What Is Direct Marketing And How To Implement It Effectively For Your Business?
Marketing was never easy for business organisations; over the years, it has only become more complex and challenging. Every day there is a new marketing trend hitting the market. And due to internet access, influencer marketing, etc., smaller companies are splitting the target market into smaller pieces.
At this point, a company’s best approach to staying ahead of the game is to make marketing more personal. And not many marketing strategies work in forming an emotional connection with the customers than direct marketing.
Direct campaigns involve sending personalised messages to the target audience to get the desired response. More importantly, it works on the principle of human relations and sees the customer as a person rather than a target.
It is why direct marketing strategies like direct mail are fast gaining popularity. According to a report by the DMA (Data And Marketing Association)
“87% have been influenced by direct mail to make online purchases.”
And remember, direct mail is just one of the many direct marketing examples. Below we elaborate on direct campaigns, their different examples, and how you can use them to grow your business.
What is Direct Marketing?
Direct marketing is a promotional strategy that allows you to present your company’s products and services directly to the target audience. In other words, direct marketing enables you to cut out the advertising middleman and market your products or services.
It is also worth noting that direct marketing is a highly targeted approach. Finding a high-potential target audience is also part of a direct campaign. Hence, direct marketing tends to have a higher conversion rate than non-targeted marketing strategies.
For instance, a healthcare organisation can target a senior/retirement community with flyers for its arthritis awareness program.
“The DMA research shows a 9% average response rate for direct mail campaigns.” – Data And Marketing Association (DMA)
However, direct mail is just one of the many direct campaigns you can use for your business. But we will explain more about that later. First, let’s look at what makes direct marketing a good fit for your marketing needs.
Reach Your Customers Faster
One of the best things about direct and digital marketing efforts is that they can immediately reach the target audience. For example, take the case of email marketing campaigns nowadays. You can send hundreds and thousands of emails to your target audience with a button.
Highly Efficient Promotion Strategy
Another reason you should use direct marketing is because of how efficient it is as a promotion strategy. With other non-targeted marketing campaigns, you are practically shooting in the dark, hoping to hit your luck. But with a targeted direct campaign, things are a whole lot different.
Direct campaigns target customers who are genuinely interested in your product or service. As a result, your direct marketing campaigns always yield maximum efficiency for your marketing messages. Regular lists are unrefined and can’t efficiently attract the attention of your ideal customers. And as a result, standard non-targeted campaigns often fail to create a connection with the target audience.
Highly Customisable
Targeting the right audience for your direct marketing campaigns is only half the battle. It would be best if you also had customisation to ensure you get the desired results for the direct campaigns. And this is what our Account Manager had to say when a leading insurance provider from California wanted to know how customisation can make a difference to their direct campaigns.
“Whenever you employ direct marketing to sell a product or service, you target a specific individual or company. And this applies to every industry and not just yours. You can’t win over a new customer without forming a personal relationship, and customisation can help you with this.”
Customisation enables you to address the customer directly. You can use customised messages, offers, products, etc. The more customised your direct marketing campaign, the more likely you will get the desired results. Thankfully, this customisation is easily implementable using various automation tools.
For example, you can use PostGrid’s direct mail tool to send customised marketing messages to your customers. It allows you to send customised postcards, brochures, leaflets, etc., to your customers with an automated solution.
Measure Your Marketing Efficiency
The efficiency of direct marketing campaigns is relatively easy to measure. You can track or measure the success of your direct campaigns by analysing different aspects of the campaign, such as
- The number of customers who responded
- The revenue earned
- The overall ROI or Return On Investment
Furthermore, direct and digital marketing is also perfect for finding out the spending capability of prospects on specific products/services. And that’s not automated solutions like PostGrid let you access advanced analytics and insights of your campaigns.
For example, you can use PostGrid to track your direct mail campaigns, including the deliverability of your mailers. You can also access analytics that figures out how to optimise your direct marketing campaigns.
Characteristics Of Direct Marketing
As you know, direct marketing strategies allow you to communicate a brand message directly to the target audience. But that is only the primary feature of direct campaigns. Below we discuss the other characteristics of direct drives. You can use these characteristics to identify a direct campaign from traditional marketing.
Targeting
Targeting is one of the easily noticeable characteristics of a direct marketing campaign. If you go ahead and mail everyone on your database, you will only spend more money for less ROI. You need a highly targeted list of eligible prospects for an efficient direct campaign.
However, you can make this relatively easy with the right tools. For example, you can use geocoding to identify geographical patterns or use address verification tools to identify demographic patterns. Or you could use PostGrid’s address verification tool which already comes with geocoding capability.
Database Segmentation
You’d know about customer segmentation if you are a marketer or closely working with the marketing team. Database segmentation is an integral part of direct marketing. It is where you divide your customer base into small categories or groups using a common characteristic they all have, such as
- Age
- Gender
- Occupation
- Location
- Interests
- Needs
- Income etc.
Categorising or segmenting your customer database like this allows you to pitch them with customised offers. You can cross these categories based on the product or service you want to sell. The only trick here is to ensure that whatever direct marketing idea you pitch is relevant to the target audience.
Tracking Responses
There is no way of knowing how well or how bad your marketing strategies perform unless you monitor them. Continuous or regular monitoring can determine which direct marketing strategy works best for your business.
Using online direct marketing channels allows your target audience to respond to your message quickly. In addition to that, you can monitor the entire marketing process through online channels. However, it is also worth noting that the open rate for online channels is subpar compared to offline channels like direct mail.
Or you can make the best out of online and offline channels using an automated solution for offline communication channels like mail. For instance, you can provide a QR code or PURL in the mailer. It will allow the customer to access your website, landing page, or mobile app.
What Are The Benefits Of Direct Marketing?
Now that you know what is direct marketing, it is time for us to discuss why your business should use it. In other words, we must examine what can your business organisation gain from using a direct campaign. Here are some significant benefits of employing direct campaigns for your business.
Targeted Advertising
As we explained, targeting is one of the essential characteristics of direct marketing. Therefore, it is only natural that direct campaigns include targeted advertising. It involves sending customised marketing messages to your target audience.
When you focus on sending a marketing message to a specific person, your marketing message becomes significantly more effective. And keep in mind that targeted advertising also involves pitching the right product or service to the prospective customer.
Budget Marketing
No matter how many direct marketing examples you consider, you will always find one common thing in all of them. Every direct campaign focuses on a specific demographic. And when you have a well-defined target demographic, it becomes easier to set plausible sales targets and drive sales.
With more reliable data on your side, it is relatively easy to implement a more extensive direct marketing campaign, even on a low budget. Furthermore, using intelligent, direct mail tools like PostGrid allows you better track and optimise your expenses.
“In 2021, direct mail advertising spending in the United Kingdom reached close to 1.1 billion British pounds” – Statista.
One reason direct marketing is gaining popularity again, as the above stat suggests, is the availability of tools like PostGrid. Automated solutions like PostGrid play a significant role in ensuring effective and budget-friendly campaigns for your company.
Boost Sales To Existing and Lapsed Customers
It might surprise you to hear this, but the key to a successful marketing campaign is not always expanding your reach. More often than not, targeting your existing and lapsed customers is easier and much more effective, and direct marketing is perfect for this.
Remember, customers, are always ready to welcome businesses that can solve their problems or pain points. And they are only too glad to seek help from a brand that has helped them. With direct marketing, you can keep track of all your customer data, categorise them and create a well-thought campaign.
But, it is even better when re-establishing relationships with lapsed customers. There are several direct marketing examples to prove this. For example, you can send personalised postcards to your customers with attractive offers or discounts. And since you already know what product they are interested in, you can target them with an offer they can’t deny.
Boost Customer Loyalty
Targeting existing and lapsed customers also implies that you can improve your customer loyalty using direct marketing. It is an ideal choice for building and maintaining good relationships with your customers.
By sending a personalised marketing message and offer, you can show how your brand values its customers and business. You can generate a genuine connection with customers by combining direct marketing strategies with customer loyalty programs. Here are some methods you can use to boost customer loyalty.
- Giving exclusive offers, including discounts
- Sending a personalised birthday card
- Inviting customers to special events, including sales
Excellent Launching Pad For New Businesses
When launching a new business, product, service, or offer to your customers, there is no better launchpad than direct campaigns. Effective communication with your target audience brings more relevant traffic to your business across various channels.
Furthermore, using direct marketing in your customer acquisition program could spark a genuine reaction from the target. As we discussed above, direct campaigns can boost customer loyalty. And it can lead to generating brand advocates for your company.
Besides this, direct marketing strategies also help you adapt and respond to market demands. But that’s not all. You can use direct campaigns for the following purposes.
- Boost sales of specific products or services
- Renew sales
- Boost customer retention
- Clearance sale for discontinued stock
- Ence follow up on promotional offers
Excellent Product Performance Measurement
Another great advantage of direct marketing is that it is perfect for measuring product performance. It lets you find out the demand for specific products or services. But more importantly, it allows marketers to
- Expand their reach to new markets
- Evaluate sales results
- Measure the effectiveness of their marketing strategies
As a result, marketers can quickly modify their campaigns and ensure success. Ideally, a marketer should monitor various aspects of the direct marketing campaign and analyse the results. The information you get from the analysis is crucial in improving your future marketing efforts.
What Are The Best Direct Marketing Techniques Or Channels?
There are numerous techniques or channels you can use for your direct campaigns. Choosing a medium more apt for your unique marketing needs would be best. Several businesses even go for an approach where they use multiple direct marketing channels.
Below, we list some of the best direct marketing examples you can consider using for your company.
Direct Mail
Many business organisations gave up on their direct mail marketing campaigns long ago. And most new companies never tried to use direct mail because everyone uses digital marketing channels. So, then why are we still talking about direct mail marketing?
The truth is that direct mail is one of the best direct marketing techniques you can use for your company. It has an excellent open and response rate. Furthermore, since everyone is busy with their online marketing campaigns, it is significantly easier to get noticed by the target audience.
“32% of managers say they always open their mail, and 30% say they open it if it looks relevant.” – DMIS Response Rates Survey.
If that’s not enough, you can automate the direct marketing process using a direct mail tool like PostGrid. We have helped numerous clients from different industry verticals set up an automated mailing system. You can connect PostGrid with your CRM for easy and accurate bulk mail personalisation. Listen to what one of our clients had to say about their experience working with us.
“We have been using PostGrid for a few months. It works with our CRM, the software interface, efficiency, automation, and integration with no issues” – CTO.
Email Marketing
Another ideal example of direct marketing is targeted emails. In many ways, direct mail and email marketing are very similar. Of course, email marketing is significantly faster, and practically everyone on the internet has an email id. Hence, it is an ideal marketing channel or at least, in theory.
The only downside of email marketing is that it is so widely popular. As you know, everyone has at least one email ID overflowing with unread subscription mail. It is one of the reasons why email marketing has a significantly lower open and response rate compared to direct mail.
Email marketing is one of the best direct marketing examples and a preferred choice for numerous companies. In addition, you can find several email automation tools like Mailchimp to optimise your email marketing.
Social Media Marketing
A fundamental principle in every marketing effort is to go to where your target audience is. Today, that place is social media. Social media marketing is even more enticing because people tend to flaunt their tastes and preferences online. In other words, targeting your direct marketing campaign was never as easy as it is now.
Social media marketing enables you to build a community for your brand and develop customer relationships. But that’s not the primary reason for employing social media direct marketing for your business. The primary reason for using social media is its ability to target audiences accurately.
Take Facebook (Meta), for example. It offers you advanced direct marketing capabilities that help you reach high-potential targets. You can even categorise prospective customers into groups using data like age, gender, etc.
SMS Marketing
SMS marketing is another famous example of direct marketing you can employ for your business organisation. It involves you sending permission-based text messages to the target audience. You can see several similarities between SMS and email marketing.
But one might argue that SMS messages are much more accessible since the user always has their phone. Hence you can use SMS to send all kinds of critical notifications, reminders, etc. Here are some direct marketing messages you send to your customers using SMS.
- Updates
- Promos
- Discount offers
- Event Invitations
- Sales notification
- And more.
It is also worth mentioning that SMS marketing is quick and cost-effective. Besides that, you only need the customer’s phone number to contact them. However, the biggest drawback is that direct marketing only supports text content, and you cannot utilise the power of images in your campaign.
Telemarketing
Telemarketing is one of the classic direct marketing examples for your business. In telemarketing, you can call your prospective customers over the phone and convince them to buy your product or service.
A standard telemarketing campaign involves multiple sales representatives reaching out to potential customers. On the other hand, you can outsource the telemarketing services to a third party, which is often the more convenient option.
The most significant advantage of telemarketing is convincing the target audience to take the desired action. In other words, you can sell a product or service to a prospect even if they do not feel they need it. This convincing power of telemarketing is why it remains one of the best direct marketing examples.
Leaflet Marketing
This list of best direct marketing examples is incomplete without leaflet marketing. Leaflet marketing is perfect for small businesses as it offers a simple and affordable way for businesses to reach out to their customers.
To make things more interesting, you also have special Royal Mail services like Door to Door, specifically designed to send leaflets. It means you can send marketing leaflets at a significantly lower price. But if you want to optimise your expenses holistically, you may consider using an automated direct mail tool.
Other Direct Marketing
The direct marketing examples you see above are only some of the methods used in direct campaigns. Apart from the ones listed above, you can also try the following techniques for your business:
- Direct selling
- Catalogues
- Push notification marketing
- And more.
Conclusion
Business organisations are turning towards direct marketing to convey their marketing messages effectively. But it is easier said than done without the right tools, especially offline marketing channels like direct mail.
Advanced direct mail tools like PostGrid make direct marketing easier for companies. It provides full automation and even includes the complete customisation of your marketing mailers. Similar solutions are also available for all types of direct campaigns.
Hence, business organisations must make it a point to analyse, assess, and find out the best tools for direct marketing. Only with the help of tools like PostGrid can you run cost-effective direct campaigns with zero unwanted delays.
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The post Direct Marketing: What, Why, How and Examples appeared first on PostGrid UK.
Via https://www.postgrid.co.uk/direct-marketing/
source https://postgridunitedkingdom.weebly.com/blog/direct-marketing-what-why-how-and-examples7317650
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