Being a frequent user of the marketing subreddit, I often see questions from marketers and business owners alike, such as: “Is email marketing worth it?” or “Does direct mail work?” or “Should I run ads on Reddit?”

The right answer, like almost everything in marketing, depends on a variety of factors. The following are three major factors which can help you identify the right marketing channel(s) for your business.

First Factor: Audience

Whether a given channel will be effective for you really depends on your audience. Let’s just use the questions above as case studies.

In the case of email marketing – whether it’s effective for your business will largely depend on two audience factors: how large/clean your email database is, and whether your database actually uses the email channel.

It’s common knowledge that most people check their email multiple times a day, but some don’t. Younger audiences, especially in business to consumer (b2c), may not check email at all, if ever. On the other hand, a business professional will likely check their work and/or personal email daily. Email marketing can be effective in b2b scenarios when combined with relevant copy/visuals (when necessary) and is also largely ineffective in b2c scenarios in which the audience does not use email or uses it rarely.

In the case of direct mail – again, it depends on your audience and the message. If you are promoting a giveaway for a b2c audience and targeting to an older demographic which is used to receiving mail and looking through it regularly, this can be an effective channel, especially because you are delivering mail to a household with one/two people and are likely to reach your intended recipient with the right visuals/messaging. If you’re sending a direct mail piece to a senior-level decision-maker at a 10,000+ employee company with a mailroom, statistically there is a very small chance it will get in the right hands.

Last but not least, the only case studies where I have seen Reddit ads be effective (and I’ve run a couple of campaigns here myself with no results), is with b2c impulse buys for inexpensive novelty items or SaaS free trials. There may be more, like negative option billing free trial type of consumer products, but for anything that requires Thinking Slow (Daniel Kahneman) Reddit will likely not be the best channel and usually money wasted.

So, how do you determine if your audience will be reachable on a given channel? You essentially have three options: 1. research, see what others are doing with a similar audience or pay for audience research which shows channel efficacy for a given audience or 2. test it yourself or 3. ask your audience via a channel you know already works. With research, you can likely get closer to the golden egg faster, but testing is always a viable option if you have the resources.

Second factor: Content Type

Let’s say you’ve figured out that your audience is super reachable via email, because they literally all told you so (wouldn’t that be fucking awesome?), and you spent some time crafting just the perfect message and make it look really nice and hit send and…. your open rate is 1% and CTR is like .01%. WTF!!?!?, you might exclaim. Why didn’t it work? Well, it turns out your entire audience is using plain-text email clients only so even those who clicked through after seeing a poor subject line were not able to see 90% of your message because you sent a really awesome infographic which loaded for no-one. I have actually gotten this exact email before, and guess what – I just deleted it and moved on with my life.

Getting the right subject in your email makes a huge difference for open rates, but it’s also important to keep it highly relevant to the message copy itself. For example, if I sent you an email with the subject “I think I found your cat on the street!” and you have a cat, you would 100% open that email. But, what if inside I said: “New electric scooter now available from Wegway, buy now.” You would probably be mad and feel manipulated and you would be right. Keeping the content in line with the subject is key, as is making sure that your plan-text email version 100% makes sense to the person who is opening the email. In my recent role, we have been absolutely crushing it with short, plain-text-only emails. They are not pretty, but they get our message across in 30 seconds or less.

To keep it short for the other two examples:

With direct email, you want to work it like a digital landing page, keep it colorful and attractive and relevant to your audience. Always send to a simple landing page as a CTA and convert, convert, convert. Direct mail notoriously has low conversion rates, which is why most sophisticated marketing departments avoid it like ebola. It’s not easy to get right, but if you do get it right it can produce tremendous ROI.

With Reddit ads, I’ve seen the most successful case studies be totally honest and upfront with the header about what the user will get if they click on the ad. This can be an effective tool, but it can also be a huge waste of money if executed poorly.

One interesting case study I personally had was using radio ads to promote a digital marketing agency. At first, the agency scoffed at the idea. How are we going to use a “dying” traditional marketing channel to drive leads for a digital agency?, they said, Are these leads even going to know how to use the internet? Turned out, they do, and they came in droves. I created some basic radio scripts (you can actually do this on Spotify right now too) and ran ads in off-peak times – which made them significantly less expensive – in ~10 markets. The key, in my opinion, to our success here is we created a separate landing page from our website for an educational webinar and registered a very simple and short domain, which we repeated several times in the ad. I regularly wound up with 100+ registered attendees on my webcast, with an 80% qualified sales lead rate this way.

Third factor: Timing

It’s much easier to time well with digital marketing (and some traditional, like TV/radio) because you are in full control of the delivery channel and mechanism, as opposed to direct email where you may not know precisely when a piece may hit your audience, or if it hits them at all.

You can nail down the right audience and produce content that is highly relevant and then completely miss your timing on promoting the content.

Primarily, timing is important for seasonal use cases where your product/service is more popular during some times and less popular in others, or if it fits somewhere specifically within a decision-making process.

With that all said, hopefully, that explains use cases for various marketing channels and helps you see them as a tool the effectiveness of which depends on what you have to work with when it comes to audience, content, and timing. Just like you can’t create an oil painting with a hammer, you usually can’t get good results from a channel if it’s not the right one for the campaign you are running.