Case Study
Emap: Benchmarking online vs offline marketing channels
About Emap
Emap is one of the UK’s leading and fastest growing niche media owners. They connect loyal audiences with news, analysis and expert opinion through leading journalism, engaging events, and burgeoning digital products.
The Challenge
Email had been the sole channel for acquiring new subscribers for Emap's Construction News title and there was a general consensus that subscriber acquisition opportunities were being missed. In order to maximise opportunity, the marketing team at Emap wanted to determine the responsiveness of using direct mail and enable the comparison of results with email marketing on a like-for-like basis.
The Solution
A multi-channel campaign was created, comprising of a fully personalised digital mail piece and a corresponding email creative carrying the same offer. A database comprising of 50% postal records and 50% email records was procured and responses for both channels were driven to a tracked landing page (each recipient had a unique URL).
Business Impact
Unique URLs enabled the ability to track response both from direct mail and from email marketing and analyse the results in our reporting suite. The results from the test campaign were as follows:
| Response | Direct Mail | |
|---|---|---|
| Landing page visits | 641 | 409 |
| Landing page clicks | 84 | 104 |
| Landing page click rate | 13.10% | 25.43% |
Although email marketing delivered more landing page visits, direct mail delivered over twice the click rate.
For this campaign, direct mail proved to be twice as responsive as email marketing for subscriber acquisition. Although using direct mail has more associated cost (print, fulfilment and postage costs), the ROI attained was sufficient enough to incorporate direct mail into Emap's marketing plans, alongside email marketing.