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In the Red Corner: Traditional vs. E-Marketing |
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| Articles Home - Marketing Articles - In the Red Corner: Traditional vs. E-Marketing |
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| Monday, September 19, 2005, 10:44 |
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To compare e-marketing with traditional marketing efforts, we need to look at cost/benefit, measurement/analysis, and feedback. Today, with
just under 1 billion Internet users world-wide, e-marketing is being implemented by most companies. Let's face it. email marketing is here to stay. Most companies today
use email to regularly to market their products and to build, maintain and strengthen customer relationships. But how effective is direct email marketing compared to
traditional marketing?
Advertising and marketing online and off-line have many similarities. Being able to reach 1 billion potential customers means little if you don't
have a clear message, if your design isn't impressive, or if your products and services don't respond to a need in the market. In either case, you have to know your target
audience and communicate effectively with them.
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Cost/benefit |
With direct email marketing, you can have direct communication with thousands upon thousands of customers and prospects world-wide from
your desktop. With desktop e-marketing software like Infacta's GroupMail, you can start creating your email marketing campaigns quite inexpensively, personalizing your
message to as many people as you can find email address for in your target market.
Traditional marketing is much more expensive than direct email marketing. If you want to start a direct mail campaign you will have costs for
creating and printing your brochures and delivery expenses. Not to mention TV or print advertising. Beside that it is much more expensive, it takes much more time to
create and implement any of the traditional marketing campaigns or off-line advertising and response ratio is usually much lower than when using email marketing.
Imagine that you want to announce your new product, update, conference or seminar. You want to inform your business partners and clients
because it is most likely that they will be interested in it. You have two choices: to use email to notify them with one click or to use traditional techniques like sending
letters or using a phone? What is better for you? You already know what is cheaper. The immediacy and low cost of reaching customers and prospects world-wide by e-
marketing are much more effective than traditional approaches that are time consuming and costly. But how effective is e-marketing compared to traditional practice?
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Measurement and Anaylsis |
With e-mail marketing, you can track your campaign as it is run. E-marketing products like GroupMetrics allows you to receive detailed statistics about how many people have opened your message, if they are clicking on the links
within it, which articles or ads are the most popular in your newsletter, and what they doing when they get to your website (i.e. are they purchasing your products?)
There are no such precise techniques for tracking in traditional marketing. You simply can't know exactly how many people actually took the
time to read your last ad in the newspaper. You might know how many people bought that newspaper, but you can't be certain how many opened the page that your ad
was on or saw it on that page. The same is true for radio and television. You might know how many people tuned in to a particular program, but you don't know if they
turned the volume down, went to the bathroom or were on the phone while your message was broadcast. Nielsen data can provide many statistics on radio and television
demographics, listenership, etc.; but they can't provide quantified data on how many people actually listened to your message. Technology like GroupMetrics makes
tracking your marketing campaign much more reliable than any traditional methods.
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Getting Feedback |
Another advantage that you get using email marketing is in getting feedback. With above mentioned GroupMetrics product you have ability to
easily create polls and to get feedback from your visitors, prospects and clients, whether you want to use it on your web site or email newsletter. Using polls in your email
marketing campaigns, you will get feedback about your company or products very fast and inexpensively.
If you want to get feedback from your customers using traditional survey techniques, you will have to hire people who find customers and ask
questions. Then you will have to adapt questionnaire data into statistical form for reports. E-marketing makes feedback easier for companies and their customers, and
provides the information you need immediately in a useful format.
In comparing traditional and e-marketing, it seems clear that e-marketing contains more benefits, certainly to business leaders that don't have
a 1 million dollar marketing budget each quarter. But even for those that do, e-marketing will be the preferred choice in the future, as much as traditionalists might resist it.
The ability to provide quality design, voice, video and inter-activity faster and at a much lower investment make e-marketing the winner by a knockout!
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