Personalization, Community Building, or Direct e-mail?

I'm trying to analyze the benefits and disadvantages of these e-marketing tools: personalization, community building, and direct e-mail.

1. Personalization : delivering individualized content through web pages or e-mail.

Benefits:

- premium services: personalization will be your competitive value as an e-marketing tool since you will treat your customer exclusively and hit right on their needs.

- better information: personlization will lead you to provide the better and usefull information to your customer.

Disadvantages:

cost: personalization of web content or e-mail is much more expensive than developing static content and also will take more time to personalized.

2. Community Building : build a customer-to-customer interaction delivered via e-mail groups, web-based discussion forums or chat.

Benefits:

- efficient: reach many specific customers by one time.

- pool of information: most people feel more comfortable by telling their thoughts to their community rather than to the company, so we may get many feedbacks from the community.

Disadvantages:

- fast delivery of bad story: once you make a mistake, the story will be fast delivered to your customer. And to make it worst, it will influence your customer.

3. Direct e-mail : a format for email-based campaigns in which standalone advertisements are sent to a targeted list of recipients. 

Benefits:

- efficient: You can target people more accurately. You can buy mailing lists that will tell you about the households you can mail your brochures, postcards and direct mail pieces to. And if i do compare with the community building, i think direct e-mail is more efficient since most people will prefer to check their mail than keeping track on the community, especially if they're busy.

Disadvantages:

- negative perception: usualy considered as spam, which is annoying.

- need permission rom customer whether they would like to receive your e-mail or not.

Since these e-marketing tools have their own benefits and disadvantages, hope this information will help you to decide a suitable balance to be applied on your company/business ^^