Email Marketing vs. Direct Mail

It is usually suggested that businesses dedicate 15% of their annual turnover towards marketing their products or services, which can be a large portion of your business budget. This makes it vitally important to research and select the most effective methods to give you the best possible return on your investment. Sending out promotional information to prospective clients can dominate a large portion of your budget, especially if you decide to post it out. However, email marketing is not only more cost effective, but also more effective at reaching the right people and allowing you to see who’s responsive to you and your company.

Unlike direct mail, email marketing can be turned around very quickly. From design, to copy writing and coding, all can be done in just a couple of days, possibly less, whereas direct mail needs to be printed, loaded into envolopes, franked and posted. Emails can also be tracked, allowing you to see who opens them, whether they click on any links, and who unsubscribes. If you choose direct mail, obviously once you’ve sent the information out you have no possible method of tracking what people do with it. The industry standard for email open rates of high volume mailings is around 10%. The key to ensuring good open rates is in the strength of the data you use and the value of your content.

Capturing email addresses for your customers is a good way to find out more about the people using your products or services, and can be as easy as adding a sign up form to your website or social media pages. Once you have this information, you can use it to keep in contact with customers, informing them of promotions, industry news, announcements and special events. As long as your content is engaging and interesting people should be happy enough to stay on your data lists, as long as you aren’t bombarding them with information on too regular a basis. Corporate emails should be sent out no more than once a month, and the best time to send them is the beginning of the week when people are more likely to read them. Send your email out on a Friday and it’s almost guaranteed to end up straight in the trash folder.

Email marketing has a number of benefits over direct mail, primarily that’s it’s easier to put together, can be tracked and is much more cost effective than its snail mail counterpart. And in an age of recession, that is sure to help any business succeed. 

Love It or Hate It

Every day there’s stories in the media of companies who are getting their marketing wrong, but very little credit is given to those who are getting their marketing spot on. Strange as it may seem, one of the companies who are consistently getting their advertising and marketing right is Marmite. Probably not one of the easiest products to market, but nevertheless they are constantly producing new and original ideas to market themselves.

The company traditionally only had one product to work with, one kind of spread. To remedy this, and create some buzz, the company has introduced a Marmite chocolate bar, Marmite cheese, Marmite flavored crisps and biscuits, and even an extra-strong version called Marmite XO. Some of these products have faired better than others with consumers, but all have created buzz and garnered the company a lot of media coverage.

Marmite also successfully jumped on the back of the general election, creating their own campaigns and voting system based on their two parties, The Love Party vs. The Hate Party, tying in with their strap line of “you either love it or hate it.” They launched a dedicated website, press and advertising campaign, and social media profiles for the two party leaders. They then encouraged people to vote and announced the winner online.

Marmite succeeds where others fail because they clearly never stop thinking about their next move. Every campaign they run has an original idea at its core, but is backed up with advertising, social media, and PR. And everything ties in with their now traditional line “you either love it or hate it.” For the lovers there’s an ever increasing range of Marmite flavored products, and for the haters there’s a hate group on Facebook (started by Marmite themselves.) Marmite is even engaging with people who confess to hate their products, and how many other companies are doing that?   

A New Page

Hello, and happy 2011 to everyone!
It feels good to be back, I know it's been a while. I originally started this blog as a way to document my job search when I left university. I felt very frustrated by, what I viewed at the time as an endless search for that first marketing or PR job. There didn't seem to be any help available to graduates once they left university.
Looking back, I realise that my job search actually wasn't that long, and I was in a full time marketing position three months after graduation. I was lucky in a way because some of my classmates still don't have jobs, and some have had to move away to get one. But it wasn't just luck on my side, I worked really hard to enhance my skills and find that first position, and now I'm there it's proven very worthwhile.
I had stopped blogging once I found my job, but I've been thinking increasingly about it the last few weeks, so I decided today to start it up again. Hopefully I'll be able to pass on some of my experiences to other graduates, as well as writing some more opinion pieces.
I appreciate every single person that takes the time to read this blog, so please feel free to comment either on here, or you can find me on twitter (see the column on the left side of the page).
So here's to 2011!