One-two marketing punch! (Cover Story).

• Author: Bernstel, Janet Bigham
• Position: E-mail, direct mail marketing - Cover Story

Don't overlook e-mail. As a marketing tool, it's cheap, it's flexible, it's targeted, and it's measurable. With 422.4 million home Internet users in 21 countries, according to Neilsen-Netratings, it also gets the eyeballs. To date, it's really the only online application to be awarded the title of "killer."

But is e-mail ready to knock good old-fashioned snail mail out of the ring? The marketing analysts and experts say "Nay." But used correctly, permission e-mail can be a useful retention tool. And teamed up with direct mail, it also can deliver a potent one-two punch.

"E-mail marketing always seems to be spoken of in an adversarial way, like there's room for both," says Michael Pridemore, CEO of Socketware, makers of Accucast in Atlanta, Ga. "Burl there's always going to be direct mail and permission e-mail Actually, the new trend is toward the integration of the two technologies."

Analyst Kevin Scott agrees. In his report "Turn Your E-Mail Campaigns From Trash to Cash," Scott, the senior analyst of AMR Research in Boston, found that 61 percent of respondents who used multiple contact methods reported an increase in response rates from 5 to 15 percent. Targeting specific offers to smaller groups led to seven to 12 times the response rates.

When e-mail is followed up with direct mail, a campaign is mare successful. "That's only natural," says Scott. "People will scan e-mail quickly and put it in a to-do file, especially if its complicated financial information. But if it's followed up with a direct mail, it's that much more effective."

A matter of timing

While e-mail and direct mail work well in tandem, email can easily replace direct mail for certain types of promotions, such as any message requiring an immediate reply. One of the biggest problems with direct mail is the response time. A typical permission e-mail campaign gets a response within 48 hours, whereas a typical direct mail campaign can take about six to eight weeks, according to Jupiter Communications.

"In some direct mail cases you don't even get a response," says Pridemore. "In e-mail, you know about people who don't take action. You also know how many received the message, in some cases, how many opened, it and how many forwarded it to a friend."

So add tracking to the list of e-mail's assets

That's one of the best things about e-mail marketing, claims Debbie Browning, Internet site specialist for the e-commerce department of Regions Financial Corp., which has 680 offices in nine southern states and assets in excess of $44 billion. "We'll be able to track who responds and who doesn't."

Browning says that direct mail is still a valuable part of their marketing arsenal, but they quickly learned the benefits of e-mail when they experimented on a campaign last October. To notify customers of a change in the online banking product, they chose to send e-mail, under the rules of the disclosure agreements. Using an outsourced application service provider (ASP) model, they were able to notify at least 75 percent of their online customers.

"So instead of physically mailing over 100,000 disclosures, we were able to e-mail them, which saved us a lot of money." says the Montgomery, Alabama-based Browning. "We were so pleased with it: It did everything we wanted it to do and it was easy to use."

After experiencing the cost-savings success of that initial campaign, Regions Financial Corp. purchased Accucast Enterprise, the software version that's run in-house, The system was installed in April 2002, and activated by summer's end.

"We have so many plans for this and it spans such a wide...