What’s happening in the world of direct marketing these days, and where is the best ROI to be found?
Certainly, a lot of inboxes are positively groaning under the sheer quantity of e-mail volume, and many people have responded by beefing up their spam filtering. But the most recent economic impact study conducted by research firm Global Insight for the Direct Marketing Association reports that commercial e-mail marketing delivers the best bang for the promotional buck – more than $43 for every dollar spent on it.
By comparison, ROI from Google AdWords and other paid search advertising activities generates about $22 for every dollar spent.
According to the analysis, postal direct mail initiatives deliver lower returns on investment — with catalogs returning just a little over $7 per dollar spent and other forms of postal direct mail around $15.
Depite its stellar ROI numbers, it is true that e-mail marketing is actually showing a slight drop in ROI. And that is forecast to continue to decline in the upcoming years, at least partially because of the reasons noted above. Even so, e-mail is forecast to deliver an ROI of ~$38 for every dollar invested in 2013.
Of course, it’s important to recognize that search marketing is where much of the heavy action is these days. Internet search drives ~$244 billion in sales as compared against a related cost of ~$11 billion.
Commercial e-mail? It drives just ~$26 billion in sales … although the cost to drive those sales is a relative pittance at ~$600 million.
And over on the postal side of the ledger, no one should be surprised to learn that direct mail expenditures, while still large at ~$44 billion, are down ~16% in just the past year alone.
[But you can look on the bright side: Your promo piece is going to be noticed a lot easier among the smaller stack of daily snail mail that’s being delivered!]
Nones Notes 
As the robot used to say on Lost in Space, “This does not compute.” For example: ROI on Google Adwords is $22 on every dollar spent? I think not. How could that possibly be? In the first place, if that were the average ROI, competition for page position would have driven the average cost of an impression through the roof. So many companies would be coining the cash at that rate of return, there would be crushing demand. Most of the buzz I hear is that the majority of AdWords users actually lose money and soon drop out of the program.
Something just sounds fishy here.