In a bid to ride out the recession, war and other economic uncertainties, a high-tech firm has abandoned direct mail in favor of e-mail marketing.
In April, Inforonics Inc. got nearly a 1% response to its first all-e-mail campaign, an under-$500,000 effort to information technology managers at small to medium-sized companies in the Northeast, said Jeff Kosiorek, corporate marketing manager for the Littleton, MA firm.
Inforonics decided to take this approach mainly to save money. Sales leads generated by paper mail had fallen by about 90% since last September and costs obviously were too prohibitive to continue, said Kosiorek.
Previously, Inforonics might spend 77 cents per page on the design, printing, postage and mailing of a paper mail piece. In comparison, an e-mail piece costs the firm about 40 cents a page.
The e-mailing was sent to some 5,000 decision-making IT executives and consultants taken from several IT business publications’ lists. It promoted the company’s services and included a free white paper from high-tech market research outfit Gartner Inc. on “Improving Operating Efficiency Through Outsourcing.” A clickthrough mechanism was featured that allowed people to enter their individual and company names, and indicate their interest in follow-up contacts from the company’s telemarketing and field sales staff.
Inforonics offers computer maintenance, application management and technical support and certification services at costs ranging from $5,000 per month to $1 million annually.
Company travel budget constraints also led Inforonics to limit the geographic scope of its efforts.
“It’s a lot easier to call on companies 20 miles away than to fly across the country, although we’re not going to turn down business from firms on the West Coast,” said Kosiorek.
Because of Inforonics’ bad experiences with mail last year, Kosiorek doesn’t see the company going back to it anytime soon, especially if the slow economy holds steady or worsens. But Kosiorek — who declined to project revenue for the closely held company — won’t rule it out for the future.
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