With the USPS facing billions of dollars in losses, anthrax scares and cannibalization from email, 20th century direct marketing is taking a further back seat to its newer relative email marketing.

Why is email so appealing? It is cost effective, it is personal and it can be targeted.

There are certain appealing aspects to traditional postal mailing lists that have not developed as of yet in the email marketplace. I'm not even talking about targetability or selectivity; I'm talking about the relatively mundane subject of pricing.

Unlike its postal cousin, the prices for email lists are truly all over the place, and the buyer beware mentality has to exist in this new marketplace. A marketers reputation is tied immediately to the list that is rented. That's the key difference between the postal world and email. The recipient of a direct mailing piece probably does not know the sources of the list. With email, the source of the list is not only stated, but by virtue of its use, creates a quasi endorsement/marketing relationship with the mailer.

There are other very organized parts of the list rental process from the brick and mortar list rental days that have not translated over to the world of email.

Mailing lists, as I will refer to the postal names, have always been listed in the SRDS Directory. This has always been a very organized, categorized and up-to-date volume which allowed a whole generation of list professionals and mailers a source from which they could derive creative information (in fairness SRDS has evolved into a great electronic service as well).

Unfortunately, there is nothing standard with email lists and their pricing, or for that matter email lists and the data they are built from. Pricing has become a fluctuating barometer of how the email list as a commodity is doing. For many marketers, the cost of the email list may supercede all of the other variables that normally go into the selection of a mailing list. This is troubling because long-term failures of email campaigns because of the wrong choice of a list may frustrate and turn many marketers away from what should be the "Killer App" for all direct marketers.

This is not to say that there should not be negotiation between a list broker and list manager for the best price possible. The price of an email list is probably the key indicator to the marketplace on how the names were actually developed.

It is a rather lengthy and tedious task to build an opt-in or even negative option list of any size that has buyers or subscribers willing to lend their name for commercial efforts.

As many good direct marketers know, the most responsive names come from the same medium that you market in, therefore, the warranty card which is sent in with an email address on it is not going to be as responsive or useful as a paid subscriber to a magazine who is registered on a website, and opted in to receive third party mailings. This is plain common sense.

This is comparable to the old compiled list versus response list. It is more costly to gather the paid subscriber name or website buyer name, and therefore, the list probably costs more.

Email marketing is in its infancy, and the marketplace is more like a Middle Eastern bazaar than the organized trading and commerce of the 20th century list business.

It must be frustrating for major mailers who are used to receiving name arrangements, and other price lowering incentives. The one "hold over" discount from the postal days will probably be what my colleague/competitor David Schwartz (CEO of 21st AZ) named the volume discount, because the more you buy the less you'll pay.

As I look to the new year I wish everyone in our industry and the country the very best. As marketers, we should remember that price is only one variable for a positive return on investment.

Happy New Year