Loren McDonald begins a post at the Email Insider blog by declaring, "Email is not direct mail." Though an obvious statement, it's something worth emphasizing. "I sense an assumption that the same basic rules apply to both channels," McDonald notes. "At some levels this is true, of course—with common principles including the role of segmentation and personalization, the importance of good creative, [and] recency and frequency models." But, beyond those similarities, the online world requires an entirely different marketing approach. For instance:

The email recipient has more power. She gives you permission to send her messages; wants to customize content and frequency; expects a transparent privacy policy; and will be unhappy if an unsubscribe request is not immediately honored.

Deliverability is more complicated. While emailed messages reach your audience much more quickly than those sent through the postal service, they face spam filters and folders, and cannot be forwarded to a new address like snail mail.

There are no guarantees about the look. According to McDonald, a worst-case scenario for direct mail is that it gets mangled during shipment. With email, however, you’re facing preview panes, blocked images, competing ads and multiple platforms—each of which can alter how your message is viewed.

The Po!nt: Email marketing is a skill unto itself. "[E]mail has a number of ... challenges and rules of the road that require direct marketers to approach their email programs quite differently,"  says McDonald.

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