Comparing Direct Mail and Email Creative

What works for print advertising, direct mail, DRTV and other traditional direct marketing advertising works with new media. People still respond to strong offers, certain words, longer copy and proven formats regardless of the channel used to communicate the message.

The chart below begins the process of cross-pollinating the learning from the traditional direct mail medium to email. Admittedly, this chart is far from complete. But at least it starts the dialog for more discussion on the issue.

It amazes me how little some online marketers who were raised in the online media world know about what works in the direct marketing creative realm. They know a lot about the technology and the importance of how emails are rendered by the various email clients on respondent machines. They also know about the importance of their corporate reputations with ISPs, the analytics of email response (sometimes) and spam control. But some have learned little from their more experienced peers on the traditional side about what elements make their direct response messages pull maximum response rates.

This is understandable since marketers today have to wear many hats regardless of what they know well. So just getting the work out becomes as much of a priority as getting it done right.

But this lack of knowledge also means that inexperienced direct marketers do not know what to test and what tends to impact response unless they just happen to run into it by accident.

So this chart begins the process of demonstrating the correlation of what works in the traditional direct mail channel when compared to email.

What other things are similar? Have you found through A/B split testing what elements impact email that has no correlation to traditional media?