email or ads: who wins in a fight?

After a stretch of several months (mayhap even years), one of my clients decided to turn advertising back on. 

The timing was perfect: 

We were approaching Labor Day and thus a Labor Day Sale where email and advertising could face up, mono e mono, in a cage match to the death. 

I’ve been on the record before claiming that email beats advertising almost every time. 

But advertising is sexier. 

It promises you new customers (naturally sexy) instead of serving your current customers better and making more revenue from them (naturally unsexy). 

And so, it doesn’t shock me that brands like Transparent Labs for example, who, based on how often I see their retargeting ads, drain their entire marketing budget on advertising and completely neglect email prefer the sexiness of advertising to the raw effectiveness of email. 

It also doesn’t help that Transparent Labs followed a corporate-style approach to their email marketing, which methinks is the reason they quit sending any emails at all a year ago. Heavily-designed, corporate-style emails don’t work - nuff said. 

Anyway, back to the cage match to the death: 

The Labor Day sale ran for about a week - both in our emails and in our advertising. 

Lemme post fizeek: 

There were 86 total conversions from the Labor Day sale. 

Guess how many came from advertising… 

If you guessed 14, you’d be correct. 

Which leaves the remaining 72 conversions for email. 

Best part?

The 72 email conversions generated more profit, by default, because you don’t really have to pay to send an email the way you have to pay for your ad to be displayed. 

Is a little bit of sexiness worth sacrificing 83% on your conversions? 

I think not. 

Many such cases of business owners being duped by the sexiness at the expense of effectiveness though. 

(Someone forward this to Transparent Labs’s marketing team… it’s egregious how many times I’m served their ads but they don’t have the cajones to send an email after it’s been a YEAR since they last sent one.)

And hit reply if’n you wanna boost your revenue through email. 

It ain’t sexy, but it pays the bills. 

John