Harte-Hanksurveyed more than 530 companies and found that Direct Marketing and E-mail Marketing delivered the highest ROI amongst all other medias. The study points out that many companies are following the trend of devoting a majority of their marketing budgets towards the Internet. Many find that there is a lack in quality data reporting and feel that it is holding back their success on the Internet. However the survey did show that the quality of the reporting has improved year over year, but still remains as the most frequant reason of why ROI from Internet ads are less than direct mail and e-mail campaigns.
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To clarify, this looks at direct mail vs. organic internet marketing, but does not include “leads,” purchased form a 3rd party? Or would that be included in the source, “Web Based Events?”
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Harte-Hanks just happens to be a direct database and email marketing company.
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That is correct. This is not looking at buying leads, only organic internet marketing.
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Yes there is a chance it is slightly biased. But they did survey 500+ companies.not a ton but…
Its only food for thought.
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It is interesting, but the fact that they did NOT include leads, I think, is telling. It has been my experience over the last 4 years that direct mail vastly underperforms against viable Internet leads. The only exception seems to be in niche marketing. For example, I know of a company that buys highly specific info from the bureaus and targets consumers highly leverage in debt to do 100+ LTV loans. But this is typically not the case within mainstream lending.
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Organic internet advertising is internet leads whether the company works them or sells them. Any one that goes online does a search for a mortgage in inputs their information is just as serious as the client that goes to lead generators website as most consumers do not know the difference (with the exception of the obvious websites). With that being said I find this post very interesting as just this month in INC magazine there was an article about the rising cost of direct mail. Rate hikes hit this month and they represnt in some cases an almost 40% rise in direct mail costs. Add to that the “Do Not Mail” laws that are in the works in AR, CO, CT, HI, MD, MI, MO, MT, NJ, NY, NC, RI, TX, VT and WA. Direct mail may not be what it used to be. Let’s factor that back into our old ROI and see what it looks like compared to the internet. Oh yeah, and what do most people do with the direct mail they get? Can anyone say circle files? Deep six?
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LC, nice title! It moved me to actually read a few sentences of this hogwash from HH.
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LOL!
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I used to mail out 125,000 pieces of direct mail a week back in 00 – 02, once we started seeing the 0.02% response rates, we discontinued that. Direct Mail for the mortgage vertical is not a channel that leads to ROI IMHO.
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