An overwhelming majority of the potential audience is not interested in what us marketers have to say.

Ain’t nothing new there, but in the mail business, things have changed. I’ll try to illustrate my point by comparing direct mail and email, both of which are usually considered to be forms of direct marketing measured largely by response rates.

With direct mail, you do your best to guess who should get the mail, open it, read it, and then be a good consumer and do what you told them to. If 1, 2, maybe 3 percent of them actually do, you can bet the marketing team will be uncorking the bubbly and partying down with Kool & The Gang.

Yet even in a hugely successful mail campaign a seriously large portion of the money pumped into the program might as well have been flushed. Another sad truth is the marketing team has no clue as to who did or didn’t open the mail, which makes it that much more difficult to refine the program to work better next time.

But now, with email, short of knowing what the recipient had for breakfast, we feast on a ton of data. Email marketing may not deliver every day in every way, but you can rest assured it’ll deliver a mountain of metrics.

So what kind of response does your email get?

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