better than search or display.

It’s convenient to look at data like this, and to conclude that email ads are a better investment than, say, Google Adwords or banner ads…anywhere. (God forbid you consider some kind of integrated marketing effort; the sky will fall.)

But this is an apples/oranges comparison. Email advertising is easier to understand and execute, and has been around longer, than search and display. It also requires opt-ins to be effective. How many of the successful email campaigns discussed in the study used purchased lists of subscribers who had no idea what they were in for? Probably very few. And what about the process of building user trust to the point where they’re willing to bother reading your marketing email? Is that factored into the exemplary ROI? Doubtful.

More importantly, this study doesn’t take into account who the target demographic is. No doubt about it, if you are selling dentures, then a co-branded email to readers of the AARP newsletter is the way to go. But if you’re selling, say, web hosting services, and the focus of your campaign is email, you’re dead.

I feel sorry for all the clients who got their channel monies re-allocated today as the result of articles about this study.

photo by tico24

  • http://www.deliverability.com/ Joshua Baer

    As to email in an integrated marketing effert, it looks like you didn’t read past the headline. In the article you link to, it explains that is usually part of an integrated marketing effort that includes search and display.

    “Some 67% of respondents stated that email has helped boost sales through other channels. In these scenarios, email is a tool for sales as well as a media channel. Search is the favored channel for complementing the email channel.”

  • miconian

    Josh, thanks for commenting. When I said “integrated marketing,” I actually meant special sponsorships or promotions that would be associated or integrated with the content or co-branded with the publisher, as opposed to a more traditional campaign that can be described purely in terms of banners, emails, and search.

    I find no fault with your company or with the data itself; I’m sure it’s all completely on the level, and it tells an interesting story as far as it goes. But the context in which MarketingCharts (and MediaBuyerPlanner, for that matter) presents it is, to me, disappointingly reductive.

  • http://www.thoughtgadgets.com Ben Kunz

    Sorry, Joshua, I gotta back Miconian here. The original email article is very misleading and positions email marketing as “the best” online media, ahead of search, which is a bit laughable. Who is a better respondent with a higher propensity to convert to lead and sale and then buy more? A user actively looking for the product via Google, or someone responding to an unsolicited email offer?

    I’m sure the ROI on email marketing is 4,500% since it costs almost nothing to fill up inboxes with electrons, but that logic is flawed. One could say the ROI on press releases is 1,000,000% given the small cost of a stamp or single email to a major paper vs. the hundreds of thousands of readers who might see it, but I would not hinge most of my marketing on PR either.

    Email marketing is a potentially viable campaign component, best used if there is already an existing customer relationship. It is also annoying to non-customers, risks an adverse impact by alienating prospects who do not respond, as a collective whole has a tragedy-of-the-commons effect of spoiling the entire email channel, and has a historic trend of diminishing returns. Which reminds me, it may be time to change my Gmail account again to get away from the stuff. But wait. Just got a great offer from some guy in Nigeria …

  • http://jamesgross.com James Gross

    I agree with you Ben, when there is a customer relationship(a real one, not one where you accidentally checked a box), email offers a great way to not only fulfill but also create demand. Amazon does an amazing job for me with fulfilling and in creating demand with the emails that I get from them. They are not perfect, but they are good enough that I don’t mind them when they are off.

    To your point Michael to focus on email to create or even fulfill demand when it wasn’t asked for, is a bad way to spend time and money.