Despite the prevalence of email, it turns out that when it comes to customer acquisition and retention, direct mail is still king – at least when it comes to business-to-customer (B2C) relationships. Yet, email seems to be more effective in business-to-business (B2B) interactions. All of this comes to us courtesy of Target Marketing magazine’s 7th annual Media Usage Forecast, a survey of 244 U.S. marketers.
For B2C customer acquisition, direct mail accounted for 31.3% of new customers, followed by email (16.7%) and social media marketing (12.5%). For customer retention, the numbers were direct mail (37.5%), email (29.2%) and social media (10.4%). Some other findings:
- 27% are using variable-data printing to personalize print
- 80% plan to invest in direct mail this year (1.5% fewer than last year).
The survey was conducted in January, with about 19,000 Target Marketing subscribers receiving a questionnaire…by email.
