subject: What is direct marketing? [print this page] What is Direct Marketing? What is Direct Marketing?
Direct marketing is all about creating timely, relevant and benefit driven communications which are designed to engage the audience and to motivate them to respond within a certain period of time.
Direct communications are generally designed to achieve specific sales targets at acceptable costs. These sales targets can usually be taken back to a customer level and could include:
acquiring a set number of new customers or prospects
converting prospects to customers
up-selling or cross-selling existing customers
reactivating lapsed customers
What types of businesses can benefit from direct marketing?
Direct marketing can benefit any business that has or is interested in forming a direct relationship with the purchasing decision maker or influencer. It doesn't matter if your business is big or small, if you offer a product or a service, if your business is within a particular industry segment or if your purchasing decision maker or influencer is a consumer or another business. The techniques and principles that contribute to effective direct marketing are the same regardless of all these factors.
Direct marketing campaigns
Direct marketing campaigns consist of the following parts, which are listed in order of priority.
Audience segments and the communication channels used to reach them
Offer design and offer mechanics
Creative execution
If you have a really great offer combined with award winning creative but it is sent to the wrong target audience then your campaign is doomed from the start. To get these parts right, you need to know your customers and understand what motivates them to act.
Direct marketing techniques that can help
To know your customer you need to conduct scientific testing of various list, offer and creative combinations to really understand what motivates each audience segment to start and to continue to do business with you. Testing is one of the most important techniques of direct marketing. Tests are designed to prove or disprove particular hypotheses and can help you to really understand what works and what doesn't. This in turn can improve both the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of your marketing activity and add long term value to your business.
It's important that you set your financial forecasts upfront so that you have a record of what you thought would happen and can then easily compare these assumptions with what actually happened. This process also helps to create a logical argument that can be used to drive change within your business. With continuous forecasting and campaign post-analysis you will find that your forecasting gets a lot more accurate over time.
Direct marketing is most useful when businesses commit to tracking actual activity by segment as it happens, usually by having a unique identifying code of some sort. If results aren't tracked and analysed there's nothing preventing yourself and others from making the same mistakes over and over. Before you embark on any scientific testing, it's advisable to be prepared to be surprised and to only test things that you're happy to change.
Benefits of Direct Marketing
The benefits of applying direct marketing principles and techniques to your marketing are that you and your colleagues continuously learn about what works as well as being able to easily identify what has stopped working and where the best new opportunities lie. These valuable insights generated will almost certainly help to reduce the guesswork going forward and consequently help to reduce the amount of your advertising dollars that are wasted. It will also improve the ease and accuracy of your budgeting process.
Summary
In summary, effective direct marketing means creating timely, relevant and benefit driven communications which engage the end purchaser or influencer and motivates them to respond in a certain way within a specified time-frame.
Testing audience segments, communication channels, offers and creative executions are some of the most important techniques used to continuously improve both the communication effectiveness and cost-efficiency. Other techniques that help to make sense of this testing process are forecasting, tracking and post-campaign analysis.
