A article in Knowledge@Wharton, University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School business journal confirms what many of us within the printing industry already know: print marketing continues to outperform digital methods.

The article quotes Wharton marketing professor Eric Bradlow, who says, "print offers marketers a clear advantage over digital media, such as email. "Many people see email as impersonal and costless to write," he says. "People want to feel special. In marketing [terms], email is transactional; paper is relational."

Print also plays nice with digital communication. Tricia Robinson, vp of market and product strategy for email solutions provider StrongMail Systems provides an example of using initial email marketing to gauge interest before a direct mail piece is sent:

We're seeing more and more companies integrating email with catalogs and other forms of direct mail. Sending catalogs is expensive. You want to encourage people to read them, so you send emails saying their catalog is coming.

When I send out emails, I get an open rate of 40%. I can then send each one of them another message based on that behavior. We can drill down quite a bit. The goal is to set up campaigns so that e-mailers can market based on behavioral traits

The article also contains other quotable gems:

Brendan Hoffman, president and chief executive of NeimanMarcus.com says, "even though print is expensive, it gets the job done. While the web site is the company's biggest single outlet in terms of sales volume, it is through print catalogs that customers are motivated to visit the store online. "We send out approximately a million catalogs a year, and about 99% are thrown out," says Hoffman, "But when we stop mailing out those catalogs, we lose customers." There are, he says, no plans to stop."

Gary Lindsey, vice president of marketing at the Parent Company says, "There's real return-on-investment from those catalogs. About one-quarter of our customers come back to the web site and spend, based on our emails. When we send them catalogs, about 36% return and spend." His conclusion: "People love shopping online, but there is something powerful when you combine print and Internet."