Snail Mail or Email?

For the longest time, people used snail mail as a means of correspondence. You sit on your desk, drown out the sounds and start writing – with a pen and paper. After writing, you fold your letter, put it in an envelope, lick a stamp into it and put it in your mailbox. Then you sit for weeks, even months, to wait for a reply - If one ever comes.
Nowadays, in order to send mail, all you need is a laptop or a personal computer, an internet connection and then just type away. And take note, we’re not just talking about regular email here, wherein plain text is being used, we’re talking about HTML mail, the one where you can do fancy layouts with colorful fonts and graphic designs. Then, after your final layout, you can now send your HTML mail to multiple recipients – with just one click of the mouse. No need to get your hands smudged with ink, no licking of stamps involved and no need to wait for the mailman to collect your mail.
Easy, isn’t it?? For the most part, yes, HTML mail is much much cheaper and faster than sending snail mail to multiple recipients. Especially if some, or most of your recipients are from different countries. Sending international snail mail could sometimes take months, particularly if you’re just sending it through the postal service and not through international couriers such as UPS, FedEx, and the likes (of course, these couriers are around 200-300% more expensive than the local postal service). By sending HTML mail, your promotional, marketing or even personal correspondence will get to your recipients in no time and at the lowest possible cost.
However, there is no denying the fact the HTML mail has its downsides. The more traditional businessman would always prefer snail mail, rather than the technologically enhanced HTML mail. One reason is that most HTML mails are marked off as spam or junk by most email clients. Most recipients would only look at the sender’s name and the subject of the mail and would not care opening it if the subject is not interesting enough, or worse, even if the subject looks interesting, but the sender‘s name is not recognized or is not familiar to the recipient, most likely, the recipient will just put it in the junk folder and ultimately delete the email. Snail mail on the other hand cannot be automatically deleted. And the letter can never be judged based on the subject line alone, that’s because there is no subject line on the envelope, there’s just the sender’s (company) name and address on it. Most of the time, even marketing letters are opened if it comes in the snail mail because there’s still the element of surprise. In addition, snail mail is more personalized than HTML mail, no matter how fancy your layout is in your HTML mail, one would always appreciate the time and effort being put in sending snail mail. Personally, I would be more touched if I received a single Birthday card in my mailbox rather than get a thousand HTML birthday greetings in my inbox.
So what works best? Well, it depends. If you want to be more personal and you want to express yourself through writing a letter, then send it through snail mail. Nothing beats the touch of a personal handwritten letter. But if you don’t have the time or if you’re not the type who writes handwritten notes, there’s always technology to help you out. Who says we can’t have the best of both worlds?