Permission Email Marketing – DIRECT MAIL OF THE 21st CENTURY? By Ross Brown May 1999 Direct mail techniques have been perfected over the past half century with enhanced information about the individual consumer and improvements in the ability to track responsiveness. “Now, where direct mail ends, permission email steps in to bridge the future”, according to Tony Priore, vice president of marketing for yesmail.com, a company offering a permission email network and permission email campaign management. Using permission email, marketers send their messages to consumers who have agreed to receive information on specific topics. Permission email doesn’t rely on demographics as a predictor of a consumer’s interest. While demographics can be an important targeting criteria in most campaigns, they are secondary to a consumer’s defined interests in permission email marketing. A big benefit of permission email marketing for marketers is lower cost. "Because it's electronic, permission email doesn't have the same hard costs as offline direct mail," Priore says. A four-color brochure, for example, can incur per-piece production/printing charges of $.50, lettershop charges of $.25, postage charges of $.27, and response card processing charges of $.20, for a total per piece cost of $1.22, according to Priore. A permission email campaign, on the other hand, may have a per-piece production charge of $.05, plus a per-piece delivery fee of $.25, for a total per- piece cost of $.30. The Gartner Group has cited email costs even lower--just 75% to 90% the cost of postal direct mail. Even if you jazz up your email message--with HTML, color photos and graphics, and perhaps in the future, audio and video--costs won't increase as much as they do when you start embellishing your direct mail with enhancements like die-cuts and expensive paper, according to Priore. That cost benefit is even more attractive when you consider that permission email can garner 10% to 15% response rates (on average), compared to direct mail's 1% to 2% response rates (on average), Priore says. * NEW TESTING POWER "Direct marketing is a medium that's about effectiveness, about measurability," he says. "It allows you to test, learn, then repeat the process, building on that learning. One of the limitations of offline direct mail is that no matter how quickly you can turn around your creative material, you still have to wait for the results to arrive, process them, and produce another mailing." Email is a very fast response medium. With a typical permission email marketing campaign, more than 75% of responses are within 72 hours of being sent out, according to YesMail. "Email allows direct marketers to move forward with their learning more quickly," Priore says. "You can learn faster, build on that learning, and generate more effective results in real time." YesMail offers extensive automated campaign tracking and management tools that report results quickly. "If a customer buys online, direct marketers can even track responses from conversion to sale," Priore says. And because the analysis is automated, very sophisticated direct mail testing is now easier with permission email. "For complex tests, permission email can be more efficient and effective," Priore says. "You can test more variables more quickly." * ALL THAT AND MORE Permission email has many unique characteristics. "It is essentially a reverse marketing technique giving consumers the ability to choose what and how much information they want to receive," Priore says. It's also a realization of the promise of push technology from a few years back, whereby marketers deliver consumers the information that interests them. But the previous implementation of push technology--streaming online content--was unstable, and it didn't provide consumers with adequate control. In contrast, email reliably delivers across platforms, and permission email allows consumers to control the flow of marketing messages. Marketers are using permission email's unique strengths to implement new marketing strategies. Airlines, for example, are using permission email to unload a perishable commodity--unsold seats. Consumers receive weekly emails offering sale prices for unsold seats on the next weekend's flights. Now, just as a retailer can mark down slow selling seasonal merchandise before the season ends and all demand disappears, airlines can unload their commodity before the planes take off--and the empty seats become worthless. Priore believes that permission email will only be limited by the speed of technological advancement of the electronic medium, which, at this point, has no apparent bounds. Through technology, permission email marketing takes the many benefits of direct mail and adds a whole new element of value responsiveness and measurability.