Email and Direct Mail Marketing - Weak Combination

I read an article today where an expert claimed that combining email marketing and direct mail could be very beneficial for a business. You can read the full article here. I found this combination of channel marketing very weak.

First, with direct mail you never know how many people actually received your piece and what the response rate was unless you have some type of unique offer and can track when people call or respond in some way to that offer. If after mailing out a piece like this you then follow it up with an email you have some fundamental problems...

1. Opt-In: Is the list you are emailing to 100% opt in email addresses? If not, you are breaking the law. Unless you are mailing to your own customers and/or opt-in list the email portion is probably not opt-in.
   
   
2. Spam Blockers: You are going to have a portion of your messages sent via email shaved off by spam blockers. Therefore, you have no concrete way of insuring that everyone gets both pieces from your campaign and hence is responding because of receiving the 1-2 combo piece.
   
   
3. Measurable: If someone responds to either your email or vice versa if you do it the other way around, how do you know that they are responding because they received BOTH pieces; hence being rewarded for combining channels. You may just as easily won that customer with only one of the pieces.
   
   To accurately measure this type of campaign you would have to know for certain the prospect received both pieces and responded after receiving the second piece. This would be very hard to guarantee with a campaign and channel choice like this.

A vastly improved model is using direct mail or direct response ads and driving the person to a web site. Once the person receives the mailing if they then click through and go to the web site you can be assured they performed that action because they received the post card. If the portion of the site you direct them to is a specialized landing page you can track the entire encounter and measure how many people converted from your landing page. This would be completely measurable from beginning to end and work better than the proposed plan above.

An alternative of my strategy is using email (from a 100% opt-in list) and tracking how many people clicked through to a specialized landing page and eliminate the direct mail component entirely.

Combining email and direct mail will not achieve the results this expert claims. It is filled with a variety of problems and will most likely be a large waste of money.