Direct marketing is no longer print’s private retreat. The youngsters have cottoned on. Where once print would sit on golden, untouched beaches in solitude, now the likes of email and SMS have arrived on a package deal and stolen all the sun loungers and turned the yacht club into an Ibiza-style nightclub. 

And you might think print would be packing its bags and heading for beaches new. However, you’d be wrong.

Print, it seems, has the confidence in itself that comes with age. It knows how good a contribution it can make to the marketing mix; it’s open to a new breed of marketing strategies where a mix of channels is the norm.

And the email service providers realise it too. They are building relationships with the printers as they recognise the power the medium can wield.

But when it comes to the marketing industry, well, they may take some convincing. In our survey the majority of marketers said they would be increasing spend on internet and email marketing and decreasing spend on print, suggesting an increasing dominance of the digital form. Endism, it seems, is an easy bandwagon to jump on and the wrap on this particular vehicle full or marketers appears to read ‘Print is dead. Long live email’.

To show them the error of their ways, we devised a test to prove that it is not a situation of replacement, but addition; to demonstrate how effectively email and print work together and how pursuing email alone means the campaign’s potential is severely limited.

The test
David Hyams loves direct mail (DM). A former Charterhouse designer, he has now set up a new DM-on-demand company, Print Fair, which is based on his belief that you can’t beat a bit of printed DM. However, it’s also based on the acknow-ledgement that you can’t ignore the digital world either.

"The basis of my product is to say that the internet is really important for marketing and that print should work with it, rather than against it; marketing should be a mix of channels," he explains.

Hyams, then, was the perfect man to co-ordinate the test. It was decided that the subject of this campaign should be something worthy, a charity. Hyams discovered Orchid, which raises awareness and funding for male cancers.

Hyams then took 1,000 male PrintWeek subscribers and split them into two groups. The first 500 would get an email message from the charity containing a unique URL (www.orchid-cancer.org.uk/donate/emailappeal) to be clicked on to make donations and get more information. The other 500 would get a piece of print DM, printed by Peninsular OneSource, followed by an email a few days later, both of which contained a new URL (www.orchid-cancer.org.uk/donate/christmasappeal) that directed to a webpage also enabling donations and offering more information. Whichever campaign got the best response, would win.

The charity
Orchid was formed in 1998 by testicular cancer sufferer and a former employee of print management firm Charterhouse Colin Osborne and his oncologist Professor Tim Oliver. It is the only registered UK charity specialising in male-specific cancers. Chief executive Rebecca Porta explains that, marketing wise, the charity has a regular printed newsletter, as well as email bulletins, both which go out to regular donors.

Its first big DM campaign was last year, sent to what she describes as a ‘warm’ data list. Though this resulted in lower than expected response rates, the average donation was well above the £25 average at £38. Going forward, they are open to every marketing channel.

"The results of this small campaign will be quite interesting for us as to how we may push forward," she reveals.

The case for DM
The Royal Mail has a vested interest in DM being popular as mailing is its business and, as a result, it collated some DM-championing statistics for a 2010 presentation by John Bliss of its Media Centre. Here are a selection: between October 2009 and March 2010, 92% of DM was opened; 48% of UK adults have done something in the past 12 months as a result of DM they received; 58% of those aged over 65 in the UK have not used the internet in the past year; UK residents ?have access to 530 TV stations, 821 radio stations and 234m worldwide websites, but they tend to have just one letter box.

DM, then, is a pretty successful marketing medium, one that arguably has a better chance of hitting its target than any other. And Hyams says the young internet generation coming through will continue to create such complimentary stats.

"The new younger generations are quite into DM, they haven’t really seen it before as they are part of the digital generation," he reveals. "Google has realised this – and as a result one of the biggest digital players in the world was using DM."

The criticisms of DM, that it is wasteful and bad for the environment, can be dealt with at once, as the solutions are all connected with a single part of the DM evolution: personalisation. DM has come along way in the past 10 or 15 years thanks to advances in digital print technology. As John Conway, print consultant at Peninsular OneSource says, this technology has enabled better use of data.

"People are starting to understand the full potential DM has," he says. "Campaigns are now very targeted."

The right data means that the right people are getting the mailers, reducing wastage, and personalisation – not just sticking a name and address on, but bespoke information to that client, including unique pictures, is ensuring that when they get it, they read it.

As for the argument that email is ‘greener’ than print, recent evidence suggests email can consume as much energy as a DM mailer, due to the high power usage of the data centres that power the internet. In 2000, data centres in the US were estimated to make up 0.8% of the entire US energy consumption. 10 years on, with the growth of the internet, this is presumably significantly higher.

So DM is targeted, efficient, and greener than you think, while boasting high response rates. Rather than asking ‘Why would I use it?’ ask ‘Why would I not?’

The case for email
"What email has brought to the mix is a lot more accuracy on statistics for levels of engagement from marketing campaigns," says Tink Taylor, managing director of email marketing services provider (ESP) Dotmailer. "We know when someone has opened it, clicked on a link, purchased something, or not opened it at all."

Email also has some attractive stats to boast about. The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) National Client Email Report 2010 found that more than half of companies surveyed expected email marketing spend to rise; 90% said email marketing was important or very important to their business; 49% said they would be diverting money from traditional DM budgets to email marketing budgets; and one-third said they spent more than 30% of their marketing budget on email.

But what of the spam that gives email marketing a bad name, along with the filters that can mean the marketing messages never reach the recipient? You first have to draw the distinction that spam is an illegal unsolicited approach from an unknown source, where as email marketing is from a brand you have, at some point, given permission to contact you. So spam messages and marketing messages should not really be confused with each other if the marketer is doing their job correctly. Taylor adds, though, that the fact spammers spend vast amounts of cash on technology to send spam out proves that email as a medium does work – people will open, click and buy.

The majority of spam is deleted by the spam filters before it gets anywhere near your inbox and so the concern naturally follows that your email marketing message will go the same way. Taylor says the key is to differentiate your message from looking like spam messages in the eyes of the filters, while ensuring your data is clean and your IP address reliable.

"There are literally thousands of things that spam filters look at in terms of where the email is coming from (Has it sent spam out before? Is it reliable source? Does it send emails to addresses that don’t exist?) and in terms of content (including subject lines and picture-to-words ratio)," he explains. "It is a bit like a dolphin getting caught in the tuna nets.

You have to make sure you are not dressing your email as a tuna (spam), make it look more like a dolphin to get it past."

Companies such as Taylor’s deal with these issues everyday and he says getting a handle on avoiding filters is "not rocket science". That said, the Email Marketing Council at the DMA expends considerable efforts trying to shut down the spammers, so though most email marketing clearly gets through, the relationship with spam and its filters is clearly still a problem. On the positive side, of course, you have the fact email is relatively cheap, it’s trackable and it’s interactive. It’s also, like printed DM, a proven success.

The realisation
So you have two very successful marketing media acting in isolation. Surely, by combining them, you make something even better? That’s certainly the view of all the people spoken to for this experiment. They’ll talk up their own medium, obviously, but all agree that a combined approach is much more sensible.

Taylor cites the perfect example of how the whole mix of marketing channels can work in harmony. Online food retailer graze.com tweeted a promotion for a free box of its produce on Twitter. When you clicked through and ordered, you were sent an email confirmation that mentioned new product ranges. When the box arrived, it had a personalised leaflet inside detailing the products in your own box and also had printed personalised vouchers inside that gave friends a free box. The original recipient then got another email asking them to rate the products received and that gave the option of clicking on a button to post a free box promotion back onto the social networks. It came full circle.

"We know the whole thing is about integration," says Taylor. "I’ve seen case studies that demonstrate that sending a print mailer first and following that up with an email means that the email open rates are much higher as the recipient is more aware of the brand."

Is that so Mr Taylor, funny you should mention it…

The results
Open rates for the combined campaign came in at an impressive 21.71% compared to an open rate of 15.49% for the email-only campaign. That’s a 40% higher open rate from the combined campaign. Click-throughs, meanwhile, also found in favour of the combined campaign by a factor of three, which got 3.64% compared to email-only’s 1.01%.

Obviously, we can’t shy away from the fact that through neither campaign prompted any donations. However, the response window we had was very small (three days), and according to the charity, a marketing campaign takes time to work. Also, Porta adds that marketing is as much about brand awareness as it is donations, and the click rates show that brand engagement was higher with the combined campaign.

"We are aware that it may take time for a campaign to work," she explains. "DM doesn’t happen overnight, it is about people engaging with the organisation, keeping people informed about where the money is going to. We recognise, to start with, it may be a long haul."

What the test proves is that people are now used to a multimedia, multichannel world and they expect this in all walks of life. Marketers know this, 92% in the survey said they would sometimes use integrated marketing campaigns. But why is this not 100% always using integrated campaigns?

For campaigns to work it should be. And print should be central to the process. It reaches people in ways digital media cannot – it is a different, targeted tangible communication tool in comparison to its rivals, that can make people sit up and take notice.

So why restrict yourself? Grab your glow sticks and join the party, mix it up. Print has, and the results are spectacular.

DM: THE STORY SO FAR
The first bit of direct mail recorded is thought to have been written on papyrus by an Egyptian seeking the return of his runaway slave in 1000BC.

But it was not until the advent of Gutenberg’s press in the 15th century that the whole process became easy enough to become a mass market business. Meanwhile, the first recorded email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson.

However, it wasn’t until the internet took off in the early 1990s, that email really came into its own. It has been reported that, by 1995, there more marketing emails were being sent than than non-marketing emails.

It’s estimated that around 5.4bn items of direct mail are sent out each year to UK households, while, for example, Hotmail says it handles 3bn emails per day.