What, exactly, is Direct Marketing?

Direct marketing is when a business communicates directly to a customer and offers a method to procure a direct response. Direct marketing allows you to promote your products and services directly to your customers in a targeted way. It should focus on promoting a specific product or service, and call on customers to act – to ask for further information, visit a website, or make a purchase.

A good direct marketing campaign should:

The most important step to an effective direct marketing campaign is to identify and know your ideal target customer.

By taking the time to research and identify the customers who are most likely to need or want your products and services, you can focus your marketing efforts when and where you have the highest chance of achieving results.

Targeting your message to a specific audience can help you set realistic sales goals and improve results on a limited marketing budget. Businesses can run effective marketing campaigns at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising.

Utilizing the data you collect, you can personalize offers to potential customers to create an immediate connection to your business. In addition, by combining direct marketing with customer loyalty programs, you can build stronger customer relationships (redeemable points, coupons, discount offers, and invites to upcoming sales). This technique should realize a better sales success rate than mass marketing to people who may not be interested in your products or services.

Direct marketing campaigns also allow you to test new tactics, measure the effectiveness of ads, and easily make adjustments to maximize results. Imagine if you email 100 customers a discount code for your website, and 20 use it for a purchase, the campaign had a response rate of 20%. By working out the cost of creating an email campaign, as well as the profit you made from each customer that utilized the code, you can directly correlate the effectiveness of your direct marketing campaign.

Direct marketers also have multiple opportunities to close sales. A telemarketer can ask questions to learn why a person is hesitant to make a purchase and find ways to overcome to make the sale. Companies can obtain the names and emails of prospects, and then send email messages with additional information, special offers and incentives to make sales. The primary objective of Direct Marketing is to make it easier for customers to learn about your product/service and buy from your company.