With that said, knowing who is sending you what really DOES make a difference in how you react to things in your mailbox or inbox.

You can be more covert with dm due to this and use curiosity to your advantage and get people to read your message.

They'd kick your ass off of Madison Avenue so quickly, you wouldn't know what hit you.

:)

My point in this post proposes that regardless of the spectrum, all communications should serve the brand. The product, the offer, the quality of the communications and the lack or appropriateness of the relevance of the offering all contribute to the brand.

I am not convinced that 100% branding communications is an essential focus. Sell product and position the brand simultaneously. Branding for branding's sake does not serve the advertiser well in my view.

But after reading it, I get your point.

My takeaway is this: It's misleading to ask "is there a difference?" between the two, because the question to ask is "what are the differences?".

I look at it this way: This isn't a binary switch between positioning and direct. It's more like a spectrum. And any single ad or campaign can fall anywhere along that spectrum.

But even at 10,000, you can do a limited amount of A/B split testing on such things as offers. But the response rate needs to go pretty high to make results statistically reliable.

As for your time and lost opportunity issue, this would not hold up for very large lists (I assume you were still referring to small lists?).

Foregoing testing on large databases actually increases lost opportunity to continually improve your response rate and overall ROI. Just be sure to test significant response enhancers such as pricing, product mix and offers. Tweaks may indeed not justify the time, management costs or lost selling opportunities.

Many of my clients do not have a super large email list and when you are dealing with small numbers (anything under 10,000) it is hard to segment and read results with any degree of statistical relevance. So you end up guessing.

The real answer for email is the triggered solution but that too requires a lot of time to set up and is hard to cost justify.

I agree that timing is critical with email -- as it is with any medium. (It may also be argued that snail mail and especially catalogs have more shelf life than email thus making the timing issue a little bit easier to deal with.)

As for browsing, some catalogers have found that certain segments of their customer files use their website like they used to use catalogs. And more and more catalogers are reducing, and even eliminating their catalogs altogether replacing them with user friendly websites. So emails are used primarily to announce special deals that drive customers to their website instead of a catalog.

Unfortunately, many of them are doing this without appropriate testing and analysis to make sure this strategy works in the longer term.

In my view, emails have the same challenge of relevancy as other media. Correct timing relates to relevancy. And as you rightly say, segmentation cannot solve this problem.

As for your experience with the excessive frequency of Land's End emails, Reggie stresses this point in her answer to the first question agreeing strongly with your comment.

"Too many marketers are sending too many emails each week, and what’s worse – there’s no real differentiation between messages."

I've noticed that I buy less from Lands End than I formerly did, because while I formerly received a catalog from Lands End, every week, now I get an email from them every day. And I rarely "browse" to see what's new. I only buy when I think I need to and then wait until I get a really good promotional offer in an email.

We need to find a more effective way to present broad content via electronic marketing channels, because no segmentation strategy can identify what or when I'm likely to buy.

I think email marketing still has a very long way to go.