Online marketing was supposed to cannibalize other marketing methods due to its minimal expense and turnaround speed. Marketers love it—but, Yankelovich found, consumers don’t.
At least not as much as they do more traditional pitches. For cold prospecting, mail (including catalogs) is still clearly the dominant channel.
Agencies are aware of this. “We do not do prospecting via e-mail,” says Chip Walker, executive vice president for strategy and business development at Wunderman New York. “We don’t do a lot of it, period. A lot of people don’t like to get unsolicited mail.
“We push our clients toward using e-mail as a CRM device.”
Larry Kimmel, chairman and CEO of Grey Direct, has seen something similar to this among digital subscriber line (DSL) purchasers. According to Kimmel, even high-tech-savvy consumers are reluctant to purchase this service online. “They want to make sure all their questions are answered, and the online channel tends to not be good at comfort and responding in a personal way.”
But Internet marketing is having an effect. Yankelovich found that consumers with online access are more likely to make purchases from inbound telemarketing centers or to send in catalog orders in addition to their online purchases. The only channel used more often by non-Web users to make purchases was direct mail pieces.
Kimmel offers a theory about this. “I believe when people are interested in a proposition they are willing to receive and absorb information from multiple channels,” he says.
He also ventures a guess as to why both direct mail and catalogs remain in such high favor among consumers, even though responding to telephone and online/e-mail channels requires less effort. “It’s controllable,” he says. “In the phone situation there is a possibility of [being talked into] upgrading. Some consumers don’t want to engage in that.”
Walker draws a further distinction. He says Wunderman has found that while consumers prefer to be contacted by indirect channels such as direct mail and e-mail, they prefer to have a direct contact such as a customer service representative when they want to reach a company.
Yankelovich’s research bears this out. While Web sites and catalogs were the two channels most often used to get information on products or services, when it came time to make a purchase inbound telemarketing leapfrogged over both and claimed the No. 1 position.
– Richard H. Levey
Network
