Direct marketing primarily involves contacting prospective customers through traditional and direct marketing techniques to promote a company’s services or products. Unlike media marketing, it allows companies to target specific individuals using personalised messages. It utilises various marketing methods such as leafleting and direct mail but is usually supplemented with telemarketing, SMS and mobile marketing, as well as email marketing, which are all cost-effective marketing techniques for reaching customers on a more personal level. Organisations of all shapes and sizes use direct marketing because it is a massively potent and cost-effective way to generate leads and sales, the question is—is it right for your small business?
Why You Should Consider Direct Marketing
For starters, it increases your chances of getting targeted customers to respond to your message. In turn, you can better focus your marketing resources on strategies that would most likely yield positive results. Provided that your direct marketing campaign has a clear CTA or call-to-action, you could boost customer loyalty, sales from existing customers, obtain new customers, and even spark interest in your old customers.
The great thing about direct marketing is that you can assess and measure it. For instance, you could send customers test marketing messages inviting them to visit certain landing webpages on your site and then see which messages customers responded to the most. You just have to pinpoint the most effective communication method. For example, direct mail might be better for individual customers, but businesses might prefer good old sales calls.
A Well-Maintained Database is Essential to Direct Marketing
Whether you choose to do it on your own or with help from reputable direct mail and marketing companies in the UK, you should make certain that your database is always updated, accurate, and maintained. You need to check and maintain your mailing lists on a regular basis. Correct any errors, get rid of duplicate entries and remove contacts that have requested to be removed.
Your database contains immensely vital information. It could tell you all sorts of things such as your customers’ location, gender, age, and more importantly, their buying habits. You could use this information for separating your prospects and customers into smaller groups so you can better tailor-fit your message to them. You could even create specific customer profiles and groups and seek new prospects actively by matching descriptions in your database or renting and buying new contact lists.
Measurable Results
It can be challenging to measure the results of sponsorships or advertising, but with direct marketing, results are easily measurable. With each campaign, you can easily calculate your breakeven point, which is the amount of sales your direct marketing costs should cover. Additionally, you can easily calculate your actual ROI and cost-per-response.
A Very Important Note
You should only send phone calls, text messages, emails, and letters to individuals and organisations that have consented to be contacted by your company. Keep in mind that there are privacy laws in place that you need to adhere to when doing direct marketing and that it’s your responsibility to ensure that you’re operating within the confines of the law.
