With anthrax the latest flood of bad news to threaten direct mail response rates, e-mail is the thumb in the dyke. But direct mail is not drying up.
Bigfoot Interactive, an e-mail marketing company in New York has heard from a dozen new clients who want to do e-mail campaigns. “About half of those are traditional direct mailers who are now investigating e-mail for the first time, and the others are those who have used it but want to use it more aggressively in Q4,” said Al DiGuido, CEO.
A business-to-business company, sending out its first-ever acquisition campaign, cancelled a project as soon as the anthrax scare began, said Jay Bower, president of full-service direct marketing firm, Crossbow Group in Westport, CT.
He said that 25% of Crossbow’s clients have considered altering marketing plans for the quarter, moving away from direct mail. “Less than 10% are actually changing their plans [so far],” said Bower, president.
Some have refused to replace letters and envelopes with postcards. It goes beyond worries about clear branding on the envelope or using clear envelopes so the recipient can see no white powder is enclosed. “There’s so much fear out there that people believe that something could be tacked onto the postcard — like smallpox,” Bower said.
The most excessive worrying is restricted to inexperienced direct marketers, Bower said: “What happens is the CEO of a company who never touched direct mail is suddenly involved and decides that it’s better to stay away from it.”
Experienced direct marketers have been integrating marketing channels for about a year and plan to continue doing so, Bower said.
Crossbow’s BTB clients have been getting 25% better results using a double postcard to drive a prospect to a Web site than they have using a direct mail letter to drive them to make a telephone call.
Until the anthrax incidences recede, though, Bower is suggesting that they hold off on mailings. “We mail to a lot of big corporations,” he said. “Mailrooms are just not going to deliver commercial mail.”
In the consumer side, integrating channels is a major focus, too.
Among the financial service providers who make up a major part of Bigfoot Interactive’s clients, “there’s a very aggressive interest in [multi-channel] strategies including e-mail,” said Bigfoot Interactive’s DiGuido. “But they don’t want to panic their consumers or the marketplace by switching everything to e-mail.” They plan to use more e-mail if the fourth quarter doesn’t go well.
“I don’t think that anyone is abandoning direct mail,” DiGuido emphasized. “They are saying if the anthrax scare continues and direct mail rates decline in the fourth quarter, then they will turn to e-mail more heavily.”
Those direct marketers not familiar with e-mail are building opt-in e-mail databases and shopping for prospect lists and append services.
Many marketers who had handled their own e-mail programs using over-the-counter software programs, are now taking it more seriously, said John Anderson, general manager of RappDigital, the digital marketing arm of Rapp Collins Worldwide.
For the first time, “they are looking at specialty shops and working with direct response agencies [to formulate their e-mail programs], Anderson said.
One big issue: e-mail lists are not as plentiful as postal lists. “Until you see e-mail lists becoming as robust as direct mail, you won’t see clients calling up and saying cancel my direct mail and throw it into e-mail,” said J.G. Sandom, vice chairman of RappDigital.
There hasn’t been a surge in e-mail list rental requests, said Jay Schwedelson, corporate vice president of Worldata/WebConnect in Boca Raton, FL. “But there has been a surge in the inquiries in e-mail lists and services.”
“Everyone is aware that the campaigns that are hitting right now are going to be the control that they will use in planning for their next campaigns,” Schwedelson said.
Some experienced marketers’ faith in direct mail hasn’t faltered. One Crossbow client, a packaged goods company with a long history of using direct mail, is mailing its sampling program as planned. “They are a big, branded company so they feel people know them,” Bower said.
Meanwhile, those intent on mailing must turn against their own established practices. Instead of making an envelope look personalized, as if was handwritten, they must try to make envelopes look more structured to give consumers the feeling that this is a mass mailing, experts pointed out.
“It is the polar opposite of what we’ve been trying to do in the last 30 to 40 years,” Schwedelson said.
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