What is direct marketing?
To give you the most helpful definition of direct marketing, also known as direct response marketing, lets start with a definition of what it’s not.
Mass marketing, or branding is what most entrepreneurs know. The goal of branding is awareness, to get prospects familiar with your company’s services and products. Branding is designed to keep a company in front of you, hoping you eventually take the next step.
Major brands such as Ford, Dell Computer, Coke, Pepsi, etc use it. Mass marketing is expensive and its effectiveness is hard to track.
What Makes Direct Marketing Different?
Direct marketing (DM) speaks to someone specific. It has a specific offer and requires a specific action. This action can be an email response, call a phone number or, of course, make a purchase.
The main elements of a direct response ad are:
- It has a headline with a compelling clear benefit
- It’s purpose is to reach a specific prospect or customer with specific needs or wants
- The call to action (CTA) directly asks for a response
- The CTA has features such as urgency, scarcity, a limited time or even specific terms and conditions to complete the purchase to motivate the buyer
Who Can Benefit From Direct Response Marketing?
Everyone.
The key benefits of a direct marketing program is that its results can be tracked and measured.
Direct response allows you to invest in your marketing with pure data. We begin by testing best hypothesis. Then adjustments are made based on the feedback of the prospects action. There’s no guessing. It’s pure math, and low risk, when done right. This allows you to make smarter marketing investments.
How Does It Work?
Through ads and emails, we are looking for ideas and messages that resonate. The ideas that get clicked or see a response, get moved to larger audiences.
Your database gets mined for the most likely profitable offer. Offers that have a high probability to earn money based on the measured actions that your prospects and customers take. There is no more guessing.
As you start to see direct response marketing results, it becomes an exciting part of your business.
Savvy marketers demand their marketing budgets are used for targeted-customer focused communications. The better you are able to measure the results, the better you can track your ROI. You can now spend that time and money where it can make the most impact to your revenues.
Every business owner should embrace direct marketing for the sole purpose of maximizing limited resources to grow business. Direct Marketing builds your business by capturing a growing a list of customers.
How to Apply Direct Marketing to Your Business
Multiple channels of communication offers multiple opportunities to ask a prospect or customer to take immediate action. This is the action that will be tracked, measured and stored in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database for future use.
Multi-channel marketing is an organized effort to interact with your market through as many relevant sources that make sense for your business.Some of the tools you have available are telephone, text messaging, social media, search engines, direct mail, email, your website, and of course in person.
The Internet is giving us the most amazing direct response channel ever created. Never in history has a business owner had the opportunity, at such low cost, to directly interact with potential customers.
If you don’t believe that to be true think about what the cost of a stamp would be for every email you send out. When I first started in business, I can’t tell you how many stamps I licked. We are living in a very exciting time for marketers and entrepreneurs.