When I started to write the title of this post I was tempted to use the colloquial phrase “snail mail” instead of the more politically correct term “postal mail”. In fact I wrote it and immediately change it. It was not my intention to be shamelessly partial when judging one against the other, but in our sector this is a common way to refer to traditional mail.

And that gets to the first point in my list of advantages of e-mail versus postal mail: it’s much faster to start and execute a campaign with e-mail. A traditional direct mail campaign needs planning at least three weeks in advance. With e-mail you can plan the campaign, send it and measure the results in just a few days.

That’s one of the reasons traditional mail gets dubbed as “snail mail” ;-)

Another good reason to choose e-mail is that you can save a lot of money too. Depending on the total size of your recipients’ data base (it gets cheaper as you send higher mail volumes) you can even send hundreds of e-mails per euro. Every postal letter you send costs you more than 50 cents if you take into account paper, printing, envelopes, stamps, handling and so on. So e-mail is thousands of times cheaper than postal mail.

Other annoyance of postal mail is that you must sort it appropriately before going to your postal office. Depending on the final destination of the letters you get a different price, and if you want to optimize the costs is very important to have all the letters sorted by destinations groups. This is an extra cost you must take in account, and one that many people discovers only the first time they arrive to the postal office with their ten thousand letters marketing action in several boxes :-(
With e-mail this just doesn’t happen and you get the same price if you send an e-mail to your country or to one in the other side of the world.

E-mail marketing campaigns give you instant access to results and metrics, and you start to receive information only seconds after sending the e-mails. You can have a level of detail impossible to get through other means. Sure, you can measure things with traditional mail, but is more difficult and inaccurate, it takes a lot of time, and generally you must use some kind of reward to get people back to you (coupons, discounts…). And that costs you money too.

Despite all this advantages and some more, many times postal mail is the only choice you have. Maybe your target sector is a very low tech one and e-mail is not very common in it. Or maybe, plain and simple, you don’t have the e-mail address of the people you want to contact. Even worse: maybe you have the e-mail addresses but don’t have the permission to use it (be careful with privacy laws: they’re much harder with e-mail than with –in my opinion- the more annoying fax or environmental unfriendly postal mail).

But if you can e-mail is generally speaking a much cheaper, agile and effective way to keep in touch with your customers, and prospects.