Online Marketing Is Less Expensive and Works Better than Traditional Marketing
Although traditional marketing remains a vital supplement to online marketing, online marketing is becoming increasingly dominant because it offers several advantages over traditional marketing:
- Less expensive
- Takes less time to implement
- Reaches audiences faster
- Gets better response rates
- Can reach more customers
- Can reach targeted audiences
Online marketing requires a significantly lower investment than traditional marketing. Consider the estimated printing and mailing costs for 1,000 direct mail pieces:
| - | ||
| Paper | $600 | $0 |
|---|---|---|
| Postage | $300 | $0 |
| Printing | $400 | $0 |
| Mail service | $150 | - |
| Email service | - | $19 |
|
|
||
| Total | $1450 | $19 |
It also takes less time to create and deliver online content to consumers - a fact that is critical to today's fast-paced consumer. The estimated average time to create and distribute a printed marketing piece is 16 to 24 days. An email campaign can be created and sent in as little as one or two days. This means not only a smaller investment of resources, but also the opportunity to reach customers with time-sensitive information and to react quickly to changing market conditions.
Time and cost advantages are only a small part of the picture when compared with the increased response rates that online marketing offers. According to Lynn Wolf, Director of Marketing for Wipfli, a traditional direct mail piece yields a 1% to 2% percent response from non-clients, and a 5% to 7% response from clients. Email marketing, on the other hand, yields response rates up to 20%.1
Online marketing also offers companies the ability to reach more customers in a single pass than traditional marketing. Imagine that you send an email campaign, and some of your customers find it interesting enough to pass along. They forward the email to ten people that they know. Of those ten people, two or three pass the email along to ten more people. Soon you have reached hundreds of potential customers through one person on your list - and most of those customers are people with whom you would otherwise never have had contact. With traditional marketing, the recipient of your direct mail piece might pass it along to another person at best.
Finally, online marketing enables you to target specific audiences. If you send an email campaign advertising three different services, and 30% of the people who open the email click on a link to more information about one of them, you can track who clicked on that link and arrange a follow-up campaign focusing on that particular service, to be sent specifically to those recipients who showed interest in it.
Aside from company websites and email campaigns, social marketing is an important component of any marketing strategy. It is one of the fastest-growing marketing trends today. Not only can it increase consumer awareness and loyalty, but it also provides you with a way to get to know your customers directly so you can offer them the products and services that best fit their needs.
The bottom line is that the return on investment from online marketing is significantly greater than the return on investment that you will receive from traditional marketing.
A study from MarketingSherpa shows that, in response to the economic downturn, companies are reducing print advertising budgets and focusing their efforts on online marketing. 60% of companies surveyed said they were reducing their print advertising budgets, and 48% said they were adding to their social network marketing and email campaign budgets.2
In today's changing market, you can only afford to allocate your marketing budget to a cutting-edge strategy that will provide the greatest possible return on investment. Our expert consultants constantly follow market trends and assess the viability of all avenues of marketing, and can help you couple an online marketing strategy with basic traditional marketing for significantly increased results and revenue.
- Wolf, Lynn. Internet Marketing-The End of Traditional Marketing as We Know It. http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/tpcpa/feb2001/internet.htm /
- MarketingSherpa. Marketing Tactics in the Economic Downturn. http://www.marketingsherpa.com/1news/chartofweek-11-25-08-lp.htm