Direct Marketing allows businesses to be able to speak directly to the consumer and receive a fairly quick response. Unlike formal channels of advertising such as television, newspapers or radio, direct marketing utilizes fliers, product catalogues, sales letters and the Internet to reach customers. Direct marketing techniques for advertising are usually marked by driving a particular “call to action,” which is a core principle of successful advertising. This part of direct marketing focuses a great deal on actionable and measurable outcomes that produce positive responses from consumers
A few reasons why to use Direct Marketing for your business:
Cost Effectiveness
Not every business can afford to do traditional mass marketing in television, radio or print because it’s very expensive. The cost of media alone is just too prohibitive.
Targetability
If you are a company with a very select target audience, it doesn’t make sense to tell your message to millions of people all across the country with traditional media. Direct Marketing allows a business to reach its target audience and key decision makers on a more targeted and personalized basis.
Create Urgency
Direct Marketing is highly effective at creating a sense of urgency about an offer, product promotion or a specific service.
Establishing Customer Relationships
Traditional marketing is not conducive to establishing “relationships” with customers. By virtue of how it is produced, the message has to be much more universal and generic. In other words, a television commercial cannot be customized for each of one million viewers; Direct Marketing can. Through digital printing and other personalization tactics, a marketer can reach individual customers, or even all of its customers, with a slightly different message. Say for example that you are a long-time customer of a brand. The offers and messages that you receive might be a lot different than the ones sent to a new or prospective customer. This type of direct marketing enables companies to reach out to its customers on more of a one-to-one basis and supports the development of more personalized relationships.
Build Loyalty Programs
One of the ways Direct Marketing is being used today is to build and maintain customer loyalty programs. Each time you use a company’s credit card, loyalty card or savings card, you are feeding information to a company’s database. This database can then be used to trigger any number of Direct Marketing responses, based on your purchasing history or customer profile. So, for example, a company can offer you something special on your birthday or send you specific messages and offers that they know will be of particular interest to you, or when you reach a certain level of purchases. Loyalty programs are being used by thousands of retailers these days, but the same tactics can be utilized by any company willing and able to collect customer data.
Build The Brand
Good Direct Marketing, like any other form of advertising, helps build the corporate brand. For many of the reasons mentioned earlier, such as through the establishing of one-to-one relationships between the customer and the company, Direct Marketing puts a company’s brand front and center with the customer.
