Print or Digital? Direct Mail or Email? Business owners across the globe struggle with the difficult decision of how to spend their advertising dollars month after month, year after year. While diversity in advertising channels is important, it is clear that print advertising remains the most trusted and most effective form of advertising.
According to a Marketing Sherpa, 76% of respondents trusted catalogs and ads while no form of digital advertising scored more than 50%. And Marketing Sherpa isn’t alone. Statistics provided by Epsilon demonstrate that 73% of U.S. consumers prefer direct mail over pop-up ads or other online advertising.
Preference and trust aren’t the only metrics in which that print out performs digital. Print ads are viewed and interacted with for longer than digital ads. According to Miller Bernstein, 75% of readers report that they spend 2.2 seconds viewing a print advertisement. This may not seem like much time, but for digital ads, “only 4% are looked at for more than 2 seconds and only 9% are looked at for longer than a single second.”
Advertising in direct mailed magazines outshines email marketing as well. Many consumers – up to 57% – say they have abandoned their email inboxes, according to a survey by Tech.co. Even when customers subscribe to email lists, they may never see your email marketing. But with print advertising, 80% of consumers act on advertising, a 37% increase over email marketing.
Utilizing multi-channel marketing is important to any business. But when it comes to investing in marketing that effectively reaches your market, be sure to invest in print!